All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Tuneless mo-fo’s.

Circle Game? Done it. Keep the Ball Rollin’? God, yes. Lodi? Oh, Lord… yes. Fucking hell… Wait, I’ve got it. “Six drops of essence of terror. Five drops of sinister sauce!” No? Come on – it’s from 1964, damn it!

What a slog. Yes, my little friends… Big Green is still here, out on the third planet of Cancri 55, only just discovered and already giving me a major, major pain in the ass. I’m telling you this right now – these space aliens have an insatiable appetite for sixties songs (which they call… “new” music). And when I say insatiable, I mean they want new shit all the time. You can not play the same song twice down here, friends. No repeating, no pre-fab set lists… just new, new, NEW. Even with a forty-year backlog, quite frankly, we are running out of stuff to play. (Note to you bar bands down there on Earth: Don’t come here. They will work you to death!) Unfortunately, we reeled through the good stuff in the first few days, worked through the bubble-gum cheese, and are truly into the dregs at this point. (As you can see, we’re starting to pull out the T.V. cartoon theme songs.)

While Matt, John, sFshzenKlyrn and I have been working the highly demanding crowd, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been devoting all of his energies to piecing our damaged space craft back together. Not an easy task, especially with his meager talents. Mind you, sFshzenKlyrn could probably knock this task off in a lazy afternoon, him being a transcendental extraterrestrial being possessed of the sum of all knowledge, good, bad, and indifferent. Trouble is, I really think he likes it here. He’s a big fan of sixties music, and since time means nothing to him, he could easily spend the next seven eons here without graying a hair. (Truth be known, the eons will not have been so kind to us.) I have been trying to think of how to incentivize sFshzenKlyrn to take over the spacecraft repair work, but so far no soap. Well… there is one thing that would work, but I would never, ever, go there. Not after the last time. It just wouldn’t be right. And it could be all any of our lives are worth to even try it again. Nope, not right at all.

Bob Seger? They want to hear Bob Seger songs? I’ll do it!

Do what? Well… we all know that sFshzenKlyrn has a little addiction issue with flapjacks. (As do we all, of course.) This is more than a mere compulsion. Some of you may remember what happened the last time he went on a major binge. If so, I need not remind you… but from the very earliest days of our association with the man from Zenon, the dreaded half-stack of buckwheat flappers has been like a gun to his oddly misshapen head. The first time we witnessed a sFshzenKlyrn bender, the space critter grew to the size of a fifty story building. That was after a rather large serving, I will admit – with the right kind of controls, we may be able to induce a pavlovian response out of him… perhaps induce him to use his enormous talents to get us off this musically-challenged cinder. And perhaps be incinerated in the process. Hmmm…

Bob Seger? Chance we’ll have to take! Oh, sFshzenKlyrn my old friend! I’ve got a little snack for you!

Big Green lives at www.big-green.net. Excoriate them at your pleasure.
Political Rants

Starts with “I”.

I’m not sure if it was Bush’s intention to come off like a paranoid lunatic last Tuesday when he commented on the national intelligence estimate on the non-existent nuclear (or “nuke-you-ler” in Dubya speak) threat posed by Iran, but he certainly succeeded in doing so. Iran “will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon,” he opined, giving a shrug of clueless arrogance that so eloquently expresses the inner workings of his tiny mind. Facts don’t matter – this much we know. And the facts have been problematic for our president and vice-president as they have tried to nudge the American people ever closer to the brink of another optional war. But they were just as problematic with respect to Iraq, remember – the administration had nothing and was working overtime to provoke some kind of confrontation, without success (to their quite visible frustration).

They’ve been working up an alternative to the nuclear scenario for some time now, as Seymour Hersh reported a few months back – certainly the basic facts in this new NIE have been known to Bush and his advisors since at least last summer. But no Iranian nuclear program certainly does not mean no war. Lord knows the administration and members of both parties in Congress have been ratcheting up the rhetoric on alleged Iranian “interference” in Iraq all year long. I know I’ve been over that ground before, so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice to say that our political leaders can always find a reason to send others into battle – that is certainly not unique to this age – and with the fiasco in Iraq now running at a steady simmer again instead of the rolling boil it reached a few months ago (providing you don’t count the corpses we’re generating), I’m sure they all feel as if we have one arm free. (Ask not for whom the dope shrugs… he shrugs for thee.)

So what’s next? We know the WMD gambit doesn’t work so well anymore. And the Iranian infiltrators toting E.F.P.’s story doesn’t seem to be getting sufficient traction, perhaps because only a handful of the “foreign” (i.e. non-U.S.) fighters captured in Iraq have proven to be Iranians. (Many more Saudis in that group, actually. Why doesn’t Bush want to invade Saudi Arabia? Friends there… many friends.) That leaves only the ever-useful fallback argument that we’re saving the Iranian people from their tyrannical government. The “liberation” of Iran – has a familiar ring, doesn’t it? Of course, that’s the kind of rationale you don’t hear much about until after the invasion… an appeal designed to make you feel guilty about saying you’re against dropping bombs on people. We’re bombing them to freedom! Trust me, when the Iraq war started, I was handed lame apologetics by otherwise reasonable people, and their rhetoric wasn’t much more rational than that. That was before full-blown ethnic cleansing occurred in Iraq, with more than 2 million exiles living in Syria and Jordan, 2 million more internally displaced, and the Iraqi government (and U.S. military commanders) reluctant to bring them back for fear that it may begin again. So, no… that dog probably won’t hunt, as the saying goes.

Nevertheless, Bush wants to invade some country that starts with “I”, and it’s obvious our pusillanimous Congress members won’t stand up to it. Guess it’s up to us.

luv u,

jp

Big Green lives at www.big-green.net. Excoriate them at your pleasure.
Usual Rubbish

The uninvited.

Couple in the next room, bound to win a prize. They’ve been going at it all night long. No, seriously – they’re playing some kind of video game in there, and I think they may just be on the verge of winning a trophy. Believe it.

Why am I reciting 36-year-old Paul Simon lyrics? Well, that story’s seldom told. I am just a poor boy… No, no, wait. There is a reason (and not one that turns out to be yet another P.S. song). Seems the planet we have landed on (third planet in the Cancri 55 system) is home to a race that’s real big on sixties acoustic folk-rock music. Of course, they think it’s all new – smoking hot platters ripping up the airwaves, straight from planet Earth. That’s ’cause Cancri 55 is 41 light years from Earth, and… well… those transmissions are just reaching them now, having crossed the trackless void of space these last four decades. Now revolution is in the air, my friends, and so is the Lovin’ Spoonful. All these Cancrites are wearing cheap leather headbands, big buckles, and fringy boots. There’s a lava lamp in every window. It’s… well… weird and unnerving, but who am I to criticize.

So what does this have to do with Big Green? What the hell, haven’t you been kept current on our last few dispatches? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)!!! Did you forget to file my column? Damn your eyes! File this week’s column twice, my good man, and be quick about it. Sheesh – hard to get good robot help up here (even if you import it). Where was I? Oh, yeah. Help. We’re stranded on this odd suburban planet, obsessed with yesteryear (or is it yester-light-year?), and what the hell, we’ve just got to earn our keep. Now before you ask, we did try to send Marvin, the man-sized tuber, and both Lincolns out to find day jobs. No luck. What about sFshzenKlyrn? Well…. he’s kind of casual, relying as he does principally on an internal fusion reactor like most celestial bodies of his class. (Not particularly class-conscious as a rule, our extraterrestrial friend does enjoy certain existential advantages over us mere mammals.) So we’re left to our own devices, as it were. I mean, what would you do? Huh?

Well… I was hoping you might have a suggestion there. Anyway, we’re brushing up on our sixties numbers. Matt seems to think we can pass ourselves off as The Cowsills or Dukes of the Stratosphere. (What’s that? They weren’t really a sixties band? So convincing….) Hence my efforts at total recall, bringing back all those songs I listened to as a wan lad. Here’s how we figure it….

  1. Learn some sixties numbers. What the hell, we’ve all had to play them at some point. Why not play them for extraterrestrials?

  2. Tuck in a few numbers that haven’t yet arrived here from Earth. Say we’re, I don’t know, the Rolling Stones. We can start playing tunes from Exile on Main Street and they’ll think we invented sliced bread.

  3. Cash in and buy spacecraft parts. Frankly, this is the whole point. We need to get our asses home.

Okay… if this totally doesn’t work, it was Lincoln’s idea – agreed? Good. He got us here in the first place, if you’ll recall. Back to rehearsal. What’s next? Red Rubber Ball? Oh, Christ! This place is a freaking nightmare! You, down there on Earth! Find a really, really long extension ladder someplace and prop it up in the general vicinity of the constellation Cancer. Do us a favor.

Big Green lives at www.big-green.net. Excoriate them at your pleasure.