Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Shooting stars.

Mitch, I’ll be frank … I don’t think this is a good idea. I know it’s the middle of the night and most likely no one can see us, but that contraption makes a lot of noise and … well … never mind.

Oh, hi. Yeah, I’m trying to talk our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee off of the ledge again. This time I mean it literally – he’s up on top of the Cheney Hammer Mill, all worked up in a lather about the recent news from deep space. Did you hear about it? Well, in case you haven’t, the space probe Rosetta has crashed into Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko after having gathered data about what that cosmic snow cone is made of.

This kind of news always sets Mitch off – he’s apparently got a hand in every celestial body from here to Andromeda, I’m gradually discovering. He’s a bit like Heath on the Big Valley. Every time a stranger comes to town, it turns out that Heath had “sworn to keel him” at some point. (I always wondered why brother Jarrod, being a lawyer, never demanded that Heath write up a list of everyone he ever swore to keel … I mean, kill.)

Aim high, Mitch.Anywho, Mitch’s overheated response to the comet collision news was tantamount to a declaration of war. He brought Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating device out of mothballs, tinkered with it for a few hours, then – with the help of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – hauled the pile of junk up to the roof of the mill and pointed its multi-pronged array at the heavens. He borrowed one of our longer extension cords, fired the orgone generating machine up, and started muttering to himself. “Yes, yes …” he said maniacally. “It won’t be long now.” (I’m leaving out the twisted little cackle he interjected between phrases as I do not wish to frighten the children.)

I’m not clear on what Mitch hopes to accomplish here. The orgone generating device, after all, does little other than its core functions of opening time portals and attracting invisible flying predators. In short, it’s a poor choice if you’re planning on shooting stars.

Usual Rubbish

Dronetastic.

Wait a minute. Here they come again! Everybody DOWN! Damn it. Okay, that was just a pizza delivery to the neighbors. You can all stand up again.

Oh, hi. Kind of caught us at a bad time, actually. We are in the midst of a coordinated drone attack. No, not the military kind they use overseas. These are domestic drones of the kind you can buy at the corner store. As you may have heard, there are now hundreds of thousands of these suckers. The skies are black with them. One flock covers three whole states, and when they move … oh, it’s like THUNDER! (No, wait … that was the buffalo, as described by a space archeologist on Star Trek. Sorry.)

Now, when I say “attack”, I don’t exactly mean they are targeting us. It’s just that there are so freaking many of these things, it starts to feel like an assault after a while. The pizza delivery joint down the street is using one. So is the florist. And last week our nasty neighbors bought one for their fourteen year old, and the first thing the little sucker did with it was drop a water balloon on the man-sized tuber. (Actually, he rather likes that in as much a there hasn’t been a lot of rain lately … but that’s not the point!)

Whoa, Tubey ... heads up.The ones that really annoy me are those mosquito-sized drones. I don’t even know how they manage to engineer a flying machine that tiny. Where do they find bicycle parts small enough to make that thing fly? They somehow even designed them so that they can replicate themselves by dropping little developmental nodules into standing water, which later hatch and …. hey … or maybe those are just mosquitoes. Okay, um … forget that last bit.

I should put out notice to our neighbors that their new-found obsession with drone technology is a bit like whacking a hornet’s nest with a stick. They need to be reminded that we have a mad scientist in residence by the name of Mitch Macaphee. He hasn’t taken much notice of the flying machines thus far, buried as he is in his laboratory. But I think it’s just a matter of time, frankly. And yes, he is the designer of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), but don’t let that fool you. Not all of his inventions are non-threatening lumps of useless technology. (Sorry, Marvin.)

Usual Rubbish

Millsville.

Sometimes if you’re up early enough in the morning, you can see the first rays of the sun breaking over the ruins of the abandoned mill next door. I think they made broom handles there or something. Now it’s just some disheveled wreck that the sun rises over. Hey …. been there.

Yes, friends, it’s been many, many suns and even more moons since I started this blog about Big Green. We now have posts that stretch back nearly as far as those rays of sunlight. A rich body of balderdash, and it’s getting balder all the time. Sometimes you forget where this all began – in some crappy dive on the west end of the city, the walls smelling of beer, dog crap on the stage, and a bartender who hates your ass. A lot of music careers start that way. Ours, on the other hand, was never anything else. (Yes, we are like most bands – spectacularly unsuccessful and damn proud of it.)

So we took to the hammer mill and started hammering out recordings. That was in the nineties. Since then, we’ve put out three albums and a bunch of songs on the podcast. Christ on a bike – I think we’re up to more than 50 songs since releasing Cowboy Scat in 2013. (Time for another album, right?) We’re still recording on an old Roland platform, trying to transition to Uh, I don't think so, Marivn.something more appropriate to the century we’re living in. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has suggested we start recording on cylinders or wire. Damn it, it’s been done, Marvin! Come up with something new, like, I don’t know … recording on bricks.

Some five years ago we started the podcast, and it is still sputtering along, though getting slower … slow like the two thousand year-old man. Fact is, we’re thinking about launching another podcast that would be devoted exclusively to bloviating – something we could get out a bit more regularly. And if it ends up half as popular as THIS IS BIG GREEN, we could nearly double our listenership.  Fan… tastic.

So, on we go. We’re in production for another podcast episode, doing the songs right now. (Damn, they’re strange.)