Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

Usual Rubbish

Old stock.

Damn, I always forget how big this place is. Who the hell knew all this junk was in here? I didn’t. Maybe Mitch knew, but he’s in Sao Paolo, noodling around with deadly lasers and the like.

Hi, everyone. Yeah, we’re stumbling upon all kinds of trash/treasure, now that the local realtors have us on our toes. They held an open house here last Sunday, for chrissake. What’s next? Shooting an episode of House Hunters in the courtyard? I mean … is anyone going to want to open a store in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill?

Anyway, back to our find. There’s this little room on the east side of the building. We pulled the lock off with a crowbar and found all these old hammer handles. It looked like Lester Maddox’s closet. (Ask your mother.) That got me thinking: If we could sell the handles, we could pay rent on this place. Then I realized how stupid that idea is. Now, well … I’m fresh out of ideas on how to stay in this squat house without opening a boutique of some kind. Maybe we can get Mitch Macaphee to make decorative candles in his lab. (Preferably the kind that don’t explode.)

Looks like this side of the mill needs a lttle TLCWe could sell old stock out of said boutique. We’ve got hammer handles. There’s also a bunch of old music lying around in various forms. We could sell CDs, but since we only have three full-length releases and a couple of EPs, that would make us a bit like the Scotch Boutique on 70s era Saturday Night Live. (Ask YouTube … or your mother.) I keep digging up old recordings from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. If people still recorded on cassettes, we could just tape over the tabs and sell those. (Ask your … oh, never mind.)

Okay, so we’re lousy capitalists. What’s new? When I come up with something you’re likely to pay money for, I’ll let you know.

Speaking of old stock, we just dropped another installment of our occasional Ned Trek podcast. It’s another Ned episode knifed out of THIS IS BIG GREEN from a couple of years back – Ned Trek 25: Not The Children One, Please!

Usual Rubbish

Flying circus.

No, damn it, I can’t spin a plate on a stick, even if the stick is on my tongue. What the hell do you think I am, a trained seal? This is freaking ridiculous. Get out of my broom closet!

Oh, well … you can see that this blog isn’t driven by our PR people. (This just in: we don’t HAVE any of those.) If we knew more about marketing, I might not admit in public that I was having this discussion with Anti-Lincoln, who is just chock full of “good ideas”. He piped up with a beauty today: that we should diversify our act a bit more. Not entirely rely on music. Put a few dance steps or maybe a couple of skits in the middle or our sets. Or … magic tricks.

I’m thinking that we should have someone – maybe Anti-Lincoln – do all that stuff for us. Why the hell not? If we need to diversify our act, I don’t want to be any part of it. Anti-Lincoln could be our agent or road manager. He could make Marvin (my personal robot assistant) jump through flaming hoops while we’re changing the strings on our various instruments. (Then again, Marvin is our guitar tech, so it would need to be, maybe, Tubey?) I’ll tell you, Marvin would have to jump fast, because I can change the strings on my Roland electric piano in no time flat. (That’s not why I bought it, though – I bought it because I could lift it without groaning.)

Space for rent at the mill.Why the sudden lurch towards random entrepreneurship? Well, we’ve been under a bit of pressure as of late. With the economy picking up a bit, suddenly the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill has become a bit more attractive as a commercial location. Local developers are thinking about gutting it and setting up one of those Mill Malls that pop up around here. (Actually, they can spare themselves the bother of that first step – this place was gutted long ago.) So, yeah, we’re looking for ways to go legit on this property, maybe even start …. gulp … paying property taxes …. or even utilities ….. ooooohhhhhh….

Anyway, that’s why I’m sleeping in a broom closet. We’re ALL sleeping in little spaces now, just to train ourselves for having to share this big barn of a place with people who sell scented candles, overpriced crockery, and weird-ass clothing. (Maybe we can open a used robot store … )

Usual Rubbish

Fire rockets.

What do you mean what am I listening to? Music. What the hell do you think? It’s my abandoned storage room. You got a problem with that? You do? Hmmm. Okay.

Well, here we are – another February at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and let’s just say things are getting a little slow around the Big Green collective enterprise. For the world is frozen and I have touched the sky. (Wasn’t that almost a Star Trek episode?) ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky – how about that? Anyway, not much to do this month except catch up on my reading and listen to some tunes. I made the mistake of cranking up some traditional jazz – Lenny Breau, to be exact – and our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee took exception to that. Not a jazz fan he. I think he’s partial to Wagner. Porter Wagner.

Actually, it’s not just the music that has Mitch acting ornery. He’s been at sixes and sevens ever since that Space-X launch of the “Falcon Heavy” and the subsequent touchdown of its twin booster rockets. I have never seen Mitch so glued to a television set (except that time he Nice ride, Mitch.was cooking up a new kind of super glue and, well, inadvertently glued himself to the television set). I may be going out on a limb, but I think the thing that is sticking in his craw is the notion that another private rocket launch would be so successful. He also has a strange fixation on the Elon Musk space car. I think he wants to hijack that ride and take it to Pluto.

I try to mollify Mitch with my assurances that, though the Falcon Heavy was a huge success, we DID do at least five interstellar tours by virtue of his spacecraft expertise. Sure, we were almost killed about a thousand times and, sure, we were stranded on strange alien worlds for weeks on end, but those are mere footnotes. The REAL story is that we didn’t make a dime on ANY of those tours. THAT’S what’s got ME all worked up. I don’t know what the hell MITCH has to complain about. (Phew. You can see why my effort to reassure Mitch kind of fell flat.)

Okay, so … keep an eye on the hammer mill. If you see the nose cone of a rocket sticking up out of the courtyard, give me a call.