Tag Archives: Anti-Lincoln

Usual Rubbish

Exodus.

Lincoln has returned to the 1860s via the Orgone Generating Device intertemporal portal, and best of luck to him. Hope he doesn’t run into any dental problems while he’s back there. Whiskey and pliers, that’s what he’ll have to look forward to in that grisly century.

Big GreenWell, that kind of solves his problem. What about the rest of us in the Big Green collective? A kind of dwindling party, it seems. Lincoln is back in Washington (though his evil doppelganger Anti-Lincoln remains). Washington is presumably back in Lincoln (Nebraska). Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is still on an extended tour of resort hotels, attending mad science conferences and watching the sun set on five continents with a glass of bourbon in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Now that our interstellar tour is over, our occasional guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has returned to his home planet of Zenon in the Small Megellanic Cloud.

Let’s see … what else is in the news? Oh, yeah … the mansized tuber has decided at long last to take root in the courtyard. He’s pushing twenty now, and feels it’s high time for him to settle down and start a garden. Hard to argue with a root vegetable. We’ll see how long THAT lasts. Christ on a bike, about the only ones around here I can count on are my brother Matt and Marvin (my personal robot assistant), This looks like a good spotthough I caught the latter thumbing through the want ads the other day. It seems there are more opportunities out there for personal robot assistants than there were just a few years ago. I may have to start PAYING him, for chrissake.

The bottom line is that, with all of these departures and major life decisions going on, it’s getting pretty quiet around this big old barn of a place. We’ve talked about finding someplace smaller to squat, maybe opt for another three-room lean-to of the kind we occupied back in our Sri Lanka days. So long as it’s big enough to produce a podcast in, we’re good.

Usual Rubbish

What the frack?

Interstellar Tour Log: February 12, 2014
The still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Greetings from camp slag! As you can see from the subject line of this dispatch, Big Green and entourage are still stranded here on alpha asteroid Ceres, here in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a veritable no man’s land of broken planets and random shards of rock, careering through an airless void in an endless race to hell. (Sounds like my morning commute, actually.)

Readers of this asinine blog will know that Big Green, in the third leg of its Interstellar Tour 2014 to support galactic sales of our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, had performances booked in the system of Sirius, the dog star. Trouble was, our GPS navigation system – Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – got the names mixed up in his tiny 1978 Texas Instruments calculator of a brain, and ended up sending us to this lifeless slag in space. It’s a bit like camping out, except without the fun (if you think camping’s fun). The weird thing is, not only is there no where to play on this rock, but there’s no one freaking here, period! I was expecting a hard rock cafe or something, at the very least.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 14, 2014
The still, still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Hmmm. It seems I spoke too soon a couple of days ago. There is somebody else here. Anti Lincoln was taking his morning constitutional the other day (he has this thing about the Constitution … he takes it everywhere!) and he ran across a little mining operation on the other side of the asteroid. Looks like Halliburton / Brown and Root has somehow secured mining rights up here, as well. (They say it’s part of Obama’s See? Solid as a rock.“all of the above” approach to energy production and development … so I guess that means everything above the Earth’s surface is up for grabs.) They’re apparently fracking the place. I know, because Anti-Lincoln got a job working the bilge pumps. (They also let him handle burning off the gas leaks. He has a lot of practice with that.)

That puts us in an awkward position. Broken spacecraft, under repair, and intensive fracking operations going on. But it’s okay: the project supervisor, a Mr. Nerim, tells us that this asteroid is made of layer upon layer of solid rock soooo thick you could lay a burning sun on its surface, and the sun would just burn itself out and leave the asteroid untouched. So I guess we’ve got some time.

Plug: Hey, if you haven’t heard the February podcast yet, give it a listen. Cheap laughs, and plenty of ’em. Check it out.

Usual Rubbish

Another Earth?

Interstellar Tour Log: January 20, 2014
Somewhere in deep space

There are some things you can accomplish quite well in space (e.g. mid-air cartwheels) and others, well … not so much. I’m afraid our January podcast is an example of the latter.

Big GreenThose of you anxiously awaiting the new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, take heart: it’s in the works, though Matt’s interplanetary breathing apparatus is getting in the way of his doing a credible talking horse imitation. (You’d think it would be a positive boon, but no.) We’re hoping this problem will be eliminated when we arrive at the gassy, Earth-like planet known as KOI-314c, which – I’m guessing – has a perfectly breathable Earth-like atmosphere. (Hey, they said it was Earth-like. That’s all I need to hear. We’re playing there.)

Interstellar Tour Log: January 23, 2014
Somewhere else in deep space

Well, we’ve arrived on  KOI-314c, and if this is Earth-like, things have gone seriously downhill back on Earth since we left.  We sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out there to gather environmental data (and hunt down some performance venues), and after twirling a few antennae and waving his arms about, he gave us the following run-down on a little strip of paper that might have emerged from a 1920’s vintage stock ticker:

  • Surface temperature: 104 degrees centigrade
  • Length of year: 23 days
  • Atmospheric composition: hydrogen and helium

Looks harmless enoughI wouldn’t say this news was received with a total lack of enthusiasm. Anti-Lincoln was just dying to get out there and take a dip in one of the nearby liquid methane pools. And for sFshzenKlyrn, the guitarist from Zenon, this sounds like a tropical paradise. There are some issues, however, should we be asked to do an outdoor concert. First, my Kork SV-1 would probably melt at 104C. Second, the helium in the atmosphere would make us all sing like those munchkin dudes from the lollipop gym.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) And if we are contracted to play again next year, that’s just 23 days from now.

Guess we’ll consider this conundrum from inside our rented spacecraft for the time being. Maybe even get a chance to finish the podcast. We’ll see, eh?