Tag Archives: 2000 Years To Christmas

Usual Rubbish

Inside Christmas.

Well, so that was Christmas, eh? What the hell. Kind of … over, isn’t it?

Play it again.Hope all of you are having a good holiday season. Sure, there comes a time when the plate is empty, the music falls silent, and the final champagne bubble pops. But take heart, friends … that time has yet to arrive. So for the nonce, as Governor Scott Walker would say, Molotov!

So, what is your holiday story? Can hardly wait to hear it. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’ve been observing the season in the usual way. All the traditional rituals. And of course, the annual holiday podcast. Kind of puny, actually. I don’t know, maybe … 36 minutes of pure lame-ass awesomeness. WE BRING THE AWESOME.

I think you can imagine what the low lights might be. Here are some of the highlights:

Gold And Silver – Captain Romney sings a song of Christmas cheer from the perspective of an acquisitive, rapacious, mammon worshiper, bent on gain at all cost. Very festive indeed. Easy to waltz to. Contains a twist on every holiday music convention imaginable.

Winter Lock – A new version of a song Matt wrote for one of his Christmas tapes back in the day. What day? Not sure even I remember. Nineties sometime. Probably about the same vintage as most of the songs on 2000 Years To Christmas. Matt penned the majority of his Christmas songs between 1986 and 1996, so pick a year.

Head Cheese Log – This is a cut from 2000 Years To Christmas that we tagged on to the end of this super-skimpy holiday special just to round it off a little bit. Another waltz, for chrissake. What the hell – have we suddenly gone all Wagnerian on you?

Okay, well … it’s a humble gift, even by the standards of Big Green, but it is all we have to offer. We had the choice between too little and too late, and we chose the former. So hell … enjoy. Happy new year and all the rest of it. Now … back to work with me.

Usual Rubbish

Yule be sorry.

Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! Can you come in here for a few minutes and vacuum up all these fragments? No, not with your mouth! Use your upholstery attachment. Silly robot.

I don't know about this, Lincoln.Lots to do around the holidays, as you well know. Some tasks are more challenging than others. I’ve always found bending candy canes particularly difficult. A lot of breakage. There’s got to be a better way! (Matt is thinking about taking a correspondence course in pretzel-bending, so maybe some of those skills will be transferable. We shall see.)

As I was saying last week, we have some holiday traditions that we try to observe on a yearly basis. Some of them could be described as strange; others, just a little off the beaten path. Occasionally we try out a new “tradition” and see if it sticks, like that year we put the man-sized tuber on an upside-down wash basin and decorated him like a Christmas tree. I think that was Anti-Lincoln’s idea. Anyway, it lacked that kind of stickiness I was referring to earlier. (Tubey still isn’t talking to Anti-Lincoln … not that tubey talks all that much ordinarily.)

Probably our best-known tradition is writing, recording, and releasing a parcel of Christmas songs – that is, Christmas-themed pop songs. That stretches way back to the late 1980s when brother Matt used to hand out cassette tapes to all and sundry on Christmas eve. Our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas, was a collection of some of our favorites from those ancient tapes – 13 songs drawn from what was easily a catalog of about 60 to 75 songs in total over eight years or so. (That was a large component of Matt’s musical output, though by far not the majority of songs he wrote over that period.)

Now we put them out on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Some of the ones we’ve put out in recent years are additional selections from Matt’s cassette tape holiday basket, re-recorded in our basement studio. Others are more recent concoctions.

So, look under your tree this Christmas for another parcel of holiday cheer from Big Green. Got a laptop and wi-fi? Plunk it under the tree and point your browser to big-green.net/pod. It’s that simple. Santa works in mysterious ways.

Usual Rubbish

Christmas bot.

Oh, Christmas bot, oh, Christmas bot! It’s hard to see just what you’ve got!

heres-bobYes, yes … we’re polishing up the holiday songs here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. T’is the season and all that. What, you’re not familiar with the dirge of the Christmas Bot? Small wonder. We just made it up. What kind of songwriters would we be if we resorted to used Christmas Carols? It would be a total cop out. So we are resolved to write lame Christmas numbers each and every December, five minutes before we hastily record them and throw them up on the internet. You’re welcome!

Legend has it that every year around this time, the sound of holiday ridiculousness wafts out of the old abandoned mill by the old abandoned canal in this old abandoned town. What an asinine legend. Just the sort of thing you’d expect in this lame backwater. Whoops – should have closed the window before I said that. Now all the neighbors know that I have NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT FOR THIS NEIGHBORHOOD!

Okay, well …. It’s probably obvious to all of you that I not only do not like having neighbors here at the mill. And it may seem to you that I am trying to drive them away with my obnoxiousness. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. We are trying to drive them away with the obnoxiousness of our raucous Christmas music. That’s probably the best way to scare away undesirables. Trouble is, we can’t keep it up for long enough to reach critical obnoxiousness mass, so we resort (as we always do) to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who makes a fairly decent stereo system when he really tries. He just plugs his sorry ass into a couple of stereo speakers, plugs a memory stick into his ear, and cranks it up to twelve.

Unethical? Not a bit of it. We have no ethics, no code. That’s what Big Green is all about. THAT’S WHY WE’RE ABOARD HER. Do I hear a “no” vote?