Tag Archives: Jupiter

Usual Rubbish

Tune it.

Turn the first little knob on the top. Yes, that one. Turn it. A little more. More. Right, now back it off a little. Good… now the next one – turn it clockwise. I said CLOCKWISE! What do you mean you’re from the land down under? What’s THAT got to do with ANYTHING?

Ho, man. Just getting ready for BIG GREEN’S [INSERT NAME HERE] INTERSTELLAR TOUR 2011, and as you can see, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will be the guitar tech again this time out. Thought it might be wise to go over the basics, just one more time, before we really need his help. No, he can’t tune a six-string guitar all by himself. He needs someone to hold the fat end while he turns the tuners – but that’s not the main drawback. You see, Marvin is made of bits left over from other experiments, in essence, including machine parts from Mitch Macaphee’s shop – air powered tools, drills, vise-grips, sanders, and the like. Sometimes when you ask him to do an open tuning on the Martin, he turns that tuner like he’s taking an air wrench to a lug nut… then it’s SNAP!  He also gets very confused on Matt’s Ovation 12-string, which Matt has set up like a six-string. (Too many machines.)

Would that that were our most serious problem on this tour. Not a bit of it. I told you, I seem to recall, about the dark vessel Mitch appears to have hired for our transport. It resembles that ship that took that fateful journey to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, that wouldn’t make me particularly nervous… except that Jupiter is on our itinerary. Seems like too much of a coincidence. No one else seems uncomfortable, but… well… I am. Open the pod door, Marvin. I said OPEN THE POD DOOR, MARVIN!

Guess I should start being nicer to the boy. At least pre-emptively. You never know what kind of situation you might find yourself in. I can imagine a scenario wherein we might find ourselves trapped in a reality that resembles what people in 1967 thought 1999 would look like.  That would not be good. But anyway….

We have a tour to plan. Bookings to book. Shoes to pack. Songs to rehearse. And guitars to tune. MARVIN!! (Please…) 

Usual Rubbish

Hard feelings.

Hey, what can I tell you? I didn’t intend to piss him off, guys. Not my intention at all. Nor was it my intention to destroy the planet Jupiter. Furthest thing from my mind.

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a little band meeting. (Bret? Here. Jermaine? Here. Murray? Here.) I’m being raked over the coals by my fellow Big Green members and our various hangers on – Mitch Macaphee (our mad science adviser), Lincoln, anti-Lincoln, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the man-sized tuber… even Big Zamboola has chimed in. What’s the “issue”, as they say? Oh, hell… it’s about our perennial sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. He’s been a house guest here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the past week or so. That is to say, he was our guest, up until he departed yesterday in a bit of a Zenite huff. (How do I know? His radioactive vapor trail was tinged orange around the edges. Sure sign.)

So, why the hurried departure? Was he on his way to, I don’t know, Joseph A. Bank to get two free suits after buying one overpriced suit? No, no, nothing like that. It’s down to me, I’m afraid. One of those obscure cultural faux pas you run into when dealing with the denizens of another galaxy – kind of like showing the soles of your feet to an Iraqi. I insulted sFshzenKlyrn in some way, apparently, when I turned down his generous offer of Zenite snuff. I believe that, combined with a hand gesture I made involuntarily, is the equivalent of telling a Zenite that his specific gravity is roughly equivalent to that of Yak dung.  (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Zenite etiquette, that is considered a particularly grave insult.)

sFshzenKlyrn left in a cloud of radioactive dust. I imagined he was going straight home, using his typical method of traveling between the dimensional layers of the wobbly thing we call reality. Not so. I guess he was a little madder than he looked, because he felt the need to act out his anger. And he did this by driving straight into the planet Jupiter, causing a bit of a disturbance. (I’m told he did that one time before, some few years back. Left a bit of a red spot, as I recall.) What this has meant to the inhabitants of Jupiter I do not know, though I suspect we will hear about it the next time we go on interstellar tour. (Late this summer, I believe. Stay tuned!) It did, however, cause quite a stir back home here, with people calling it a dramatic collision, a missile, an asteroid, and so on.

Nah. Just a pissed off Zenite guitarist, that’s all. And from the ‘splosion he created, I guess his specific gravity must be quite a bit greater than that of Yak dung after all. Whoops! Sorry, sFshzenKlyrn!