Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Thrust.

Did you guys hear that sound last night? Maybe about 3 a.m., I don’t know. It was raining like hell, I think – pounding on the windows like a freaking hammer. At least I think that’s what it was. Either that or a … a … rocket lifting off …

Well, that last paragraph is a depiction of what I sounded like when it first dawned on me that our leased Plywood 9000 rocket was hijacked in the middle of the night. As some of you recall, just before Thanksgiving we were preparing for a brief tour of some lesser known planets that don’t get a lot of respect, like KIC 8462852. That appears to have been, well, scuttled. And while the Plywood 9000 is not what you might call luxury transportation, it apparently was functional enough to be stolen.

Who is the thief? Can’t be 100% sure, but the fact that Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has disappeared probably isn’t a coincidence. I think he was getting a little tired of our antics, or lack of same – it’s been weeks since we first discussed this tour and still no action. The man just hates waiting around, particularly when there are discoveries to be made. Who can blame him? No one likes waiting, least of all a mad scientist. And when it became obvious that the Trump administration was not going to tap him to be Chief Scientist at NASA, he did seem to be weighing his options.

Hey, man ... what's that noise?That means we have a mad scientist on the lamb. Or on the rent-a-rocket, to put a finer point on it. I think his ultimate destination will be the newly discovered planet KIC 8462852 (and no, I don’t mean it was discovered by Anthony Newly), but there are a lot of potential stops between here and there. So I’m just putting this out there: if you astronomers, amateur or professional, notice any unusual activity on the outer planets, particularly Jupiter (about which Mitch has harbored a strange fascination for many years), notify us immediately. Use the comment form on this blog post, or send us a note by snail mail to … well, just write “Big Green, Cheney Hammer Mill” on the envelope – we’ll get it.

Fuck all. Then there’s the lease payment for the Plywood 9000 rocket. DAMN YOU, MITCH!

Usual Rubbish

Cleanout.

Hey, got any old concert DVDs or VHS’s? No? Okay, well … that makes one of us. In fact, I have stacks of them in the forge room. That is, unless Mitch melted them down into something useful.

Oh, hello. You just caught us in the middle of doing our year-end inventory, housecleaning, etc. I know, I know – that seems like a strange choice, given our recent preparations for an interstellar tour, but this is the sort of thing we do every year at this time, whether we need it or not. We sort of turn the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill upside-down and shake it a few times. Whatever drops out of the east-side windows goes into the junk heap. Then it’s the DPW’s problem.

Some stuff is easy to get rid of. That cardboard carton our electric roll-out radiator came in? Probably don’t need that anymore. Molded styrofoam from a shipping container? Fair game for the dumpster. Video tapes and DVDs, though …. that’s another story. You never know when you’ll want to watch the Concert at Big Sur movie (or what I euphemistically refer to as the anti-Woodstock) again, particularly that part when Steven Stills gets into a suburban grade school-level fight with some grizzled looking guy complaining about the high ticket price, then, after being led away by his bandmates, offers a lame little speech about how “everything’s going to turn out however it’s gonna,” before playing 4 and 20. Or when Joan Baez was having trouble keeping the stoned rhythm section together. That was awesome.

Yeah, baby, yeah. (Squx)Other gems from the junk pile? Well, there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s favorite: Rainbow Bridge! A “concert” movie that features about 15 or 20 minutes of Jimi Hendrix playing a set interspersed with about an hour-long montage of stoned hippies running up and down hillsides, being totally free. Why Marvin likes this so much I can only guess, though you can tell he’s been watching it when you see him rolling pointlessly around the mill with his claws up in the air. I might get him a headband for Christmas this year … or maybe some feathers and bells, and a book of Indian lore. (Apologies to Zappa.)

So, which is it going to be … fly off to the stars in our Plywood 9000 rocket or watch old concert tapes? Tough choices.

Usual Rubbish

Serious gravity.

Well, maybe a larger booster rocket would help. Or some tightly wound springs. Then there’s the lever option, like a catapult – give me a lever large enough and I will move the world, that sort of thing. No? Okay, never mind.

Oh, hi. Yes, we’re grappling with the same conundrums that so vexed our predecessors in flight – how to defeat that old devil gravity. It’s a little hard to imagine being able to reach planet KIC 8462852 without finding some way to break the surly bonds of Earth, whatever that means. Sure, it would be easier for Big Green to just give in and start doing terrestrial tour dates, packing ourselves into a multi-colored school bus and teetering down the road to Springfield and Lodi and East Aurora (unless we get stuck in Lodi … again …), but that would be an abandonment of all we hold dear. And in all frankness, gravity would still be vexing us! (Especially after a particularly long night.)

The other day, a big semi backed up to the front gate of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) and dropped an enormous cardboard box with Mitch’s name scrawled on the side. We had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) haul the thing into the courtyard as a precautionary measure – it was ticking and smelled vaguely of sulfur, so I certainly didn’t want to touch the sucker. Well, it turns out that the box contained our ride to the Khyber Belt: the promised Plywood 9000 space rocket we rented from SpaceY, some assembly required. It’s here, it’s here!

So that's it, then, is it?Mitch Macaphee retreated into his lab and began tinkering with the thing, and just yesterday morning I awoke to the sight of a nosecone peaking over the courtyard wall. He managed to piece the thing together, but there were apparently a few parts missing. Engines, for one. (Or more precisely, for four, since there are supposed to be four of them.) Being a mad scientist, Mitch took this as a kind of challenge. Whereas any sane person would just phone the company and tell them to send the missing parts, he started adapting some odd pieces of technology he had lying around his workbench. There was that anti-gravity device he tinkered with a few years ago, for instance.  Then there’s that big blow-dryer he invented.

So, I don’t know. Maybe a big catapult is more practical. If you have random thoughts on advanced interplanetary propulsion, please send them here.