Tag Archives: Jupiter

Usual Rubbish

Hot spot.

What the hell kind of itinerary is this? I have never seen a more incompetent attempt at organizing a freaking interstellar tour. Who put this bullshit together, anyway? Me? Oh … oh dear.

Well, as usual, I spoke too soon.  Not the first time. Honestly, I don’t know why my bandmates don’t look over my shoulder when I volunteer to do shit like this. After all, I’m just connecting dots on a map. I’m not a rocket scientist or anything. Sure, I used to launch Estes rockets when I was 10 or 11, but that was kind of a long time ago, and I think technology has moved on a bit since those days of cardboard tubes, butyrate dope, and solid fuel engines. Oh, and ignition wires. Yeah …. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has moved beyond those texts. He of all people should have known that what I was suggesting was just plain impossible.

Let me explain. The third leg of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 brought us to Sirius and then back to the great red spot on Saturn. All well and good, right? Trouble is, our next gig is on Saturday in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which I am now reliably told is nearly 200,000 light years away. Jesus. No wonder it looks small. Even pedal to the metal, it will probably take far longer than the rest of human history for us to get even halfway there.

Damn. Just imagine the size of the BIG one.

What’s worse, even if we were to make it the the Cloud by Saturday or several aeons after that, it’s a freaking galaxy that is itself about 7,000 light years wide, so it may take us a while to find exactly where we’re expected to perform. (My contact in the Cloud told me we couldn’t miss it, but then she or he is a transcendental being without form or persistent location in time-space, so everywhere is as close as it needs to be for that fucker.)

I hate to cancel a paid engagement, but unless we find a serious wormhole or radically rewrite the laws of physics in the next day or so, we may have no choice. Besides, that gig on Sirius was a serious pain in the butt, and the big Red Spot isn’t as hot as it used to be back in the day. Hell, the older it gets, the slower it turns, and well … there goes the electricity, my friends. So I’m for packing up and heading home. What about the rest of you? Show of hands? All in favor, say aye! Anyone for an aye? Don’t all speak at once.

Usual Rubbish

Tourmageddon.

Idle hands do the devil’s work, right? What about idle minds? Are they commandeered by some other malevolent agency? Inquiring minds want to know.

We appear to have arrived at the doldrums of summer a bit early here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York. Just finishing up a stretch of 90-degree plus days, some of them feeling over 100 degrees with the humidity. When it gets like that, we go subterranean – down into the cavernous basement of the mill, where it’s about 30 degrees cooler and wherein we have built an alternative habitat of sorts. Makeshift furniture made of bits and bobs. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a charging station set up down there. It’s a big, dank, windowless home away from home, perfect for summer staycation.

Okay, I’m exaggerating. It’s anything but perfect. It’s drab as hell and it reeks down here. Even worse, there’s nothing to freaking do except scratch on the walls and think about shit. That’s where the idle minds come in. I don’t remember if it was my idea or someone else’s, but at some point we got to talking about how we haven’t done a tour in years, why that was the case, and where we would go if we decided to go on the road again. Before we knew it, we were scratching out the rough outline of a 40-city tour, using a sharp piece of slate on the cellar wall. I say rough because Anti-Lincoln can’t tell the difference between Jupiter and Saturn – he keeps mixing them up, putting the rings around the wrong one. You may think that’s a detail, but once you’re out in interplanetary space, these details matter.

Io, Lincoln? I don't know ... Okay, so …. here’s the hole we dug ourselves into, at least on paper (or, rather, concrete). Two weeks of engagements in the greater Jovian system – you know, the Great Red Spot, then on to Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (we limit ourselves to the Galilean moons because, well, they’re more well-rounded). As stop-over at Saturn and Titan (always a lively show). Then from there, straight out of the solar system, assuming we can rent a vessel that will handle interstellar travel. Our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee says he knows a guy. We’ll see about that.

I must confess – I’m not sold on this idea, but if it keeps my colleagues content for a couple of weeks, there will be peace in the basement. And when the heat wave breaks, then maybe I can talk them out of another tourmageddon.

Usual Rubbish

Big marble.

No, I haven’t seen your camera. Or your enlarger. What the hell do I look like, a custodian? For crying out loud – if I were a custodian, I would be retired by now on a decent state pension … instead of cooped up in this drafty squat house with a mad-man inventor who can’t find his freaking camera.

Oh, hello. You’ve just caught me in the middle of a small dispute with one of the members of Big Green’s retinue. As I am the very soul of discretion, I will refrain from saying which one … Mitch Macaphee. (I didn’t say it, I typed it.) Suffice it to say we have our share of disagreements, and it’s usually over stupid shit. Last week it was some old piece of quartz he had mistakenly left at the local watering hole. By the way he was carrying on, you would have thought it was the only quartz in the world. And I can assure you … there is more quartz out there … more than you ever dreamed of.

Now – this week – Mitch is cheesed off over some photographs he saw on the Internet (though why he wastes his time surfing the web is beyond me … that thing is never going to amount to anything). NASA just posted some shots of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft that make the planet look like a giant marble or close detail of a Nice brushwork.Van Gogh painting. Mitch got a little overwrought when he saw them. He claims that they were photos he took on our last interstellar tour. He started pacing up and down the corridor, grousing about how NASA is always using his material without compensation or attribution. Then he disappeared into his laboratory.

We all hope he’s just sulking in there. I sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in to check on Mitch; he returned with some kind of electronic device attached to his torso. It has flashing lights and makes an odd, whirring sound. Not sure whether or not it’s having an effect on Marvin – he seems to act normally, though I did notice that he now eats corn-on-the-cob on a vertical axis. Could be a coincidence. People change, right? So, too, of robots.

Okay, well … we’re trying not to let the strange sounds emanating from Mitch’s laboratory distract us from our primary task: that of making strange sounds emanate from our recording studio.