Tag Archives: Kuiper Belt

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!

Usual Rubbish

Get ready.

Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Our sorry asses to perdition. Prepare for launch sequence start. Roger! Roger! Stay away from that engine nozzle! Man, that guy’s an idiot. I don’t understand how he ends up on every mission.

Well, we’re about to launch our spring Interstellar Tour, which we’ve dubbed the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019.  Not a moment too soon, I should add. It’s getting pretty strange down here on planet Earth, and we’d just as soon watch the various developments from a safe distance of maybe 75 light years. From that remote prospect, all of the cares and woes of human kind are reduced to a mere point of light. A sobering thought … unless you’re drinking that basement hooch Mitch Macaphee has been working on recently. Not one of his better experiments. Speaking as someone who’s about to embark on a perilous deep space excursion in a ramshackle craft, I can say I’m more afraid of imbibing that noxious beverage.

Yes, we did secure transport. It’s a used saucer someone abandoned in exchange for something much, much better.  Mitch picked it up from some used car dealer, caulked up all of the gaps, and it appears to hold air pressure for the most part. Then there’s the engines, and well … they’re a little vintage. There are some rudimentary sleeping quarters, a kitchenette, strangely one of those snack fridges where you get charged five bucks for a Snickers bar. (It shows up on your bill.) There appear to be navigational controls, some direction-finding devices, a few dozen flashing lights, and an old reel-to-reel machine done up to look like a computer. We’ve loaded our gear in and we’re going through a list of final checks before liftoff. (Hey … I never saw that check before!)

How about this little Jewel, Mitch? Just one owner ...

So … we’ve got two days to get to Neptune. And really, we shouldn’t merely arrive on time. It’s awfully hard to find the venue down in that mass of impenetrable atmosphere. Oh, and the Neptunians don’t appreciate tardiness. Come to think of it, they don’t appreciate much of anything … including our music. Why they keep hiring us I could not say. I think it’s because we’re cheap and we provide our own transportation. As you can imagine, being one of the outer planets, they go to great expense to import just about anything, and that includes music. In any case, just a short stop there, then it’s off to the next solar system over … Proxima something or other. Can’t miss it. Just take a right at the Kuiper Belt.

Usual Rubbish

Thule fool.

For the last time, Mitch, I said no. No, damn it! Isn’t it cold enough in upstate New York? And you want to go way the hell out there? Forget it!

Ah, right. I’m typing all this as we speak. My apologies – we were just having a band meeting and, well, things were starting to get a little contentious. You see, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee got it into his head that we should book a performance or two on Ultima Thule, that snowman-shaped object in the Kuiper Belt recently photographed by a NASA space probe. “You’d be the first,” he said. “Don’t you want to be first in something?”

You see what we have to put up with around here? I mean. Matt and I were just asking for ideas about new venues, new opportunities to connect with a broader audience … preferably a terrestrial one. That’s when Mitch piped up about the planetoid. Sure, we’ve played planetoids before. But honestly … you want to go someplace warm during the winter months, right? Somehow an open air concert on the shore of a sea of frozen methane is not my idea of a plum gig. In fact, I’m shivering already. (The Cheney Hammer Mill is kind of leaky, as you might expect.)

It's a freaking snow man, Mitch!Now, it’s no secret that we’re not super fond of live performances. Our battles are fought in the laboratory, not the prize ring! I mean … we make music in the studio, for the most part. Hell, it’s easier, and you get do-overs. So the notion of traveling billions of miles in some dodgy rent-a-spacecraft with a mad man at the helm is not particularly appealing. At the very least, we would need to send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do the advance work, which on a gig like Ultima Thule would involve checking the gravitation (too strong, too weak) and doing an atmospheric analysis. I’m guessing the lab work could be finished maybe nine months after his return, which given current technology, might take 40 years.

We could just shoot a line up to the snowman-shaped planetoid and yank it a little closer so that Marvin can do his work. Frankly, he doesn’t need to check its temperature – you just know the sucker is cold, right? It’s shaped like a freaking snowman, for chrissake.