Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

Usual Rubbish

Clown computing.

Wow, okay. Do that again. No, not that one … I mean the hand stand. Okay, NOW the somersault. Can you do cartwheels? Not the donuts, you idiot! The circus trick! Wait … where are you going?

Well, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is off to find a Dunkin Donuts or Crispy Creme somewhere. He’s so damn suggestible. The mere mention of sugar-saturated junk food gets his wheels rolling, quite literally. Marvin was just showing me some of his acrobatic exercises from his days with P.T. Barnum. Now, I know what you’re going to say …. Marvin was just manufactured sometime around the year 2000; how could he possibly have worked for P.T. Barnum? Well, god only knows what materials our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee used in putting Marvin’s electronic brain together, but I suspect part of it may have come from a circus wagon. Robots – where would they be without other people’s memories?

Now that you’re pondering that impenetrable mystery, here’s another one. I was noodling around on our distributor sites and discovered that I can port songs from our first two albums – 2000 Years to Christmas and International House – over to our SoundCloud site. Well, for some reason it seemed like a good idea to start doing just that. The first one we posted was our 2011 single, One Small Step:

Call that a cartwheel? Sheesh.Since I’ve been in an archiving mood pretty much all summer, I will likely start posting selections from International House (our 2008 album) in the coming weeks and share them here, forthwith, etc. Not new material, of course …. just a cheap-ass retrospective on where we’ve been. Something for you to chew on while we work out where the hell we’re going. I don’t know, maybe another interstellar tour, or maybe we’ll go all in on another album, or maybe just watch Marvin try to do cheap circus tricks. So long as he doesn’t dress up like a rodeo clown and start juggling bowling pins. That’s a bridge too far.

Of course, now Marvin is giving me that “it does not compute” look. I get that a lot. Or maybe it’s just Marvin’s default expression; he’s got brass fixtures for eyes, nose, and ears, so it’s a little hard to read.

Usual Rubbish

Going up.

What the hell’s that sound? The street sweepers again? Probably a lawn mower. Lawn mowing! What the hell is this neighborhood coming to?

Well, here I am, down in the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill, tapping away at my keyboard as I often do this time of week. Strange how you can hear everything that’s going on outside from down here. Of course, there are probably mouse holes in this place you can drive a front-loader through. Though I have to admit – I myself have never seen a mouse drive a front-loader. It would be one way to defend themselves from those awful snap traps. Diabolical contraptions!

Anyway, summer has kind of arrived here in upstate New York, now that we’re on the climate change calendar, so naturally my mind turns to more leisurely pursuits. I know what you’re thinking – what on Earth could be more leisurely than being a member of a band that never plays anywhere? Well, you might be surprised by my response to that question. I find all kinds of pointless uses for my time. My illustrious brother Matt, not so much – always doing things, that one. Me? My natural state is at rest. And while I spend most of the year going up the stairs, in the summer I go down them.

This thing's friggin' WRECKED!My summer pass-times usually include deep archive stuff – you know, threading old reel-to-reel tapes onto antiquated and dysfunctional playback machines, just to get a momentary listen in to what they contain. We have a few of those, and many, many audio cassettes with both stereo and four-track content. We also have Hi-8 DAT tapes from our Tascam DA-88 days (the system we used to record our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas) and, of course, standard DAT cassettes. I’m guessing that if you add it all up, it would amount to less content than we’ve produced in just the last five years, but it may be close. Matt did a lot of recordings in the 80s and 90s – probably hundreds of original songs.

Oh, then of course there’s our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. My guess is that we will be posting the next episode in just a few days,  but I’m terrible at predicting things, so I won’t say anything. Beyond what I just said. Arrgghh … I’m no good at this. Should probably be mowing the lawn.

Usual Rubbish

Five gets you ten.

Remember those ridiculous glasses with the tiny black lenses? Sure you do. And those dumb ass purple sneakers. They were super easy to find because no one besides me wanted to wear them. (Oh, and you could find them in a dark room. I think they were radioactive.)

No, we haven’t converted this into some kind of retro fashion blog. Far from it! We’re just playing a game that’s gotten kind of popular around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It’s called Five and Ten. You guess what the other players were doing five years ago, then ten years ago, then fifteen, and so on. Every time you guess correctly, you get five points. The person with the most points by the time everyone has walked away in anger is the winner – they then have to go to the local strip mall and open a Five and Ten store. (The game’s a little too complicated, in my humble opinion.)

I’m actually no fun to play against in this game, because if you ask me what I was doing five years ago, I would have to say that it’s very much the same thing I’m doing right now. Same sort of thing with ten years ago. Now if you say twenty or thirty, I have intelligible answers to that. Twenty? We were working on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and I was starting to think about doing this blog. Okay, so that’s MOSTLY like today. No points on that one.

Huh. Old Ben beat me to it.Thirty years ago, I was working for Donald Trump. (Or “Drumph,” in the original Norwegian – Trump’s family comes from that part of Norway that’s called “Germany”.) Well, I was a contractor for him in a sense, playing in a band that performed at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. I’m not certain, but I think around this time of year in 1988 I was playing the last of three month-long engagements we had at Trump Plaza, in one of the casino-side lounges, playing pretty horrible covers. My big song on that gig was Benny King’s “Stand By Me”. (The front person for that group was a singer named Joanna Lee.) At the end of that particular run, I got fired for losing my voice. (Not by Drumph, but by our manager, though admittedly I wasn’t very well liked in that establishment. Attitudinal issues, I believe.)

You can read all about my exploits as a low-flying road musician by dropping me a message via the comments form and asking me to tell you all about it. How easy is that? Now excuse me – I have to go open another Five and Dime.