All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Squat of the future.

Are you still tinkering with that thing? Holy shit, I thought you were a scientist. What kind of scientist spends a week screwing the legs into a mail-order ottoman? Whoa, Mitch …. put the hammer down. HEY!

Greetings, Big Green die-hards. This is what I sound like a moment after someone tries to brain me with a flying hammer. Our friend and mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is not all that pleased with me right now. I shouldn’t have asked how his latest experiment is progressing. Don’t know what he’s working on, but I can tell you that it came out of an Ikea box. Maybe it’s an ottoman, or perhaps a chesterfield. Kind of hard to tell from ten paces.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Mitch is a mad scientist in the traditional sense, right? His stock in trade is formulating theorems to crack the earth in half or poison the atmosphere (not that we aren’t already doing that without his help), BIG stuff … not build-it-yourself furnishings or other petty household trifles. Well, all I can say is, never underestimate the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He is truly ahead of the curve on domestic mad science, and that’s largely because of some YouTube clips he’s been watching on the Internet of Things (IOT).

Talking fridgeRight, so … Mitch spent a few weeks YouTubing, and the next thing we knew he was tinkering with our aging refrigerator. The following day, Matt opened the fridge door and the little light went on. Hey … he’s finally making himself useful, we all thought. But then the thing started talking to me. One afternoon I reached in for a cold drink and I heard a mechanical voice say, “Are you going to have another one of those?” Then it locked the door on me. That was bad enough, but just this past week we started getting random shipments from the neighborhood grocer – eggs, milk, cottage cheese, lettuce. I thought it was Anti Lincoln planning one of his famous cotillions, but no … Mitch had hooked the fridge up to the internet, and the bloody thing has been shopping online and spending a freaking fortune.

So, hell … if Mitch takes a little heat on his home improvement projects, he has it coming. Not sure why an ottoman needs a gun mount, though …

Political Rants

False outrage.

Trump isn’t happy with the compromise plan being served up by the Congressional Conference Committee to Avoid A Second Pointless Shutdown. That’s certainly a good sign. Whenever Trump is unhappy about something, an angel gets her wings. Still, the Trump administration is always about fifty things in any given day, some retreads from previous cycles, some new bullshit, invariably something to get under nearly anyone’s skin. The things I probably found most irritating this week (and that’s always a hot contest) were Trump’s Texas adventure, the big speech at El Paso, and his sloppily calling for Rep. Ilhan Omar to resign. The former of these items was infuriating for obvious reasons; the latter more because it was dog-piling on criticisms of the Congresswoman from a broad swath of people, including many in the Democratic party.

Totally not antisemiticOmar is the perfect target for Trump. She’s a woman, a person of color, an immigrant from Somalia, and a Muslim who, like many Somali women, wears a headscarf. The orange-faced jackass has attacked all of those things separately on many occasions – by attacking Omar, he gets more bang for the buck. Would that he were the only one so eager to jump on her over an anti-AIPAC tweet. Democratic leadership really showed their ass this week, following up on their shameful support of Trump’s Venezuela policy from the previous week. A really poor performance. Still, Trump and Kevin McCarthy both get extra credit for crying antisemitism when their own track records on bigotry are unambiguously offensive. Both McCarthy and Trump made George Soros the bête noir of the mid-term campaign last year. Not subtle.

I don’t know that I would attribute fanatical support of Israeli government policy solely to receiving money from AIPAC, but Omar is right to call the lobbying group out, as they take an extreme right position on just about every aspect of Israel’s various domestic and foreign policy actions. Moreover, politicians from both major parties regularly try to out-do one another in their speeches before AIPAC conferences, trying to establish which of them does a better imitation of Netanyahu or someone further to the right flank of Likud. The problem is more with the politicians than the lobby, and their cravenness on this issue occurs in the context of an American foreign policy that is in lock-step with the Israeli government, regardless of what they do. That’s just bad policy, no matter what government we’re talking about.

Glad to see Omar give Elliott Abrams a pain in the ass. Somebody sorely needs to.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Tuneless fuckers.

No, there’s nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Since when are you a musical purist? I’m experimenting, man … that’s where it’s at, right? That’s what Big Green is all about. THAT’S WHY WE’RE ABOARD HER …

Oh. sorry … I lapsed into James T. Kirk dialogue for a moment. We were just having a little back and forth over some musical contrivances I’ve been attempting on our latest crop of NED TREK songs.  Last count we’ve got fully eight numbers in the works – an unusually large parcel, though our recording process has taken a bit longer than has been our habit in recent years. As some of you know, we used to take some pains over our albums (e.g. International House, five years in the making). Then when we launched our podcast, we started slapping songs together in hours rather than days or months (e.g. Cowboy Scat, a ridiculously slap-dash effort).

That's ... uh ... real good, Abe.Well, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. I think we’ve put about six months into these songs, and we’re only now at the mixing stage. Mind you, we have just a few hours a week to do anything on this at all, then it’s back to the salt mines. Still, taking time allows us to experiment a bit more, which is what Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was calling me out for just then. Not sure when he graduated from Julliard, but apparently the sight of me playing a coronet with a violin bow blew a few breakers in that little brass noggin of his. It’s called innovation, Marvin. Deal with it.

The unfortunate side effect of taking longer on these songs is that we go through longer periods of posting no new songs. That makes us tuneless fuckers for a good portion of the year. But don’t let our silence fool you – there’s a lot of music going on in this drafty old hammer mill. Why just the other day Antimatter Lincoln pulled out his banjo and started plucking. Now, there aren’t a lot of things that even Anti-Lincoln does worse than I do, but plunking on a banjo is one of them. And I’m freaking awful on that instrument. That’s why I took up the coronet. Though I’m thinking an accordion bellows would help that horn dramatically. We’ll see. Back to the lab!