All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

One man’s ceiling.

Oh, Jesus … not again. If you don’t quiet down, I’m going to call the police! What? Of course they’ll come. The cops don’t hold a grudge. And besides, I doubt they even remember that little note l left on their cruiser last year. It was a joke, for chrissake.

Ah, hello out there. Back to domestic bliss here in the formerly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I say “formerly” because in our absence during our Ned Trek Live Springtime Tour Extravaganza 2019, not only did snapping turtles move into our basement studio, but some even more combative creatures took up residence on the third floor of the mill. I send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) upstairs to find out what the commotion was all about, and he came back with an upside-down pitcher on his head. We then sent him back up there with a bundt cake Anti-Lincoln’s aunt Mildred made, but they weren’t having it. They threw our peace offering into the courtyard! (It made a crater on impact. Auntie Mildred should have shelled those walnuts.)

Okay, now … let’s just try to keep our heads, shall we? After all, we don’t own this mill. We just squat here, and frankly it’s selfish of us to think that we can have this place all to ourselves. Still, those folks are noisy as hell. They party on until the wee hours of the morning, pulling together drum circles and howling at the moon. At one point we though we could out-gun them with our PA equipment, but that was a joke – our main speakers are about 40 years old and sound like freaking kazoos. And those people don’t seem to mind the sound of kazoos. In fact, they might enjoy Matt’s early composition, the theme from Destination Space, played by an orchestra of kazoos (all tracked by Matt himself). Then again … perhaps not. So let’s find it and crank it up to eleven! THIS IS WAR!

Better have another word with them, Marvin.

Damn. I lost my head in the span of a single paragraph. These are trying times indeed, my friends. On days such as this I rely on the sage counsel of Antimatter Lincoln, a man  who has seen his share of hardship and sorrow, who has navigated the treacherous shoals of total warfare, who held onto his vision for a better world through the worst of times. Well … I mean, his doppleganger did, anyway. Anti-Lincoln did the opposite of all that stuff; he basically watched the Twilight Zone and ate TV dinners for a living before he met us. (That’s when he moved on to beef jerky.)

Arrrgh. There they go again! Where are my headphones?

Political Rants

Debatable.

I’m starting this post while watching the first Democratic debate.  Too many candidates, of course – I think that’s obvious. It’s kind of dizzying, frankly. John Delaney wants to double the earned income tax credit … whoopdee doo, right? What the hell is that fucker doing there? He wants to keep what’s working, like … private health care? What the fuck. This is like some kind of game show.

Highlights? Well, on night one, Elizabeth Warren put in a strong performance, but with nine colleagues to compete with on time – and sixty second answers – it’s hard to get to a substantive level on any issue. Foreign policy was, as always, a rough spot, with questions about “red lines” and “duty to protect”. In my mind, this points to one of the biggest drawbacks of these corporate-sponsored, major network hosted candidate forums. The questions strongly reflect what the mainstream media considers the broadly held political consensus on major issues.

With respect to foreign policy, when Lester Holt asks candidates where they would draw a “red line”, he’s drawing on the Syrian war debate during the Obama administration, when hawks backed the president into a corner of his “red line” comment, hoping to get another American invasion of the middle east out of it. Obama disappointed them, but has been called out for “fecklessness” ever since by the Joe Scarboroughs of the world. The idea that there should be some “red line” beyond which we plunge ourselves into a murderous, costly, and self-destructive conflict is simply ludicrous. I’m not a huge fan of Tulsi Gabbard, but she was the only one on that stage that seriously pushed back on that and on the “humanitarian intervention” question.

Probably six too many.

Then there was the question, again from Holt, to Elizabeth Warren about whether she would agree to any restrictions on abortion. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the premise for that question. Trump has been running around the country, describing with glee his fairy stories about newborn infant executions at the hands of craven women and their nefarious abortion doctors.  This question was an attempt to get the candidates to weigh in on mythical late-term abortions, and thankfully no one took the bait, though I wish one of these candidates would just swat that bullshit down, once and for all.

The second debate was kind of a crap show. I will return to that in next week’s installment.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Lights out.

I thought I told you to pay the bill before we left. Well, if you did, why the hell is it sitting here on the counter? Riddle me that, Batman! WHAT? Well, of course you can’t see it. The lights aren’t on …  BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T PAY THE BILL.

Man god damn, now I have to give lessons on household finance. I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do one thing, ONE THING, before we set off on our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, and he screwed it up. I put the electric bill in front of him, hooked a pen into his prehensile claw, and told him to cut a check to National Grid, post haste. Nothing. And now we’ve come home from our less than triumphant interstellar tour to a dark hammer mill with a leaky roof and a family of turtles living in our studio. And no, they’re not subletting.

Yes, friends, we are back on terra firma, and none too soon. No, we didn’t get to the Small Magellanic Cloud. We kept flying towards it, hoping it would get a little bigger in our forward view screen, but no luck. Saturday came and went – that was the date of our gig – and so we chose to turn around. I asked Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist, to send off some kind of automated vehicle in our stead, with a letter of apology sealed in its nosecone. Well, he sent some kind of missile out towards the Small Magellanic Cloud, but I’m not certain what it was, exactly. I guess they’ll find out in a couple of hundred thousand years. (Sometimes surprises are pleasant … and sometimes … )

In the studio? Uh ... okay.

Back here on earth, everything went to hell, as you might expect. The hammer mill is in a shambles – exactly how we left it. Aside from the lack of electricity, the air seems a little thin in here, like it’s been on a hunger strike since we left. I was hoping the mansizedtuber would have looked after the place a bit in our absence, but damn it, you can’t get good help around here, even if you grow it in a planter. Speaking of planters, we almost went nuts cooped up in that tiny flying saucer. That SOB made the lunar module seem spacious. It also made the LEM’s computer system seem sophisticated. (It wasn’t.)

I would like to be able to say that we made a pile of quatloos on this tour and that we now have the means to make this place habitable. Yes, that would be a nice thing to be able to say … I just can’t bring myself to do it.