All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Casting some pod.

We just did that, man. It’s still summer, right? What? October! What the hell … we’ve got some work to do. First task: find out what happened to July. (I know I left it around here somewhere.)

Oh … hi, friends of Big Green. Seems like I’ve lost track of time just a bit. I’m off by about three months, but hey … who hasn’t lost a quarter, right? It’s probably somewhere deep in the sofa cushions. Except that we don’t have a cushioned sofa here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Just chairs. Stark wooden chairs. We sit, straight as a board, until the darkness comes, then we retire. It’s  hard, but it keeps us honest. (Honestly … it’s hard! The chair, that is.) We ain’t got no time for no podcast stuff round these parts, no how. Now GIT! Ah …. sed …. GIT!

Whoops … lapsed in to Bobby Sweet mode just then. (Not to worry. Bobby Sweet wouldn’t hurt no one. He just has a hankering for big guns.) Yeah, I can blame the calendar, I can blame my momentary lapses into stereotypical rural jargon, but when you come right down to it, the fault is mine. We haven’t posted a podcast in three months, and it’s because we haven’t finished an episode in that long. Hell, it took me all summer and half of the fall to write the script for the upcoming installment of Ned Trek. We recorded the audio last week in a couple of hours, and now it’s off to editorial. Which is to say, we need to cut the living shit out of it.

Did somebody see my summer lying around here?Hey, anyone out there who works with audio and video knows, this stuff is time consuming. Especially when you’re a lazy sloth like me. I’m a bit more like Bobby Sweet than I care to let on, truth be told. I like to sit back and strum on my old guitar, pound out a few chords on the old piano, drop some canned fruit in the old blender and swear at the fact that it still doesn’t work. All I can say is that, despite the distractions, we are working on the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast and it will appear very soon. Which is to say, it won’t be another quarter. Maybe a nickel. Stay tuned!

Usual Rubbish

Seasonal disorder.

Pipe bombs dropped at the homes of prominent opposition political figures. Scare talk about hordes of dark people working their way north towards our southern border. Dog whistles turned up to bullhorn volume in competitive races across the country, including a racist Amos and Andy-style robo call in Florida. This is what election season in the United States looks like in 2018. This is the reality show election that proceeds from the reality show presidency of Donald Trump, who is basically spending all of his time flying to every corner of the country, holding his signature Klan rallies and greasy fundraisers to prop up sagging congressional republicans desperate to hold on to their majority for another cycle.

Another Klan rallyOur local House member, Claudia Tenney in NY-22, is one such republican. Trump came for a fundraiser over the summer; Paul Ryan came by a few weeks ago, and just this week we were treated to the sight of Eric Trump, who gave a pep talk to Tenney’s campaign volunteers and staff. For her own part, she has been channeling Trump a bit more than usual, referring to Colgate university as a crazy, left-wing school, whining about “socialists” coming up from downstate to help her opponent, and so on. I suppose she is calculating that, between her own erratic behavior and the spectacle of being carried around on the flabby shoulders of GOP celebrities, she will have enough lift to get over the finish line in November. We shall see.

The net effect of all of this is to further erode the nation’s grasp on reality. This is a tried and true method of authoritarian governments – trust nothing but what comes out of Dear Leader’s mouth. As Trump said the other day in response to the press’s mild skepticism about his claims of “middle eastern” people traveling with the Honduran refugee caravan , “You can’t prove anything.” Nothing can be proven; therefore, every claim of fact is equal to every other, and those who put their claims forward the most forcefully win the day. This is a recipe for disaster and a roadmap to true authoritarian rule. Perhaps all that’s needed now is a Reichstag fire.

My advice to all is pretty simple: vote, vote, vote. Whatever else you do (and by all means, do all you can), you must cast a vote or risk losing that basic right in the months and years to come.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Grounded.

Hmmm … leaving kind of a big footprint there, aren’t you, Anti-Lincoln? Seems like you’ve been feeding on a pretty good pasture lately, am I right? No? Ah, okay.

Well, the gravity’s back. Isn’t that good new?. And now all of us weigh about twenty pounds more than before. Just a little side benefit of Mitch’s latest project. (YEAH, MITCH … THANKS A LOT. Turn that gravity thing down a little, willya?) Something tells me we will need to replace the floor joists in this crumbling old ruin of a hammer mill … except that I don’t know how to do that and I wouldn’t know a floor joist if it hit me upside of the head.

Mitch has got this whole gravity thing figured out. He describes swarms of little invisible magnet-like  particles he calls “gravitons”. Apparently these little critters swarm around you by the thousands, holding you down as the world spins out of control. Without their persistent intercession, we would all fly off into space, the earth shaking us off as it rotates on its axis. Mitch thinks of them as the quantum mechanical equivalent of guardian angels … which is the reason why he hates them with a mad man’s passion. He went into a bit of a rage last night about gravitons, swiping at the invisible particles like he was shooing away mosquitoes. At one point, he appeared to have caught one between his thumb and forefinger, but his triumph was short-lived – the little specter slipped away, eliciting a yelp from the mad scientist as if he had touched a hot stove.

Here they come again, Mitch.Okay, so …. that guy’s crazy. And, as Mr. Spock once observed, madness has no reason … but it can have a goal. That’s what Mitch’s anti-gravity machine was all about. The device attracts gravitons like a bug zapper, apparently, though it doesn’t zap them … it just keeps them busy so that they can’t hold the rest of us down. (You always thought it was THE MAN that was holding you down, but no, says Mitch, it’s the gravitons!) Anyhow, it kind of worked for about a week, then something went bust. That happens a lot with mad science tinkerers like Mitch. Hell, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has dozens of glitches, but hell … he’s family.

So we’re back on the ground, for the nonce. We’ll see what the weekend brings. I’ve got my bike helmet on, just in case.