The Electron Pencil

Nancy’s Day

I can’t wait for Saturday, March 25th. That’s when Nancy Hiller will be at the Book Corner, signing copies of her new book and telling a tale or two from it. Making Things Work: Tales from a Cabinetmaker’s Life is available for purchase right now on Nancy’s website. We’ll have scads of copies at the Book Corner as well.

A Nancy Hiller Kitchen

[Image: Kendall Reeves]

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See you there at 3:00pm.

BTW: Nancy was on Big Talk last month, February 9th. And keep an eye out for my profile of her in Limestone Post, in this month’s edition of Big Mike’s B-town.

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Back Door Woman

Speaking of Big Talk, man, I coulda taken last week off while Nicci B of the Back Door was in the studio. The co-owner and arts & entertainment director of Bloomington’s premier LGBTQ gathering place bent my ear like a champ. My interview w/ her aired Thursday. Here’s the link to the WFHB feature and here’s the link to the original, pretty-nearly-unedited original interview with her.

Nicci B

[Image: Andrew Grodner/Limestone Post]

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Big Talk will indeed be taking this week off but we’ll return next week, Thursday, March 23rd. I’ll let you know who my guest will be just as soon as I nail someone down.

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Bye-bye

Perhaps the scariest thing about these Days of President Gag is what I’m going to start referring to as the Big Finale. That is, there seems to be an epidemic of thought — suffusing people of seemingly every political and philosophical stripe — that…, well, we’re all about to die.

Here It Comes!

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• Environmentalists warn us that we’re poisoning the Earth to the point that humanity can’t survive.
• The scared bunnies on the Right tell us that Islamic terrorists are ten minutes away from acquiring a mega-nuke that’ll blow us all to smithereens.
• Those on the Left howl that L’il Duce himself is ten minutes away from pressing the nuke button, destroying all life on this mad, mad, mad, mad world.
• Gun nuts think hordes of black-skinned people are amassing right now on the edge of town, preparing for some kind of Great Siege.
• Nativists believe undocumented brown-skinned people are pouring over the border by the tens of millions.
• Fans of organics worry that GMOs’ll result in food as dangerous as a cookie made of arsenic.
• A year and a half ago, celebrity “consumer advocate” Erin Brockovich hollered that drinking Bloomington’s water was equal to having tumors surgically implanted in our various and sundry organs.

I can go on and on, but you get the picture. Take all these disparate folk and add to the mix a certain segment of the pop. that believes we’re hurtling headlong toward a day when some defining battle between civilizations, between”winners” and “losers,” an Apocalyptic War, will rid the planet of evil and you’ve got our species’ current zeitgeist in a nutshell.

More than anything else, this Big Finale thing is terrifying. Too many people — the Right and the Left, the pious and the atheists, rich and poor, nice and not — are beginning to act as if they have nothing left to lose.

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The Man Comes Around

Johnny Cash’s homage to the Book of Revelations — specifically the Apocalypse — from the Rick Rubin-produced “American IV.”

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