Tag Archives: interstellar tour

Usual Rubbish

Off with us.

Glad that’s over. Anything I hate, it’s packing over a holiday weekend. But we’re under way at last, back into the welcoming arms of deep, deep space. GJ 1132b, here we come!
Ned Trek, the podcast
I suppose I should spare you the details of the last week – the rush job of putting this expeditionary gig together, the foibles regarding our interplanetary transportation, etc. (Just try booking a four-engine ion drive spacecraft on the weekend before Thanksgiving. Freaking impossible!) As you may recall from last week’s post (particularly if you have nothing better to do with your life than to read this useless blog), Big Green has decided to pay a call on our newest neighbor in space – the recently discovered dwarf planet GJ 1132b – and see if we can discover some gainful employment there; namely, a one night stand for a terrestrial band.

Okay, so we dubbed this BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT), which is literally true, as GJ 1132b is out there, man, really out there. We had to name the gig in order to get some support from our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (whose indie imprint is named Hegephonic), still run by Indonesian military thugs. They’ve got deep pockets, though, and they and our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee go way back, so he was able to connive … I mean, convince them into ponying up some of their ill gotten gains to fund this reckless foray into parts unknown. Mitch is just that good.

So that's it, is it?The transport was a major problem, though. All of our previous rides were unavailable. Mitch had inadvertently vaporized our last spacecraft during the course of an experiment (one he was conducting on behalf of those same Generals from Jakarta he was conniving this past week). GJ 1132b is 39 light years away, so we needed something with a little heft. It couldn’t be one of those sub-compact crafts you take to Mars and back, right? There was a good deal of head scratching over that issue, until finally Mitch remembered an old colleague who had built an interstellar spacecraft for his own amusement at some point, then just parked it in his garage next to his Land Rover. Hobbyists!

Anywho, Mitch sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) over to pick it up. Big mistake – Marvin got lost on the way home, so we lost a couple of solar days, delaying our launch until Thanksgiving. Let them eat space! See you on GJ 1132b!

Usual Rubbish

Up to the sky in ships.

Next week? That’s kind of short notice, isn’t it? Usually we have a few weeks to arrange for interstellar transport, provisions, sound company, etc. But five days? Sheesh!

Ned Trek, the podcast
Ned Trek, The Podcast

Let me ‘splain. A newly discovered planet 39 light years from here (and when I say newly discovered, I don’t mean it was discovered by Anthony Newley, because he’s dead and not an astrophysicist) named GJ 1132b has been described as Earth-like. And since we are natives of the planet Earth, we take that as an open invitation to go visit this strange new world, seek out its new life and new civilizations, and boldly try to book a gig there … where no one has gigged before. Tall order? Perhaps. But frankly, we’ve been a little short on tall orders just lately here in Big Green land.

This, of course, means scrambling. (For Mitch Macaphee, it means poaching – he HATES scrambled eggs before a rocket launch, HATES them.) We’re having to pull a major interstellar journey out of our collective asses, and that can be a problem. That said, it is kind of exciting to think that at this point next week we will be venturing forth on the surface of a world no human has ever seen before. (Though why we need to go fourth, I don’t know. If we’re going to see something no one has seen before, we should rightfully go FIRST.) Did I just say that? Yeah … I was afraid so.

Eureka.There is one slight wrinkle, of course. Planet GJ 1132b reportedly has a 450-degree surface temperature. Obviously, we can leave the winter gear behind. I’ve asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to pack some extra box fans into the space craft, once we HAVE a space craft. The real problem is going to be keeping our axes in tune. If you’ve ever left your guitar sitting in the sun for a few hours you’ll know what I’m talking about. MARVIN … PACK THE EXTRA GUITAR TUNERS!

Mitch Macaphee assures me that he can rent a suitable spaceship in time for this journey to an unknown world. So, we shall see. If by Sunday afternoon I don’t see him backing that sucker into the courtyard, I’ll start to worry. Til then, take a deep breath.

Usual Rubbish

Gearing up.

You know, any other band would be talking about a summer tour right about now. But that’s what “normal” bands do. They play in front of actual people and stuff. Big Green? Not so much.

There must be SOME clubs out there...Here’s the thing about Big Green. We are not a “normal” band. We are a musical collective, a band of brothers, a loose association of critters, a gaggle of organisms, a … I don’t know, something else that implies more than one of us. And weird. The very suggestion of a “summer tour” brings to mind something quite different from what most people picture. We’re not rolling into Akron or Missoula, playing in a urine-soaked noise cave, and sleeping on someone’s floor. No, sir – typically, we’re sleeping in the urine-soaked cave. That cave? It’s called the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home.

Okay, so we never, ever do normal tours. I’m not saying we never will, but everyone ELSE is saying it, so who am I to argue? No, sir … when we go on tour, it’s not the usual plainclothes, indie circuit – it’s in outer space, on other planets, in other solar systems, and so on. Actually, one time, we did an inner space tour, deep beneath the Earth’s crust, but that was the one exception. So if you heard us, and it was after 1993, you would have had to either (a.) tunneled to the planet’s chewy center or (b.) traveled to Neptune, Jupiter, or the Crab Nebula. Unlikely, I admit.

Anyway, when we want to do a summer tour, we start by looking up. Way up. Hey, think of it this way. The Hubble Space Telescope, now 25 years in flight, has demonstrated that the visible universe is far busier a place than we had ever previously imagined, with fields of literally millions of galaxies within view. In short, there are a lot of punters out there – a lot more than you’ll find down here on old Terra Firma. So what use is it trying to hit it big in America or England or India? We want to be big in M24 and environs. Fuck the Milky Way – it’s podunk, according to sFshzenKlyrn, and he should know … he was DISCOVERED by the Hubble.

So, yeah … there may be a voyage this summer. Grass is always greener in the next galaxy cluster over.