All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Tourward.

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Flag the commissioner, Alfred, we’re ready to roll! Hope you fixed the sticky hinge on the bat cave door. You did, didn’t you…. ? DIDN’T YOU??

Wha-at? Oh, man… what an awful dream! Not that you asked me what it was about, but… I dreamt I was an MBA in the accounting department at Enron, and… Oh, no, wait. That was Thursday night’s. Last night’s was a bit more blood-curdling (if that can be imagined). But I won’t go into that in detail. Suffice to say that it resembled something from mid-sixties television, populated by big pointless-looking computer consoles covered with flashing, multi-colored pin-sized lights. (They made whirring sounds. It was terrifying!) Lucky to get out of that particular sojourn alive. Thank uncle Jebus our tours are nothing like that. When we do interstellar travel, we tend to avoid whirring sounds…. at least, the evil, low-pitched ones. Uuuhhhllll….

Enough about me. Glad to be able to say that we’ve finished provisioning our interstellar tour bus. By which I mean, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has finished loading the un-spaceworthy crate we’ll be taking to Jupiter and parts beyond.  Now I know what you’re going to say… and stop me if I’m wrong, but I think you were going to caution me on embarking on interstellar journeys in a forty-year-old rust bucket. (You weren’t going to say that? Bugger.) In any case, I’ve asked Marvin to work with the man-sized tuber in bondo-ing up all the panels that have rusted-through on the J-2 spacecraft since our last tour. About 4 dozen spots. More than I’d imagined, actually. (We put it up on blocks all winter, too. Go figure.)

Yeah, so our ship whistles when we fly…. so what? We’ve got that can-do spirit that put Armstrong, Aldrin, and… uh… that other guy on the moon forty years ago. (Actually, Collins had his own one-man party in lunar orbit, as I remember. Judging from the footage, that would have been the job for me.) What the hell…. we live in an abandoned hammer mill, for chrissake. We haven’t had anything beyond basic cable in, like, five years. Mitch Macaphee rides a bicycle that doesn’t even have fenders on it.  Seriously…. we can handle anything deep space can dish out. As long as it isn’t on fire. Or radioactive. I hate radioactive stuff. (It makes my fillings glow.) Besides, Mitch (our mad science advisor) has assured us that the J-2 replica is perfectly safe to fly, so long as we stay away from that massive swarm of comets circling menacingly just outside the orbit of Pluto.  We told our agent in no uncertain terms – by no means book anything within the deadly comet belt!

Ahh. Our tour itinerary has just been faxed from our good friends at Loathsome Prick records. And guess where we’re going on week 3. Just…. guess….

Political Rants

Short takes.

You’ve been reading my extended blog rants for some time, perhaps. Well… maybe a few of you. Here’s a slight departure. Instead of blathering on about one issue, I’m going to just briefly rant about two or three things. (Yeah, no planning ahead here – let’s just see how far I get).

Beer at the ‘House. Like you, I saw the photo of the president and vice president sitting down with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Sgt. James Crowley. Looked friendly enough, as intended. For me, though, it doesn’t erase that disturbing image of Gates being led out of his house in handcuffs – a man who walks with a freaking cane – in obvious distress. Whoever made the decision to subject Harvard’s Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute to this level of humiliation is, well, let’s say not a nice man. I don’t care what Gates said to the police in his own home. If he didn’t wave a gun at them or try to assault them in some way, there was no reason to arrest him. They were responding to a non-existent crime. They could have just left the scene. They chose otherwise.

Cash for Lunkheads. That the so-called “Cash for Clunkers” program has proven highly popular is not surprising. What the hell – $4,500 towards a new car? Pass the freaking potatoes! It’s a kind of stimulus, and as such is a good thing, but  as someone who drives a 15 year old car that gets in excess of 20-25 miles to the gallon, I feel a bit frosted by the whole thing. I mean, we made a relatively sober decision to buy an economical car 15 years ago, while other folks (plenty of them) bought ludicrous gas guzzlers that helped drive the price of gas through the roof (through increased consumption), not to mention contributed mightily to environmental degradation. So now the gas-hog drivers get a $4,500 check towards a new ride, while I get bupkis (except further incentive to squeeze another year out of my wreck). Isn’t this kind of rewarding stupidity and selfishness? Again – I think they should extend the program, and I see the point of it. But w.t.f., you feds – share the love a little bit. Shouldn’t folks who bought more modest vehicles – who are just as crunched as any suburban truck-drivers –  get some help too?

Bank Holes. The “too big to fail” banks are back in the business of handing out six and seven-figure bonuses to their executives, even after having been put on life support by the U.S. government (i.e. you and me). This is just a thumb in the eye, isn’t it? It’s like they’re saying, “Well… we gambled like a sailor on acid, almost brought the entire financial system down, then got billions from you losers, and we’re still on top. Suck it up!” Meanwhile, they are all inventing new ways to screw their customers until the provisions of the credit consumer protection bill kick in, like increasing minimum payments (i.e. accelerating payment schedules on low-interest debt), raising interest rates, and so on. What to do about this? Good question. How about revoking their TARP aid? How about closing the Federal Reserve lending window (through which they’ve gotten even greater infusions of cash)? How about nationalizing the fuckers? Summers? Geithner?

All right… that’s all I’ve got.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Count sideways.

2 Comments

Well, great day in the morning… I was wondering where I left that freaking thing. Who might have thought it would turn up in the rock garden? What’s next, eh? (Well, the next thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire…)

I don’t have to tell you – when you start packing your bags for an extended trip beyond the bounds of our solar system, that is when things start turning up… things you haven’t seen for months, maybe years. Just yesterday I found a pair of sneakers I’d misplaced during last year’s election. The day before that, Matt stumbled across the remains of his first kazoo (the one he’d used to record the theme from our never-completed sci-fi epic, “Destination: Space”). John has been turning up all sorts of remnants of past lives, such as an ancient banjo labeled simply “The Gibson”. And I’d rather not get into what Mitch Macaphee has been dragging out of the depths of his makeshift studio in the old forge room of the Cheney Hammer Mill, our humble squat-house. Half-human cyborgian experiments. Beakers of nameless goo, glowing five colors at once. A bald unicycle tire. (How did that get in there?) What did the man-sized tuber find in his terrarium? Some old plant food… that’s about it.

It’s always hard to know what you’ll need on this kind of journey. Big Green’s last interstellar tour required a great deal of ingenuity on our parts, and that’s mostly because we didn’t have the proper supplies. This time, that’s not going to happen. In fact, we’ve given Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the responsibility of being our quartermaster. He has, as I’m sure you realize, a machine-like memory. (I don’t mean a computer kind of machine… more like a desk stapler or tape dispenser.) In addition, he has the strength of ten ordinary men (like the cartoon Hercules), so he can load whatever he requisitions. Now that is what I call efficient use of humanoid resources. Now if he could only convince the man-sized tuber to put his little push-cart to use loading the spacecraft. (Though that degree of efficiency might be considered borderline obsessive. Scratch that.)

How are the Lincolns helping us? Good question. Anti-Lincoln is still billeted in the hoosegow, the crowbar hotel, the pokey… whatever you call it where you come from.  Trust me – the biggest help he can be is by staying right there until launch date (or launch date plus one, even). Posi-Lincoln, for his own part, has been keeping to himself of late. I think he’s working on an address of some sort. He keeps poking his head out and asking Marvin to find him some used envelopes and a spare bottle of India ink, then he disappears again, scratching away. Another Gettysburg address in the works? No man can say. Not sure what the occasion would be. Maybe he’s working on his memoirs… though they are likely to make a very strange read at this juncture. (I’ll look with interest for the chapters describing his transit to the 21st Century via Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device.)  And then there’s Mitch, who… who…. Oh, bloody hell! He’s blown a hole in the side of Jupiter! Nice going, Mitch! They’re going to love us in the Big Red Spot! 

With all this going on, of course, we’ve had to… well… hold up the countdown. Or something close to that, anyway. (We’re counting sideways, in point of fact.)