Roll with it.

April 27, 2013 Joseph

Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close … too close.

Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won’t go!) We’re just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you’ll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths … even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It’s brutal out there!

Okay, so we’re thin skinned. That doesn’t stop us putting shit out there, friends. That’s because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example – perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week as he decided to attend the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX, along with all of the living ex-presidents and his evil doppelganger, anti-Lincoln. And the current president, btw). Talk about motivation! And who can forget Mitch Macaphee, mad scientist extraordinaire, inventor of Marvin, promoter of the interstellar space-time warp, and collector of dark matter, that mysterious substance that comprises most of what we know and hold dear.

No, my friends, we cannot be dissuaded by mere cat calls from beyond the internets. We have an album to finish and a podcast to produce. We are behind schedule on both, and that’s okay, because we are determined to finish. HAARUMPH! Right, then. Sorry. I was listening to a Dale Carnegie tape someone left in the forge room a few decades ago. Sometimes that stuff gets into you head, like the earworm from hell. Anywho, we are basically finished mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – that much is true. We’ve got another episode of Ned Trek in the can. Our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast will be posted by the end of the month. Projects, projects, projects.

I don’t know … maybe it’s time for a tour. Any takers?

Political Rants

Sand and salt.

April 27, 2013 Joseph

Non-stop fun here in the land of the free. No coincidence that this is the week they dedicated the George W. Bush presidential library. Some of the key “decision points” of his presidency were in play this week. Let’s start with a honking big one.

Syria. Bush’s political allies (and many in the “muscular” liberal establishment) have been pushing for wider involvement in the Syrian conflict for a good long while now. This week, unconfirmed reports of the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime surfaced this week, by way of the Israeli and French intelligence services, for the most part. The Obama administration intelligence services seem ambivalent and non-commital on this evidence, but not so Admiral … I mean Senator John McCain and some of his clones, who really really really wants another mid East conflict on his resume of error.

McCain is once again proving why he would have been a catastrophic president. He affects to believe that creating a “safe zone” in northern Syria and arming the fractious opposition (which includes a strong element of jihadi fighters from the Gulf) will not lead to a broader confilct that will commit us to another long-term occupation of a Middle Eastern state, ignite a broader international war, and generally result in another Iraq-like catastrofuck. I say, let’s just drop McCain on Syria, since he’s so eager to put someone’s life on the line. And if chemical weapons are a “red line”, we should have drawn it before using white phosphorus and depleted uranium munitions in Iraq. If Syria goes to the Hague, they should be in line right behind us.

Seneca Lake. A blockade by activists at the site of a salt cavern natural gas storage site being established by Inergy LLP resulted in arrests a few weeks ago. One of those arrested, Sandra Steingraber, was interviewed on the Capital Pressroom radio program this week along with her attorney. This project involves storing natural gas shipped in from outside the state in salt caverns left from old salt mining operations. Similar facilities across the nation have caused sinkholes, water pollution, etc., and now they want to site this thing on the largest of the Finger Lakes. Steingraber and her fellow protesters are fighting the good fight on this one. Pumping natural gas into geologically questionable formations beneath one of the largest fresh water lakes in the region seems like, well, not a real good idea.

Energy coporations and faulty intelligence. It’s like Bush all over again.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Ripping yarns.

April 20, 2013 Joseph

Glad we got that sorted out. Another rogue operation shut down. Try to behave yourself from now on, Marvin. Marvin? MARVIN!!!

Right, well…. lots to keep track of. I know it may look easy, being a member of the virtual rock band Big Green, but there’s more to this than meets the eyes (or ears, for that matter). Plenty of demands on our time; enough tasks to fill this drafty old abandoned hammer mill to the rafters, quite frankly. Sure, I know – we haven’t gone on tour in a couple of years. No impromptu trips to Neptune, for instance, to take in the annual Methane Fest or perform at one of our favorite hyper-gravity venues (The Flathouse is particularly memorable, for me at least). But there’s more to being a band than performing, you know. Much more.

I have described in previous posts our grueling production schedule for our upcoming collection, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A full album of 15 to 20 new songs in about a year’s time – that’s greased lightning in our world, my friends. Sure, I know – these are songs culled from a musical about the life, times, and presidential ambitions of our cousin Rick Perry, governor of the great state of Texas, and as such each number will be performed by a different musical ensemble (all of whom strangely resemble us). But it’s a big project nonetheless. Hands full, over here … hands full!

Then there’s our monthly podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, an extravaganza of useless gibberish, lovingly packaged and delivered to our listeners via iTunes. Each episode includes previously unreleased music as well as another installment of our continuing series, Ned Trek – the bizarre outer-space adventures of Captain Willard Mittilius Romney and his First Officer/Dressage Horse Mr. Ned, on board the Starship Free Enterprise. Last month, this most derivative crew of space adventurers visited the surface of Ozark 5, an outpost run by Gov. Louie Gomert, thereby initiating a series of unfortunate events that resulted in a titanic struggle, mano a mano, between Captain Romney and a giant ear of corn. Gripping drama.

So, sure … we’re occupied. It just looks like we’re a bunch of lazy lunks squatting in an abandoned mill.

Weird ass music since 1986