Usual Rubbish

Eldorado.

Can you talk any faster? Me thinkst not. Even if you could, I can’t type any faster, so it wouldn’t do any good. That’s what I’ve become, after seven years of this. Stenographer to assorted denizens of cyberspace. Can I stand the strain? Well, no.

I’m sitting on the landing gear of our rent-a-spacecraft, killing time as my cohorts continue their preparations for the upcoming Big Green GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE interstellar tour. Yes, we did change the name — thought better of it. I think this is a bit more descriptive than the last one, wouldn’t you agree? There’s a greater urgency, a more definite sense of momentum. Just wait a momentum, please. WATCH THAT CRATE! THOSE COMMEMORATIVE VASES COST A FORTUNE! Okay, sorry. Hard to get good help these days — very hard… especially when you don’t have any money with which to pay them. We just hope to bugger off before they expect compensation. (Hey… I told you the new name was more appropriate.) JUST LET ME KNOW IF YOU NEED A HAND, GUYS!  

As I mentioned last week, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will accompany us this time out, as he has so many times before. This decision was taken by popular demand on the part of Marvin’s enormous cyborg fan base out yonder. (So if you’re listening out there… he’s coming, damn it! Stop e-mailing me, you obsessive cyborgs!) Yes, we will have the full complement on board the imitation J-2 space cruiser; a regular who’s who of Notes From Sri Lanka lore. We got your man sized tuber, your sFshzenKlyrn, your Trevor James Constable (complete with orgone generating device; additional T.J. Constable accessories sold separately), your Mitch Macaphee, your posi Lincoln and anti-Lincoln, and even your Dr. Hump right here. I’ve seen each one of their crates being carried on board whilst I’ve been sitting here, relaxing. (Yes, we’re keeping them all in crates. Why not, eh?)

Who will be keeping an eye on the mill while we’re gone? Well, this is where the clever part comes in. Frankly, I didn’t have the heart to leave tubey or any of the others behind to face the hostility of an entire community, still bent out of shape from the bombing run that Gung-Ho treated them to on our behalf. (Well… they all flatly refused, for one thing, and let’s face it — there are more of them than there are of me.) So we commissioned our scientific cohort Mitch Macaphee to rig up the equivalent of a baby monitor system… our “eye from the sky”, as it were. That’s the more clever half. The slightly less clever half involves cardboard cut-outs of ourselves strategically positioned at all the windows. This will give the mill the appearance of occupancy. What purpose does that serve? Not sure. Fact is, we set them up before really thinking through what the effect of doing so would be. So rather than let all that good work go to waste…. we left them there. And we mounted one outside the front viewing port of our space craft. Call it a hood ornament… or a baby monitor.

Anywho, Mitch set it up so that we can talk back through those monitors and, hopefully, intimidate any intruders into abandoning their nefarious designs. I thought that was a nice touch. And as I sit here watching people work, I can only applaud Mitch’s initiative in devising this “solution”, as they say in the corporate world (where thesauruses are as rare as hen’s teeth).

Hopefully when you hear from me again, it will be from somewhere in outer spaaaaaace. Somewhere with breathable air and a positive gravity. (Hey… we wrote it into the contracts this year, so no surprises, right?)

Political Rants

More war.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats were tossing non-binding resolutions at one another this week, with members from both sides of the aisle babbling about some conflict that just barely resembles the one grinding on in Iraq. Not a very heartening spectacle to see the legislative branch being just as delusional as the executive. There were, of course, exceptions whose reasonableness cast the lunatic position of the majority in stark relief — Murtha, Feingold, a few others (Kucinich, of course, and McKinney, still swinging away). It does make one wonder how many times the war party can hash out the same lame points. We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here. It’s America or Al Qaida. When the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down. The ludicrous John McCain was on a morning show, using words like “frustratingly slow” and “painful”, and claiming “No one said this was going to be easy.” (Uh… yeah, they did. And you agreed.  

For chissake, gentlemen, even Jalal Talabani — a Kurdish leader and president of Iraq — is calling for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal! Did any of these imbeciles check with the Iraqis to see what they want? Instead, we get sanctimonious speeches from the majority about how, if Murtha’s plan had been applied to WWII (an identical circumstance to the current war, apparently), we’d all “be speaking Japanese now”. (That’s adapted from the old classic that used to end with: “…we’d all have slanted eyes, now.”)

Of course, the week didn’t begin and end with Iraq alone. There was also a great deal heard about the other “axis of evil” members. As always, Iran was all over the news, with fresh accusations that Tehran is behind some elements of the insurgency in Iraq. Now that’s a particularly ironic piece of hysteria. (Imagine the gall of those Iranians, interfering in the internal affairs of another country!) Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iran: accept our terms or suffer the consequences. Quite frankly, he reminded me of the declaration of martial law read by Kodos the Executioner, governor of the planet Tarsus 4, on Star Trek. Too obscure? How about Margaret Hamilton on her broomstick high over Oz, threatening Dorothy et al. with some remarkably readable skywriting? No? Anyway, it was grimly amusing to see Bush and the German Chancellor stand up there and deplore aggression. Seems to me neither Germany nor the U.S. has a lot of credibility on that topic, but anyway…. 

Then there was the dreaded North Koreans and their mighty missile of death. The way the administration talks, you’d think it was the only ICBM on the planet. Jesus, how many times have we test-launched missiles capable of reaching North Korea? And while you’re working on that one, think about the likelihood that more than a few of our thousands of nuclear tipped ICBMs (all on launch-ready status) are targeted on Pyongyang. This is not idle speculation or paranoia — this is a very real danger from their perspective, made worse by 1.) our general bellicosity 2.) our deployment of “missile defense” batteries around the Pacific rim, and 3.) the fact that we flattened North Korea entirely once before within living memory. Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal, on the other hand, consists of maybe one or more bombs (and maybe none at all), plus a missile the last version of which failed during a test in 1998. 

In truth, by foaming at the mouth over this missile test, we are only helping Kim Jong Il further convince the subjects of his hermit kingdom that he’s making the West tremble. 

Usual Rubbish

Achtung. (No “baby”.)

No baby on that. I’m off pop songs this week, friends. Had it. Mention one and it’s with me all day, like those little transmitters they plant in your head when you’re in the mental institution. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? No? Where did I hear that? Well…. let’s just say a little voice told me.

Okinawa! (Another island entirely.) We are getting closer to the goal of launching our ad hoc interplanetary tour. How much closer? Well… I’ve got a hat, a baseball hat, and it says Big Green Tour ’06 on it. And we’ve got suitcases. Hey, it’s closer than we were LAST week, okay? What am I, a machine? That’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s role, not mine. For those of you who have been wondering (particularly you fans in the greater cyborg community), we have relented on the topic of bringing Marvin along on the tour. We simply can’t do it without him and expect the kinds of flies… um… crowds we’ve been drawing the last few times out. Looks like the task of running interference back on old terra firma will have to fall to someone else. Man sized tuber, perhaps? Hmmmmm….

No, seriously – we have made progress. For one thing, we’ve settled on a name for our tour. It’s going to be called BIG GREEN’S GET OUT OF TOWN FAST! SUMMER TOUR 2006… for obvious reasons. There are also some less than obvious reasons, like our perpetual need for additional cash. Can’t beat the revenue of an interplanetary tour, especially when – like us – you remain unhappily obscure on your home planet. (Just barely moving the needle down here on Earth, friends – I’ll be frank with you. And don’t call me Frank.) And with all these (ahem) unexpected rebuilding costs, damn it, man! That scaffolding is going to be up for months on end. Do you have any idea how much masons charge in our neck of the woods? They have to import all the bricks from Madagascar, for chrissake. We need to make hay, gentlemen, make hay. Cause as we’ve learned from Edward G. Robinson during Israel’s captivity in Egypt… can’t make bricks without straw. Nyeaah. Where’s your Moses now….? 

So there you have it. Don’t delude yourself that we are only in this for the sake of “art”, or that we make music for reasons of “peace” and “love” and “pastrami”. No, look… the utilities don’t take crystal necklaces in lieu of a check every month, no matter how hard we try to polish them up and make them look nice. No dice! Money makes the world go round. (Pop music again!) Anyway, like anyone else who wears pants and eats sandwiches, we gotta have it, and if we can’t find it here on the good oit, we’ve got to go out in space and rake it up. Necessity breeds invention – we have posi-Lincoln inventing the tour for us right now, working the phones, sending interstellar e-mails to the usual venues, mailing out contracts. He’s actually pretty good at it, though he does tend to write everything down on ancient pieces of paper that have already been written on. One of them had his old address on it – guess he lived in Gettysburg once. Who knew? Damn his habits of thrift! Not the most efficient filing system, but hell… it’s better than mine. (Mine was bombed out with the mill, thankfully.)

We’ll be setting dates real soon and making them public, so if you’re planning to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Ursa Major in the next six or seven weeks, leave some space in your calendar. And bring an appetite! Mitch Macaphee plans to handle the catering this time out. He’s supposedly a really solid cook, as most chemists are. (I hear he has over 100 recipes. He calls them “elements.” Funny guy.)

Weird ass music since 1986