Tag Archives: interstellar tour

Usual Rubbish

I said keep the bastards away from me!

Get Music Here

I told you, I didn’t want to be disturbed. And just because I have a gaping hole in my wall doesn’t mean you can just jump right through it. Get out, and take those nasty things with you. Jesus! This mill is a prison!

Okay, I admit that I was overreacting a tad just then. My deepest apologies, and the same for Marvin (my personal assistant), who was once again in the process of invading my personal space for no good reason. Still, that doesn’t justify bad feelings or harsh words. We try not to fly off the handle around here – that’s part of our credo as a band, and it’s something we’re particularly, uh … shit ….. WILL YOU TURN THAT DAMN THING DOWN!!

Quadropedal unmanned vehicles

What did Marvin want from me? Well, he made a new friend today and he wanted to show the bugger off. It’s one of those automated robot dogs – you know, the kind that chase people to death in your nightmares (or just in Black Mirror). He thinks he found the robot dog out in the street, but I happen to know that little iron fido is one of Mitch Macaphee’s latest experiment. It’s kind of his Eighth Man, if you know what I mean, though he’s clearly no Professor Genius.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust autonomous vehicles of any sort. They have a mind of their own, you know. And they’re just as liable to take your leg off as any real dog, maybe more. I mean, I could possibly get behind Mitch’s experiment if it were about supporting our next interstellar tour. But damn it, man, it’s got nothing to do with that. That’s right – Mitch is going rogue, once again!

A real Florida story

Now, I’m not a big fan of all these other states. But apparently there’s one state called Florida, and apparently there’s a place down there called Cape Canaveral. And at this Cape Canaveral is a special installation of the Space Force. And that force needs protection … the kind you get from autonomous robot dogs.

Yeah, I'm not crazy about that idea.

Okay, friends. Like I said earlier, I don’t much cotton to autonomous robot animals. And I’ve made my opinion quite well known within the domain of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Which is why it puzzles me so that Mitch Macaphee – whose hearing is excellent, I understand – would put in a bid for building those robot dogs for Cape Canaveral. Seriously, do you know what this means? It means all of his beta testing will be happening right here, in the hammer mill. That’s no fair, man. Tell Florida to get their own beta-tested robot dogs. (Not even sure you need to tell them something like that.)

My little redoubt

Like with most of Mitch’s contracts, it’s really best to just ride them out and keep your head down. I might consider investing in some knee guards – something that will protect my vulnerable shins from those vicious robots. No, they haven’t done anything mean yet. But they might decide to at any moment. What part of autonomous do you not understand?

Usual Rubbish

Lights out.

I thought I told you to pay the bill before we left. Well, if you did, why the hell is it sitting here on the counter? Riddle me that, Batman! WHAT? Well, of course you can’t see it. The lights aren’t on …  BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T PAY THE BILL.

Man god damn, now I have to give lessons on household finance. I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do one thing, ONE THING, before we set off on our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, and he screwed it up. I put the electric bill in front of him, hooked a pen into his prehensile claw, and told him to cut a check to National Grid, post haste. Nothing. And now we’ve come home from our less than triumphant interstellar tour to a dark hammer mill with a leaky roof and a family of turtles living in our studio. And no, they’re not subletting.

Yes, friends, we are back on terra firma, and none too soon. No, we didn’t get to the Small Magellanic Cloud. We kept flying towards it, hoping it would get a little bigger in our forward view screen, but no luck. Saturday came and went – that was the date of our gig – and so we chose to turn around. I asked Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist, to send off some kind of automated vehicle in our stead, with a letter of apology sealed in its nosecone. Well, he sent some kind of missile out towards the Small Magellanic Cloud, but I’m not certain what it was, exactly. I guess they’ll find out in a couple of hundred thousand years. (Sometimes surprises are pleasant … and sometimes … )

In the studio? Uh ... okay.

Back here on earth, everything went to hell, as you might expect. The hammer mill is in a shambles – exactly how we left it. Aside from the lack of electricity, the air seems a little thin in here, like it’s been on a hunger strike since we left. I was hoping the mansizedtuber would have looked after the place a bit in our absence, but damn it, you can’t get good help around here, even if you grow it in a planter. Speaking of planters, we almost went nuts cooped up in that tiny flying saucer. That SOB made the lunar module seem spacious. It also made the LEM’s computer system seem sophisticated. (It wasn’t.)

I would like to be able to say that we made a pile of quatloos on this tour and that we now have the means to make this place habitable. Yes, that would be a nice thing to be able to say … I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Usual Rubbish

Cloud nein.

Okay, so what are you saying, Mitch? I thought you knew how to drive a space ship. This is a hell of a time to tell me you were just pulling my leg. No, I don‘t have any prayer cards on me. What a stupid question!

For crying out loud, why … why does this happen every time we go out on tour? We map out an itinerary, we hire a spacecraft, we commandeer a space commander of some description, we set off with confidence, and then BOOM – everything goes to hell. Before we know it, we’re bobbing around uselessly in intergalactic space, light years beyond the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, hoping some alien freighter takes pity on us and trains a tractor beam on our pathetic, rusting hull. And I ask myself, is this why I got into this business?

Right, so … now that I got that out of my system. Someone (could be anybody … but probably was me) suggested that as part of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 we play this gig in the Small Magellanic Cloud, some 200,000 light years out yonder. Now, necessarily, such a journey would require the development of technologies previously unthought of by humankind. Recall the challenges NASA faced when JFK charged them with putting a white dude on the moon within the course of a single decade. Christ on a bike, they had to invent miniaturized computing, develop advanced rocketry, perfect the concept of staged spacecrafts, and the only help they got was untold billions of dollars in public funds and the advice of retired Nazi ballistic scientists.

At this rate, we should get there by the end of time.

They did it, though. And what have we got? Well …. one mad scientist. (Actually, right now I would describe him as just a little grumpy.) One supercomputer – Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a Pentium processor from 1995 humming away in his little brass noggin. And a second-hand flying saucer, salvaged from some boneyard on the outskirts of Roswell, NM. Pull all of those resources together, and nothing can stop you … from getting about three feet off the ground. We’re still working on that first light-year, so we’ve signaled ahead to the promoter on the Small Magellanic Cloud that we may be a little late. Unfortunately, our message is traveling a bit more slowly than us – I can just about see it through the rear window.

Did NASA say uncle when things went wrong? Hell no. But then … maybe they should have. UNCLE!