Tag Archives: Cowboy Scat

Usual Rubbish

New frontier.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 25, 2014
Between Neptune and Pluto, or thereabouts

Big Green“Steve Lawrence”, Matt says. My reply: “Jennifer Lawrence.” Lincoln’s turn: “Jennifer Hudson.” Everyone looks at anti-Lincoln, who scratches his temple thoughtfully. “You lost two points on that one, Abe,” he says with a smirk.

Right, well … you have to occupy your time somehow in deep space, and rather than doing something productive, we’re playing Name-Chain. Yeah, it’s really fun. You name a famous person, and the player to your right has to name another one with the same first or last name, and around it goes. Lincoln got penalized because if you name someone of the same sex, you lose two points. Then you all multiply your score by the square root of corn meal and, well … it gets complicated after that.

Did we play on Jupiter last week? Well, the less said about that the better. Not sure what happened, but whatever it was it left a big red spot. Not exactly what we had in mind for our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Hell, nobody on Jupiter had even heard of Rick Perry.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 27, 2014
Near Pluto, I think. (That’s the yellow dog with no clothes, right? Yeah … near Pluto.)

Uh, how bout Uncle Milty?Well, the good news for our Interstellar Tour is that we’ve got a whole boatload of possibilities for new venues. NASA just discovered 715 new planets, and scientists say that the law of averages dictates at least 3% of them must have indie music venues. Even better, our sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn, has been to at least half of these newbie planetoids, and has established relationships with the relevant booking agents. He’s out ahead of us now, greasing the wheels a bit. I was hoping he’d take Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with him, but alas … sFshzenKlyrn flies without a spaceship and Marvin gets vertigo easily. Useless bag of bolts.

Did I just say that out loud? Whoops. Let’s see…. “Al Franken” …. “Franken Beans” ….

Uncategorized

Next stop: who knows?

Interstellar Tour Log: February 19, 2014
An unnamed rock garden in deep space, somewhere east of Jupiter

Big GreenWell, once again, we were sold a bill of goods. I think we’ve got some canned peas in there, maybe a little hard tack, some burlap sacking material (in case we have sack races), a jar of peppermints for the children, and an oil lamp. Who knew there was a general store on Ceres?

Aside from that, though, we were given bad advice. That Mr. Nerim character wasn’t telling us the truth at all. Apparently, hydrofracking is not utterly harmless. My evidence? Ceres, the alpha asteroid – the big brass buckle in the asteroid belt – is now a little smaller than it was when we arrived. Fact is, part of the asteroid was blown to bits and hurled into deep space. And as luck would have it, it was the part that we were camping out on.

So when old Nerim pushed the plunger on his cartoon-TNT detonator rig, it sent that side of Ceres (and our sorry asses) on a journey of undetermined length and destination, our battered rent-a-spaceship floating in a swarm of asteroid fragments, some the size of a house. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is beginning to regret having accompanied us on our Interstellar Tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. His rationality processor must be working properly.

Oh yes, one more thing …  YAAAAHH!

Interstellar Tour Log: February 21, 2014
Orbit of Jupiter, gas giant

Let's check it out, man. (You first.)Well, after several days of drifting aimlessly, we appear to have settled into orbit around Jupiter, the bull moose of the outer solar system. Our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFhzenKlyrn, has volunteered to visit the surface of the gas giant to see if there are any performance opportunities, since we’re in the neighborhood. I’d go myself, but alas, I require oxygen and Earthlike temperatures, to say nothing of solid ground. Sure, we’ve played the Great Red Spot before, but that was back in the day. (It’s probably a gas station now, like most of the clubs we played back then.)

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.