Tag Archives: interstellar tour

Usual Rubbish

Time wasting.

Ever see that episode of Lost In Space when they’re rushing to get the piece-of-shit Jupiter 2 spaceworthy before the planet they’ve been living on for an entire television season explodes beneath them? Yeah, well … that’s sort of where Big Green is right now.

Big GreenNo, a stereotypical t.v. gold miner named Mister Nerim is not fracking the Cosmonium out of the living rock beneath us (at least, not yet), but it’s nearly as bad. Our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (also known as Hegephonic) has arranged for an interstellar tour to support the release of our most recent album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which – while it hasn’t done squat down here on earth – is selling briskly on Aldebaran, I hear.  (Great music always finds its audience. And, well, ours does, too, if it travels far enough.)

Of course, Hegemonic subcontracted the tour arrangements to some underworld figures, as they typically do. That has its upsides, like … I don’t know …. valet parking on Aldebaran? Free breakfast for gamblers? No, it’s the downsides I’m more concerned with. Like the fact that the contractors just handle the booking; the transportation is completely up to us. So as you saw last week, we’ve been scrambling to pull together some kind of interstellar space vessel – quite a challenge in the continued absence of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who is sunning himself in beautiful Madagascar right now.

Well ... a little ambitious, perhaps. Don’t know if you know this, but underworld booking agents take breach of contract kind of seriously. That’s why we’re resorting to just about any means of getting from one planet to the other. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) helpfully suggested a design for a new space craft, but it seems a little ambitious, to be perfectly frank. I’m not certain that we need anything with forty-story legs and a cavernous exercise room. I was thinking something more on the modest size. Maybe a step up from the 1954 GMC city coach, but not a large step.

Hey, however we do it, we’ll need to have it done in a few weeks. Got suggestions? Put them behind the hot water pipes. I’ll find them.

Usual Rubbish

Geek to me.

Connect blue wire (A) to terminal (3). Check. Connect yellow wire (F) to terminal (48c). Check. Hit boot switch, but first, insert index fingers (K) and (M) into ears (7) and (8). Hmmm…. okay.

Big GreenOh, hi. Caught me in the middle of something, as usual. Always some task to perform here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house in lovely upstate New York. As you may recall from previous posts (or not), we are preparing for an upcoming interstellar tour to support extraterrestrial sales of our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Fact is, we make most of our money on units sold outside the bounds of the known solar system. (The rest we make on Neptune and some of the smaller, rockier moons of Saturn.)

Anyhow, as you might suspect, we will be needing some means of transportation for ourselves, our hangers-on, our instruments and gear, our provisions, etc. We have an old 1954 GMC City Coach (or we at least have access to it in the junk yard across the street), but it’s seen better days and probably isn’t up to a journey of 1,000 light years across the trackless void of space. (The windows haven’t been caulked in a couple of decades, so I doubt it’s space-worthy.) We used to simply “rent” spacecraft from other fictional narratives, like Lost in Space or Here Come The Brides, but that option is walled off by lack of funds. Our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee is still in Madagascar, enjoying the sun, so we’re left to our own devices.

The one on the leftRight, so … using Mitch’s credit card, I ordered a do-it-yourself space ship from Heathkit. (Yes, I know … they no longer exist. I had to go through Mitch’s time portal to place the order.) So here I am, perhaps the most technically challenged member of Big Green, a man without a smart phone (I still use that brick phone my dad lent me in 1989), assembling a deluxe interstellar space cruiser stick by stick, armed only with a soldering gun and a pair of superannuated pliers.

No need to back away. I haven’t gotten to the volatile rare earths part yet. Stay tuned.

Usual Rubbish

Under the hood of lost September.

Is this the new itinerary? Looks like last week’s. Which, if I recall correctly, was a hastily updated photocopy of the flight path for Voyager 2. That mission didn’t end well, my fine friend, just you remember.

Yes, yes … we are still preparing the ground for our upcoming interstellar tour to support celestial sales of Big Green’s latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. The itinerary thus far includes stops on gas giants, molten moons, and frozen asteroids hurtling into black holes. Couple of snags, that’s all. Nothing to get excited about. (Man Jack Jesus, this band has to work like an animal to find an audience.)

In the meantime, we have plucked the lost September episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN from the jaws of non-existence (if such a state of being can be said to have anything resembling jaws), and good thing, too: we needed an October episode very badly indeed. What’s it all about? Well, you could give it a listen. Or you could just ask us … and if you did, we would most likely tell you it includes:

Big GreenAnyhow, the “lost” September episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN includes:

Ned Trek XIII: Specter’s Stepchildren. Our running satire of Star Trek, Mr. Edd, and the Romney presidential campaign continues with this gripping episode. Mr. Welsh is being coaxed into serving as a sound engineer for powerful aliens who force songs out of Mr. Ned, Mr. Pearl, Rev. Doc Coburn, and Willard Mittilius himself…. with hilarious consequences. Five (or is it six?) new Big Green songs, never before heard, one sung by a horse, one sung by a robot Nixon, one sung by space aliens (accompanied by John Ashcroft), one sung by a chickenhawk neocon (guess who). Don’t miss it.

Idle conversation. As usual, Matt and I ramble on for about 20 minutes about vital issues of the day, random snippets from days past. We talk about our dad, about space probes, about god knows what. Something else, I’m sure. No spotlight songs resurrected from the past this month – we spent our song quota in the Ned Trek episode.

That’s what we’ve got. Now, back to travel plans. Where’s that sextant?