All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Planet pool.


We’re off the charts? Finally! Took long enough. What the hell… this band has been going for 25 years and we… What? Oh. We’re off the star charts. Right.

Well, space travel has just gotten a lot more confusing, people. Much, much more complicated than even a few weeks ago when we left planet Earth to embark on this ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour. It seems that normal (i.e. not mad) scientists back on Earth have discovered the existence of literally millions…. perhaps BILLIONS of Earth-sized planets circling stars throughout our galaxy. As we’re bobbing around out here, trying to find our next destination (Kaztropharius 137b), we’ve been scratching our heads, trying to figure out where all of these freaking planets came from. None of them are on the charts. Lots of them look alike. This is bloody ridiculous.

Okay, so… where do we start? With the mad scientist, of course. Mitch Macaphee knows everything about planets and planetoids, from concocting them to blowing them up (particularly the latter, truth be told). We caught him in the middle of one of his favorite experiments – turning lapis lazuli into marble fudge. (It’s not exactly a value-creation experiment, but hell… I did say he was mad, didn’t I?) The conversation went something like this:

Joe: Hey, Mitch?
Mitch: Can’t you see I’m busy
Matt: Wait…. Is that lapis lazuli?
Joe: Never mind that. Mitch, the planets, Mitch…!
Mitch: Yes, yes? What about them? Yes??
Matt: I didn’t know lapis lazuli is blue. Thought it was …
Joe: There are too many of them! How do we tell them apart?
Mitch: Don’t ask me such foolish questions. When you want to blow them apart, let me know.

As you can tell, we weren’t getting a lot of help from him. A little later on, he sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into my quarters (an empty storage bin, actually) with a recorded message. “Use the laser cannon,” Mitch said on the recording. “If a planet splits straight down the middle, it can’t be Kaztopharius 137b. That thing is made of solid quintilium. The best you can get is a clean hole, no split. Just keep shooting til you find it.”

I’m not sure, but I think Mitch is suggesting we incinerate multiple worlds, and personally, I’m a little uncomfortable with that. (Anti-Lincoln seems kind of keen, though.) Better take tonight’s watch, just to be sure.

Political Rants

Turning Japanese.

Looks like we all drive with Boehner. And perhaps swim with Aqua Buddha.

Okay, so… here’s the irony of this mid-term election. Admittedly Obama isn’t the most “outside of the box” thinker imaginable, but when he came into office two years ago, he had a relatively ambitious agenda that included a major stimulus package. The original version included infrastructure spending that would have put some fuel into this sluggish recovery. The Republicans had decided, of course, to vote no on everything, including cloture for all Senate bills, making the bar for passage of anything more than sixty votes. The stimulus got watered down with tax cuts – 30% or so was tax cuts – to bring along people like Arlen Specter, who was a Republican then.

Of course, that spending package worked by all measures… but only so well, as tax cuts have always been a pretty poor method for stimulating the economy. The G.O.P. then tag the dems with the “failed stimulus”, even though its lack of broader effectiveness was largely due to their stonewalling. Now the voters, in their understandable anger at this failure, have put the Dems out and, by extension, House Republicans back in charge, so any correction of this is extremely unlikely. So… it looks like we’re headed for Japan in the 1990s – a zombie economy, staggering along for the next decade, suffering from our unwillingness to take bold action. The deficit hawks have gained the upper hand for the nonce, and that is not good news for the rest of us.

Not that the G.O.P. House will seriously move to cut the deficit. As of yet, they have been unable to name even a few billion dollars worth of cuts they would be willing to make. Not to mention the fact that they seem determined to continue boring the hole through the treasury that Bush started with his tax cuts for the rich and famous. If they do that and succeed in repealing the health care legislation, we’re effectively talking about another $1.7 trillion in debt added on to what they claim is a staggering total already. Does that sound serious to you? Perhaps they’ll try to resurrect Dubya’s Social Security privatization plan to underwrite such largesse to the wealthy. (Since their successful House campaigns were floated by post-Citizens United corporate cash, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.)

Here’s my suggestion, Mr. President. Take that $700 billion tax cut they want to give to the wealthy and propose adding it to the cuts for the bottom 97%. Let them vote against that one.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Dipper in road.


No, no – that is Antares. This is Betelgeuse. And Kaztrofarius 137b is way over here, not here. Jesus christmas, Mitch! I thought you said you could read maps.

Okay, well… that’s great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE – our current interstellar tour – and we’re freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn’t true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like… not at all.

How lost are we? Hard to tell. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) what he thought, and he just blinked his lights on and off for a minute or two, said nothing. A deathly silence from this man of brass. Not a good sign when you’re lost. Though I looked out the portside window and a few of the constellations looked familiar. A little farther away than I’m used to, but familiar none the less. The big dipper actually looked small, and the little dipper was microscopic. I mentioned that to Lincoln, and he went into this long meditation about the infinitely large intersecting with the infinitely small, and how we may all be mere subatomic particles in the vast body of our universe, etc., etc. Pretty esoteric stuff from a man of the 19th Century, wouldn’t you say? (I think he’s been watching my old Cosmos tapes.)

This is taking a bit longer than we thought, and we may be losing our performance “edge”, if you will (or won’t). As you might expect, it’s a little challenging to rehearse in a zero-gravity environment. Sure, the guitars, keys, and drums float away from time to time. But what’s worse is when you play up tempo stuff – we actually start floating in circles around each other, rotating on multiple axes as if we were mounted on gyroscopes. It’s a little unnerving… except for sFshzenKlyrn, who does that sort of thing all the time, gravity or no. It’s kind of his natural state. So… yeah, we’re getting rusty up here.

Damn! I should ask sFshzenKlyrn where the hell we are? What am I thinking? Have to sign off and suit up (he’s out on the hull smoking a Venusian cigar).