Another Web bucket to fill. Good grief, tubey! How many Web sites am I supposed to maintain? I’m the one with the arms, remember… and the cerebral cortex.
Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.
As always, money is a challenge. Copies of One Small Step are not exactly flying off the shelf on this planet (though I hear it’s moving quite briskly on Kaztropharius 137b, that nasty little planetoid that hosts us every year or so). It’s predictably hard to repatriate profits from other planets – that’s not surprising at all. They use a whole different kind of currency up there… not to mention a whole different kind of gravity, air, and background radiation. Hell, funds transfers are the least of it. If you’re a bank courier, you’re lucky to get out of there with your skin. Word of warning.
There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions.
Note to Mitch: Your next invention should just be money. Just invent some cash, there’s a good chap.
Okay, I’m struggling with my status as official Luddite of Big Green. (Originally that post belonged to my illustrious brother Matt, but now he’s the dude with the smart phone.) I don’t claim to be the most inept person ever to sit in front of a keyboard, but good goddamn – I’m making a doorstop out of this thing. If they just equipped PC’s with drawbars and foot pedals, I could drive the suckers, no problem.
in that every time you make a call, your signal is drowned out by pirates yaaarrr-ing at one another.)
Oh, hi. Just spitballing here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Nothing to get excited about. Between Big Green tours, as you may already know, we tend to blow a lot of time in contemplation and various other pointless activities. Not because we are perennial time-wasters, you understand. No, no – it’s the ascetic lifestyle we aspire to. I know most bands drown themselves in drink, cloud their minds with illicit drugs, and indulge in multifarious pleasures of the flesh. Not this crew, my little friend – not a bit of it. We are like monks. (Did I say monks? I meant monkeys. Or Monkees. You take your pick.) We sit about, scratch, toss things at one another… until somebody says, get up there and play.
That’s just one example. And yeah, we’re aiming that at both an Earthbound audience and those folks out there in spaceland. Got to name-check a few communities they’re likely to recognize – kind of like those pop songs that have place names in them (like Huey Lewis naming cities at the end of “Heart of Rock and Roll”, for instance). When we’re up in the Crab Nebula, they wait for this song. They start waving their tentacles and nodding their oddly misshapen heads. It’s a gas.