All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Weighty stuff.

Matt… can you talk to him this time? He’s freaking ignoring me. Give it a try, damnit. I need to get some sleep. We’ve got the governor coming in the morning and…. well, you know.

Oh, hi. As per my usual affectation, I will act surprised at my discovery of your presence. What-WHAT? Okay, now that that’s out of the way. Just trying to get Matt to speak to Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad science advisor, about keeping the noise down a little bit, just for one night. One night, Mitch! That’s all I’m asking! Man does not live by tofu alone! He needs socks, too, and occasionally a couple of ounces of baby oil … so, my point is that it’s more complicated than you think! Oh, what’s the use?

What’s he doing that makes so much noise (i.e. more noise than a rock band)? Well, I made the mistake of leaving last Wednesday’s paper lying about. Mitch picked it up and zeroed in on an article about the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland … you know, the high-tech gizmo that smashes atoms to PULP. (Gulp.) Yeah, well … apparently that’s one of Mitch’s hobbies, too, and he got this bug in his head about finding something he calls the Higgs boson particle, which is the theoretically predicted thingy that gives all matter its mass. (Apparently, we Americans are just chock full of the stuff.) And now he’s obsessed with finding the bastard before those scientists in Switzerland do.

Now, when I use the term “obsessed” with reference to Mitch, I am not using hyperbole. He’s plugged together his own hadron collider (which he calls the “reasonably large hadron collider” or RLHC) using discarded PVC tubing the plumber left behind, as well as other odds and ends. He’s press-ganged Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the effort as well, making him eyeball the gauges and man the meters, day and night. And the freaking noise! I can’t even hear myself type. I mean, how the hell are we supposed to finish our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? How are we supposed to record our July episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN? If those smock-wearing eggheads in Switzerland could just … just…

What? They found it? Oh, Mitch…. The paper’s here. Read all about it.

Political Rants

Rights and wrongs.

G.O.P. congressional fiscal policy wunderkind (somehow) Paul Ryan was talking about rights on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos the other day, and he said this:

We [Republicans] disagree with the notion that our rights come from government; that the government can now grant us and define our rights. Those are ours. Those come from nature and god according to the Declaration of Independence.

I’ve heard similar stuff emanating from the heads of various conservatives over the years, of course. It just amazes me, though, that this creature they present as such an intellectual heavyweight in the area of legislative statecraft can seemingly lack the knowledge a pre-teenager might glean (between naps) from civics class. Rights are given to us by god and nature just as food and water are; which is to say, not really at all. Rights exist; we may (or may not) be aware of their existence. But they are not “given” to us in any respect.

Government is, at its best, an imperfect guarantor of rights; that is one of its primary functions. If people are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, what of the African Americans owned by the very man who penned the Declaration of Independence? Were they not also handed the gift of freedom by the almighty at birth? I think not. They were chattel, for chrissake; uncounted millions were born into forced labor and indeed died therein. It took a civil war, fought for other purposes, to abolish institutionalized slavery, but the fight for freedom was far from won when the guns fell silent.

The civil rights struggles of the 20th Century carved out some basic rights of citizenship that were then encoded in federal law and implemented and enforced by federal authority. No miracles there. No, the government doesn’t hand you freedoms; neither does god, nor business. We scratch for every inch, and if we’re persistent (and fortunate), the government can assist us in holding on to our gains. Or it can throw us under the bus, with the wrong people at the helm. The only role any god might play is if s/he gives us enough brains and enough strength to fight.

All I can say is, if Ryan is the best thinker they have … they’ve got some thinking to do.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Preppin’ for Tex.

Got your cowboy hat yet? Oh. Okay, why the hell not? Just go downtown, walk into the cowboy supply store, and pull a ten-gallon hat off the rack. What’s so hard about that?

Oh… hey, man. Caught me, once again, in the midst of lecturing the help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) refers to it derisively as “reprogramming”, but you know better. All I asked him to do was to purchase his own cowboy gear – that’s all. Is that so unreasonable? Am I expected to pay for everything around here? What the hell – I’m the “job creator”, right? I’m the one using “air quotes” left and right. Haven’t I done my part in this employer-robot assistant relationship? Huh?

Okay, so why am I asking Marvin to dress up like Tex? So that he’ll match the rest of us, of course, when we start shooting videos to support our upcoming album of Cousin Rick Perry songs. What the hell, we can’t release an album of songs nominally by the governor of Texas without donning ten-gallon (or, at least, 5-liter) headgear. That would be tantamount to malpractice. And what is malpractice but a crutch for cats who can’t blow? (Okay… I murdered that quote, but it had it coming.)

Admittedly, there is more to making a new album than getting matching cowboy suits. Much more. Like shoes. And pizza boxes. Bubble-stuff in a plastic jar. What else? Hmmmm. Corn husks. Put them all in a cement mixer and flip the switch, baby. Round and round they go, and after a few hours, pour it out into a six-up mold and start stamping out those CD’s. Nothing to it.

What about the music part of it? Details, details. We’re working on it, that’s all I can say. All of those first-draft podcast songs? We’re polishing them to a sparkling luster. We’re patching them up like ten miles of bad road. We’re turning knobs, flipping switches, and cranking …. cranks. We’re making the little lights flash like glow-bugs. That’s a bit of doing.

So, yes… we will have an album. Big Green will crawl again across the shattered landscape of American music anyhow. In cowboy hats. Yee-haw.