All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

‘Neath a southern moon!

Is that a southern moon or a northern one? Little hard to tell from this perspective. Everything is relative, relatively speaking. I even have relatives in my band. Matt Perry – my brother. Little known fact. Oh, and John White… brother-in-law. Kazow – now you know. 

Okay, so anyway. Big Green has embarked on its very special GET ME THE HELL OUTA HERE Tour 2006, after much discussion of logistical considerations, much debate, much…  too much… pain in the ass nattering over every detail, our great space cruiser finally lifted off, hours behind schedule. Like 400 hours. (That’s actually days behind schedule, but we’ll call it hours.) Well, like I said, there was a lot of preliminary bullshit. Ship’s manifests to manifest. An entire complement to compliment. Orders to be put in order…. I’m telling you, these things take time. The important thing is, we sailed off into the heavens with all of us on board, and just minutes behind the arrival of the bailiffs at the door of the semi-deconstructed Cheney Hammer Mill. (Close shave!)

Many people have asked (don’t ask how many… just trust me) about the spacecraft we use (I’m telling you, it’s more than a few people… lots of people, okay?) when we go on these interstellar tours — how does it work, what are its origins, etc.? Well, for those of you who are just dying to know (and you know who you are), we drive a reconstituted stunt model for the original Jupiter 2 spacecraft used in the Lost In Space television series of the 1960s. No, it doesn’t run on “deutronium” fuel, as that ridiculous show suggested, any more than Dick Nixon ran on cottage cheese and ketchup (beyond a certain point). Thanks to the efforts of our chief science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, the phony J-2 is propelled by an eludium positron star-drive with a maximum range of 7500 light years between refuelings. Now that’s economy. Don’t know how it works exactly, but when it’s idling it sounds like this:

….Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa Pocketa….

Yeah, I know. Mitch says they all do that. It gets us where we need to go, that’s the point. 

But there are more reasons for using the J-2 than mere economy. Frankly, it’s jolly comfortable – like an RV in space. What’s more, it’s supremely robot-friendly. What with Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as an important member of our contingent (as far as the cyborgs of the galaxy are concerned), this is a prime consideration. The J-2 has a customized magnetic “lock” pedestal built for automatons – old Marvin just steps in there, throws a switch, and he can stand through 40 g’s of forward thrust without pegging a single dial. (That’s how a robot spells comfort, my friend.) The man-sized tuber has his customized terrarium on the lower deck, and even Big Zamboola finds plenty of room to bounce around in the engine room / power core area. What the hell, we’ve got a crew that defies simple definition, if you catch my meaning. Not just any interstellar craft will accommodate them all. 

Anyway, so here’s the plan: We arrive on Neptune this weekend for a couple of pick-up performances, booked at the last minute by Posi-Lincoln, followed by a showcase on Uranus sponsored by Loathsome Prick Records, then it’s off to Kaztropharius 137b for our triumphant return. By that time, hopefully, we will know where the hell else we’re going. (Keep watching that FAX machine, Lincoln – those signed contracts should be coming through any time now!)

Political Rants

Long shot.

As you know, the North Koreans launched their deadly ICBM this week — the one our entire political office-holding class has been obsessing about for weeks on end. Turns out the missile that was supposed to be capable of reaching the U.S. couldn’t even make it to North Korea. Essentially the same thing happened back in the 1990s – dud missile makes world headlines and puts NORAD on high alert for a fortnight. Why is this treated like a credible threat to our very survival? Yes, North Korea may have nuclear weapons, but what the hell are they going to do with them? Even if that long-range missile worked, they couldn’t put their nukes on it… and even if they could, firing one at us or our allies would be like firing a pistol at a machine gun nest — a “suicide weapon” in the truest sense of the phrase. It is strange that we tend to behave as though we are threatened by these impoverished societies when, in fact, it is we who pose an existential threat to them. And we’ve demonstrated our willingness to attack without provocation.

Unfortunately, this tendency towards jingoistic alarmism is unlikely to change should Congress flip back to the Democrats this year, or if a Dem is elected to the presidency in 2008. There is a bipartisan consensus on this idiocy such that the party that’s out of power is always pushing the ruling party towards more extreme measures. Just as Kerry criticized Bush in 2004 for not hitting Fallujah hard enough, mainstream Democrats regularly chastise the administration for being too soft on Iran, North Korea, Syria, etc. Everybody wants to go for the “tough” guy routine – it’s a no-brainer in an election year (quite literally). Some of the stuff I hear Hillary Clinton saying is enough to make me want to picket her office and burn her publicity photo. You’d think a Senator would feel it less necessary to hew to a reactionary line in a state that’s one of the nation’s most liberal. Trouble is, she really believes that trash she’s talking, aging Goldwater girl that she is. 

When you’ve got support for the Iraq war at well below 50%, you have to wonder why so many Democrats are avoiding the issue like a new strain of the SARS virus. Why is a conservative Dem like John Murtha among the only ones saying anything substantive about this conflict? My guess is that they’re looking around the next electoral corner. They, in essence, are still trying to inoculate themselves against being on the wrong side of a victorious campaign, just as they tried to do during the 2002 election. Many, I’m sure, still believe in this war in as much as they think it is a worthy cause that’s being ineptly handled, rather than a bankrupt enterprise that is bad for Iraq and bad for us. About the only ones who still love this war are Dubya’s crew and Osama. 

Hey – both need recruits, right? 

Usual Rubbish

Ahoy, ahoy, ahoy.

It’s awful hard to hide on a ship, m’ladies. Scuttle me britches, sons-of-a-bitches. Raise the yard-arm. Lower the yard-leg. Hoist the mizzen-mast. Mast the hoist-mizzen. Hast the moist hizzen, for shizzle.

Whoops. Didn’t know you were copying all that. Just practicing my ship-board jargon. Getting a little bit rusty, what with having spent the last year on solid ground. My pirate words are getting all tangled up with one another. (Hard enough to understand those scurvy fuckers to begin with without putting their ravings through a scrambler.) We’re getting awfully close to launch time (it’s about noon right now, and I’m getting peckish) … launch time, and if I’m going to be scuffling around in zero gravity environments, I want to talk the talk as well as walk the walk, you follow me? Arrrgghh.

Enough of this gay banter. We are about to embark on a bold new expedition to remote corners of the galaxy. I’m not talking some old Ford Galaxy, either, I’m talking about the big enchilada, the mongo galaxy… what we know as the Milky Way. No, not the candy bar. The real deal. No, not John Kerry. Arrrgghhhh. Bloody brand names! You just can’t get away from them. Try to have a five minute conversation without stumbling upon large swaths of the language they have appropriated to their own dark purposes… just TRY. Okay, I’m a bit on edge – I admit. This trip is looming, and I’m just not ready. Not packed, not rehearsed, no house-sitter. I haven’t even gotten Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to agree to sign an appearance contract so that he can join us on stage without charging extra money later on. (Oh, he learns QUICKLY.)

Actually, speaking of contracts, we’ve gotten some interest from another corporate label. You remember our old label – Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc.? (I think they’ve contracted that to just Hegephonic since our day.) Well, just as we were packing our pipe organ onto the spacecraft, a blank contract came in from a label called Loathsome Prick Records. Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of them before. I think they do a lot of spoken word stuff. (They may be the guys who distribute Bill O’Reilly’s books on tape, but that’s just supposition.) I’m not sure where they found out about Big Green, but what the fuck… they HAVE to be better than Hegemonic (or Hegephonic). Sound like a nice bunch of people, anyway. Think maybe I’ll drop them a note before we blast off. Or maybe I’ll have the Big Zamboola carry it over to them personally. (He can always catch up with us, being a planetoid and all.)

What’s that sound? It’s the low murmur of our stardrive engines revving up. Yeah, I just made that up. I don’t know what propels us from planet to planet – we just press buttons, consult our science advisors, and somehow we get there. What the hell, do I look like someone who knows what he’s doing? Look closer!