Tag Archives: COVID-19

Usual Rubbish

Hands out.

2000 Years to Christmas

Huh. Still promoting the Christmas album, eh? Think that’s wise? I mean, it’s freaking May, man. What’s that? Okay. I’ll just stand over here, then, and not say anything.

Oh, hi. I was just talking to our advertising manager, a Mr. Antimatter Abraham Lincoln, esq., who spent some time as a railroad lawyer, I hear, and has since moved into marketing and PR. Perhaps a bit less mentally challenging for him, I suspect. Anyway, Anti-Lincoln has some very passionate opinions about what works and what doesn’t work. Interestingly, they don’t appear to have anything to do with standard measures of success, like sales, cash flow, etc. I’m not sure what he’s measuring, frankly. In as much as he is an anti-matter being, it’s possible that the less successful something is, the more of a success he considers it to be. If that’s the case, then Big Green is on top of the world in his book.

Yeah, trouble is … we’re on the bottom of the world in everyone else’s. I know, I know – the top and the bottom of the world are both cold, cold places, and nobody stays there long without a key to the ice station. Then there’s the radiation pouring through that ozone hole, and … um … I’ve lost the thread of this metaphor. Anyway, like every other band in America, we’re freaking dead in the water, hijacked by COVID-19, our gigs canceled, our audiences loathe to gather (and with good reason), our technicians fighting the cat for scraps. Many musicians have taken to the internets with virtual performances, either passing the virtual hat or running shows behind a pay wall. And many are discovering how little money there is in the internets. Shake it upside-down, and all you get is some gum wrappers and pocket lint.

Lincoln ... seriously. Give it up, man.

Some of you are aware that we of Big Green are old hands at the internet. Sure, we started life as an old-school, thrown-together, play-in-the-park-gazebo type of band. (That was in the Before Time, before the Awful Things.) We limped along in that mode for a number of years, then had a re-birth in the late 1990s as a virtual band, launching our first web presence in 1999, along with a page on the now-defunct mp3.com site (a domain that has been replaced by some exploitation pop culture news aggregator). This blog is just the most recent iteration of the garbage we’ve been posting since then. Trust me, no one knows better than us how little money there is to make on the internet. The thing will NEVER fly. But still … Anti-Lincoln will try. Unlike his posi-matter doppelganger, he really only cares about personal gain, not the fate of mankind … and some personal gain. He’s a gold-digger, old dishonest Abe.

Hey, everyone needs a hobby. Hobbies we got. Work? Not so much.

Political Rants

The expendables.

Sounds like a Bruce Willis movie from 1987, right? Well, it might as well be. The president appears to be okay with the notion of thousands upon thousands of us impaling ourselves on the altar of a boom economy; this after he left the door wide open to COVID-19, taking cues from the likes of Mick Mulvaney and John Bolton and other reactionary conservatives bent on shrinking the administrative state to a size that can be easily drowned in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist was fond of saying back when he was relevant-ish. Congratulations, America! Guess what? You’re all warriors now! Time to take a bullet for President Little Lord Fauntleroy, whose idea of sacrifice is taking uncomfortable questions from a relatively supine White House Press Corps.

Seriously, does anyone want to die for Donald Trump? Does anyone want to sacrifice a parent, a sibling, a child, a grandchild, an aunt or uncle, a neighbor … anyone for the betterment of Trump’s political fortunes? Because make no mistake about it – COVID-19 kills, and there’s no telling who it will kill next. You might be spared … or you might not. We simply do not know this virus very well yet. If we listen to the President and some of these red state governors and force people back to work (on pain of losing their unemployment benefits), more and more people will get seriously ill, the hospitals will be quickly overwhelmed (particularly in more rural states, where there is even less excess capacity in terms of ICU beds), and thousands more will die. Judging by the degree to which people are avoiding those establishments that have reopened, I would say that most people understand this dynamic fairly well.

Of course, we all know who is particularly expendable in the minds of our leaders. Elderly people in nursing homes? They’re expected to die at regular intervals – this much I know from experience. But the true expendables are the folks who take the crappy jobs – the meat packers, the farm workers, the restaurant workers, etc. People of color, mostly, and a lot of women. They are being compelled to return to work because the establishments they work for are being told to start up again, or because their bosses are getting impatient, and practically none of these companies are inclined to invest in protection gear or protocols that would keep their workers safe and well. Wealthier, whiter knowledge workers can work from home, no problem. Meat packers, not so much. There’s a greenhouse in a neighboring county to where I live – they tested their employees for COVID and more than 100 of them were carrying it. That’s an enormous number in a rural area like this. Multiply that by thousands and you’ll get some idea of what we’re looking at.

Trump wants to keep the cheeseburgers rolling. Trouble is, when you force meatpackers back to work, it’s likely that they’ll get sick. And when they get sick, they can’t work, so you’re right back to where you started from. We can either address the public health problem, or we can expect a massive level of disruption from here on out. Up to us.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

There’s this baby, see?

2000 Years to Christmas

So what the what? And is that really the way it ends? God damn it. Six bucks down the drain. And in THESE hard times! All right … time for Planet of the Apes.

Oh, hi. We’re just endeavoring to entertain ourselves here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our COVID-19 quarantine site in this time of pestilence and putrid infection. What better way than to make use of Netflix or some other streaming service, eh? Except … well, we don’t have anything like that, as we are as poor as church mice … except that even THEY have the run of the donation basket and the leftover sandwiches from the parish volunteer society luncheons. In other words, we’re poorer than church mice. Just think of us as Mill Rats, scrounging for crusts and little fragments of entertainment. (Call me crazy, but when the mouth sits idle, the eyes need to work overtime.)

Well, fortunately, we have our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). I asked him this week if he could engineer some kind of hack that would allow us to watch Netflix movies for free. He retreated to his laboratory, then came up with a kind of solution. Actually, it was like those old rabbit ear antennae they used to put on old-school television sets … except much, much bigger. Fifteen feet tall, actually. A little intimidating, to tell the God’s honest truth. Anyway, Mitch planted it on top of our borrowed walnut console TV and hooked it up to the coax. He messed around with the array a little bit, squinting at the static-choked screen as he worked. Suddenly, a stable image appeared. It was the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. We hooted a bit, congratulating Mitch, but he quickly explained that this was not, in fact, Netflix, but actually the reverberations of ancient transmissions of movies that have been bouncing around the solar system for the past fifty years. Hey … potato, po-tah-to, right? What the hell difference does it make, so long as there’s something to occupy our down time.

Still kinda fuzzy. Try the vertical hold, Marvin.

So, we’re watching 2001, and it brings back memories of when it ran in theaters locally during my childhood. I went to see it with my dad, as I recall, who provided a running commentary about features of the moon and astronomical facts (many of which a father in the seats next to us repeated to his offspring). My sister, I believe, talked about seeing it and some dude was explaining the strange end to the movie to his companion, starting with the phrase, “There’s this baby, see? And that baby … is God, see?” Why am I thinking of this while watching this antiquated and quite strange movie? Well …. because it’s kind of freaking boring, and besides, the reception of television signals bounced off the Kuiper Belt is a little fuzzy to say the least. Yeah, I’m letting my wits wander. As long as they don’t get lost, it’s okay.

Well, that took care of Friday. What do we do with ourselves next week? Suggestions? Send them our way. (Play music, perhaps?)