All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Lawn robots.


It’s not just the noise, man. It’s just a stupid thing to do. For one thing, we don’t HAVE a lawn. For another, it’s three o’clock in the freaking morning!

Oh, hi. Sorry… I was reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Not that he needs to be reminded of its contents – It’s been posted on a spike inside his memory banks for a good many years now. Nevertheless, I felt he needed reminding because he’s been unusually disruptive of late. Sure, there have been times when Marvin’s programming has gone south or when he’s unduly under the influence of nefarious telemetry from alien planets (don’t think it doesn’t happen, because it does!). Only recently he’s been trying his hand (or robotic claw, more properly speaking) at a number of different small enterprises, hoping to make a marginal living in these hard times. (What exactly he needs money for, I don’t know. Perhaps some kind of automatonic inebriants.)

I don’t know for sure, but I think this may have something to do with his having been trapped in a virtual mine shaft with the man-sized tuber for the better part of a month. (Even an electronic brain can go crazy. Just ask the robot on Lost in Space.) Whatever the cause, Marvin is obsessed with new ventures. He opened up a flower stand in front of the Cheney Hammer Mill last week, assisted by the man-sized tuber (who knows a thing or two about flowers, being what amounts to an enormous tulip bulb himself). When he heard about the president’s plan to send men to an asteroid in the distant future, he desperately attempted to put himself on the short list for the trip, thinking the rewards to be great (like many pentagon contracts). Both of these, of course, fell flat.

Okay, so I’m in the studio, pounding on the keys, trying to make something that sounds vaguely like music. I hit the playback button, and I hear this grinding sound that bears no resemblance to the one emitted by my aging Oberheim rack unit. It was, in fact, motor noises being picked up by an ambient mic. So I go upstairs and see Marvin mustering a small army of robots – I don’t mean five or six normal robots, but about 40 to 50 toy-sized automatons, all with little purring lawn mowers. He apparently crimped the little suckers into being the muscle behind his new landscaping business, and they were practicing on the Hammer Mill courtyard. Which is made of cobblestones. Genius!

Now that all their mower blades are dull, I’m guessing Marvin will talk the best of his little crew into putting together a band. He’ll likely call it, “Marvin and the Lawn Robots”. So great – Big Green brings him up from nothing, and now he’s competing with us.

Political Rants

Backlash.

A few brief and sullen meditations this week. Not much to say, really, but I’ll say it anyway.

‘Lection Show. Primary day was a bit underwhelming, to say the least. Not surprised to see Arlen Specter voted down. Just a bit too much political opportunism there to survive, I suppose. Never been very keen on him, I must admit. He was one of the decisive votes in pulling serious infrastructure spending out of the stimulus package last year, as I recall. And it’s hard for me to forget his spirited defense of Justice Thomas, whose bitter judicial philosophy (such as it is) we have been saddled with for the past two decades (and will likely have to live through for another two). John Murtha’s seat stayed in Democratic hands – that’s a disappointment to some.

So was Rand Paul’s victory in Kentucky, against an establishment candidate avidly supported by Cheney, McConnell and others. While Paul has gotten himself tangled into knots with some absolutist libertarian positions, he shares his father’s disdain for both of our useless wars. That, at least, would be an embarrassment for his party… and a well-deserved one, at that. He would also be one of the only truly anti-war senators. Hard to fault him for that.

What I can fault him on, though, is the logical outcome of his extreme libertarianism, which his recent comments illustrate. He’s troubled by what he sees as a heavy handed approach to BP by the administration, since that violates his sense of the total separation of the public and private spheres. For one thing, it’s amazing to me that he would consider what’s happening between Obama and BP overly intrusive or burdensome to the oil giant. If anything, it’s way too cozy and too permissive. Personally, I think they should break BP into a million pieces and cash each fragment in as a downpayment on the damage they’ve done through their greed and negligence. But Paul refuses to acknowledge human agency in either the BP undersea oil volcano, or the Massey Energy mine disaster, or I imagine any similar circumstance. “Accidents happen”, and when they do, government looks for people to “blame”.

In that respect, he sounds severely unhinged. But only because he’s willing to say out loud what many right-wing politicians and tea party “patriots” (i.e. former Bush voters) are thinking quietly to themselves.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Root cellar blues.


Don’t tell me what day it is. No, really – I don’t want to know. Just let me pretend that it’s still Saturday. Yessss…. Saturday….

Oh, man. Typing in my sleep again. Someone should really take this laptop away from me. I’m liable to post ANYTHING while I’m sleeping, even (dare I say it?) the password to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). That’s all you would need to make him do YOUR bidding, however inaccurately. Actually, (*yawn*) his password is a vegetable that starts with “P” followed by the fifth number up from zero. Do your worst. Don’t forget to oil him regularly, and if he asks you to feed him, just ignore it. He fancies himself some kind of humanoid or cyborg, but that’s pretty far from the truth. For chrissake, Mitch Macaphee made him out of bits and spares. Nothing of value in … HEY! STOP KICKING ME, MARVIN! THAT HURTS!!

Word to the wise – he gets kind of ornery sometimes. Or at least since we sent him down that enormous rabbit hole that Mitch Macaphee dug in the flagstone floor of the Cheney Hammer Mill, where we  live. Something happened to Marvin down there… something no human should ever experience. Namely, being stuck in a small air pocket with the man-sized tuber. Ever spend a weekend with a sack of potatoes? I mean, like, when you were a kid, sleeping in the root cellar of your uncle’s farm, or something. Well… whether you have or not, THAT’S the kind of thing Marvin had to get through this past week. Something broke deep inside of him. (I think it might have been a c-clamp, but I won’t be sure until I take him in for service later this month.)

Mitch, thankfully, has given up on his idea to build a radical new transportation system circumventing the surface of the Earth entirely in favor of direct routes through its chewy nougat center. However sound that idea may have seemed, it turned out to be surprisingly impractical. Who knew there were so many obstacles deep beneath the Earth’s crust? I always assumed this was one of those relatively inexpensive planets – you know, the ones that are hollow inside? A hollow chocolate world. No, sir… turns out it’s not. The Earth, you see, is like an enormous malted milk ball, except instead of some kind of hydrogenated artificially-flavored wad of sugar and cornstarch, it’s full of rock and dirt and molten lava. Yeah, man… who knew? Guess I should have paid more attention in school. Let that be a lesson to ALL of you kids out there. STOP READING THIS BLOG! SAVE YOURSELVES WHILE THERE’S STILL TIME!

Well, my eyelids are telling me to sign off. And I never give them an argument… at least not for very long.