All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Looking back.

Are you sure that happened in 2007? I’m pretty sure it was in 2006, but if you say so, I guess I’m wrong. The years all fold into one another, don’t they? I was just saying that last year, and … well … there you have it,

Oh, hi. Just playing a little game of total recall here with Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Now, of course, he can’t say much aside from a few metallic squeaking sounds, but he can give me tickertape readouts like any good electronic brain from the middle of the last century. We’re trying to recall when our first subterranean tour happened. Hell, I don’t know why I don’t just look at our old blog pages instead of relying on Marvin’s Commodore-era processor. (Except that when I wrote those blog posts back in the day, it was on a computer almost as primitive as him.)

Did we actually do this at some point? 'Fraid so.I suppose more than a few of you have noticed that we don’t do a lot of tours anymore. Maybe the occasional day trip to a distant asteroid once in a blue moon (not to mention the gig we did on that blue moon once), that sort of thing. We have become more sedentary over the passing years, and one glance at those old blog posts confirm it. God knows, back in THOSE days we were sailing off to distant solar systems at the drop of a hat, teaming up with extraterrestrial guitarists (like sFshzenKlyrn of the planet Zenon, a real shredder), braving all manner of threat and hostile conditions. Heady times indeed!

Well, that was then. Now we hang around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, wandering our way into our makeshift studio a few times a week to record songs or podcasts or what have you. Some would say we have given up. Others would say we’re a bunch of useless assholes who don’t deserve the time of day. Still others might argue that our dietary preferences are an abomination and run counter to the laws of god and man. Who am I to say that any of them are wrong? Busted!

We’re about looking forward, not backward. That’s the only way I can keep myself from walking into walls. I’m a practical man, some might say.

Political Rants

Standoff.

[Blogger’s Note: The shutdown ended a day after I wrote this. I’m posting it anyway because we’re likely to take this circus ride again sometime soon … and because I’m too damn lazy to write another post.]

There’s little light I can shed on the ridiculously long Trump government shutdown that hasn’t already been tossed around on the corporate media over the past 30-odd days (and they have been very odd indeed). I’ve got a handful of things to say about it, and here they are.

  1. This is an asymmetric battle. For the most part, the stuff being shut down is stuff the Republicans despise anyway and don’t mind seeing derailed or dismantled. This is just another avenue to the same ends they’ve been working towards since they came to power. They have nothing but contempt for government workers. They want to slash food stamps. They hate regulations and are glad to let corporate America run wild without even the nominal constraints that government imposes upon them. They pretend to care about securing the nation against attack, but their policies do the exact opposite. They simply don’t care if the country falls over backwards – arguably, that’s their core mission as a party.
  2. The Dems can’t back down. Seriously, if Donald Trump (aka President Drunk Uncle Twitter Troll) gets anything out of this shutdown, he will use this tactic again and again.  We know that’s the case … the man simply cannot be trusted to keep his word and he is incapable of telling the truth. We may as well have this out now … because if we don’t, it will just need to be dealt with later (and not much later).
  3. Labor may need to stop this. I don’t make a habit of telling working people what they should or should not do – they should do whatever works for them. But it occurs to me (and many others as well) that one way out of this impasse would be for the TSA and air traffic controllers to walk out. That would bring air travel and transport to a screeching halt, and my guess would be that the president would deflate like a punctured tire if that were to happen. Just saying – solidarity is an effective weapon.

What he looks like when he loses.High school standoff. Re this controversy about the standoff between Catholic anti-abortion protesters and Native Americans at the Lincoln Memorial this past weekend, I agree with Sam Seder that (1) young men can act like tremendous assholes when they gather in large numbers without proper supervision, and (2) where the hell were the supervising adults anyway, and how did they let this get so far out of hand? Despite all the hand wringing about misinterpreting the incident based on fragments of viral video, it’s obvious that these kids are mocking the Native Americans. I know that smirk anywhere. But I don’t blame them … just their minders, who shouldn’t be allowed to supervise children ever again.

Usual Rubbish

Witness protection.

Beard and glasses are no good. You’ve already got a beard and glasses, remember? Maybe you should just shave and squint more. Not sure anyone would recognize you anyway, but there’s no point in taking chances.

Oh, hi. I was just attempting to help our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, with a little problem he’s experiencing with law enforcement. No, he didn’t get one of those threatening IRS calls demanding thousands of dollars in iTunes cards on pain of arrest. Nothing that exciting. Apparently, Mitch has been running a side-hustle. He built some kind of interstellar surveillance drone, and it’s been spotted by NASA and disseminated to the press. Now he thinks the feds are after him for horning in on their game.

Yes, I know. He’s got nothing to worry about. But Mitch’s nerves have been kind of raw just lately, and he wants to go into hiding … a kind of witness protection program, only the kind that shields you from the government. His probe – named “Oumuamua” by astronomers – collects call data from the planets it orbits, then transmits it down to Mitch’s lab, where he puts it through a grey box with flashing Christmas lights and a kind of electrical arc that runs between two rods. (I told him he could use a standard toggle switch on the thing, but he insisted on the big-handled wall switch. It’s no fun being a mad scientist without one of those.)

Hmmm... Doesn't look like a drone.I guess it’s the downloading the data part that makes him think he might be in the crosshairs of law enforcement. Even Mitch, with his fevered astrophysicist brain, knows that that is a bozo no-no, so to speak, in the eyes of the intelligence services. I told him just to shut Oumuamua down for a couple of weeks or send it to another solar system … preferably a slightly less repressive or litigious one. My guess is that he will eventually come around to doing something like that, though you would think the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might have worked that out for himself. No soap. So many difficult personalities to deal with in this business! So much freaking drama!

Okay, so Mitch is in a funk, and we’re still inserting the funk into our latest raft of songs. Be patient, my friends … they will drop one day soon, funk and all.