Tag Archives: mansized tuber

Usual Rubbish

Spring is … psych!

Had the weirdest dream last night, Anti Lincoln. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill …. I mean, I dreamed there was snow all over the place, like it was mid January. Talk about unrealistic. Hey, pull up the shade … it’s kind of dark in here. What the …. WHAT?

Yeah, that snowfall took us all a little bit by surprise here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in frosty upstate New York. Somehow, after a freakishly mild winter (which I personally think was cooked up by our own Mitch Macaphee, mad science adviser), snow has returned in early April. Once again, I think Mitch might have had a hand in this. He’s got this big-ass smoke machine that shoots unnamed projectiles into the heavens – missiles loaded with I don’t know what the fuck, and lots of it. Mitch cranks it up, the sucker sputters and pops for a few minutes, then it starts snowing. Kind of. (That might be torn up fragments of Mitch’s membership agreement with the National Academy of Mad Science.)

Nice gizmo, Mitch.Okay, so let’s assume the weather has nothing to do with Mitch’s cloud bazooka. This is effed up, man! Remember now – we are squatters in this here hammer mill, see? And, well … the heat in this place is a little unreliable. Most of the winter we depend on an old wood stove in what used to be the shipping office. It’s the mansized tuber’s job to stoke the thing, and sometimes he falls down on the job a little. But most days we manage to keep the ice off the dishwater … though I don’t suppose you’re aware of how effective ice can be as a dishwashing medium. It scrapes, it emulsifies, it …. okay, I’m exaggerating. You have to look on the bright side when you’re freezing your ass off.

Winter is in extra innings. We can live with that. After all, we have spent weeks on remote planets, like Pluto, for instance.  We have traveled to the center of this here Earth. We have, I don’t know … done lots of stupid stuff. Certainly this is no stupider.

So, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the mansized tuber are tasked with fanning the flames for another week. Good exercise, even for a robot. And an animate stump.

Usual Rubbish

Killers from space.

Just an FYI: this post has nothing to do with Killers from Space, either the thing or the movie by the same name. I just used it to draw your attention to an even more immediate problem: Killers from Underground!

Say what you want about Big Green. Sure, we may not be the most successful band around. And true enough, we don’t perform very much … or even at all, really. And it’s fair to say that we spend much of our band time recording stuff in the basement, releasing the resulting tracks buried in incomprehensible podcasts. Further, you wouldn’t be wrong to say that we are gaunt, pigeon-toed freaks with bad builds and gray hair. Right … are you done saying what you want? This is getting depressing.

Oh, yeah – my point is simply that, even though we don’t deliver on a lot of what you might expect from an indie rock band, we try to be useful in little ways. Like giving you pointers on how to handle a disgruntled mad scientist. Or tips on personal robot assistant maintenance. Or best practices with regard to the care and feeding of man-sized tubers. I think you’ll agree that there’s value in that. And you can listen to music while you learn. That’s the kind of service we provide.

You may be on to something, Marvin.Anyway, some of you may recall our Journey to the Center of the Earth a few years back. For highlights, just look back a few years in this very blog. (If you find it buried in the madness, let me know. I can’t freaking find it for the life of me.) Well, we have had indications that the Morlocks are planning some kind of attack. How do we know? For one thing, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an electronic earthquake monitor built into his water works, and it has been turning out some disturbing data … data that suggest a veritable army of Morlocks digging their way to the surface. Either that or someone is fracking in the neighborhood. We’re opting for the far more likely Morlock scenario.

Trouble is, with our luck, they’ll probably break through the earth’s crust right in our courtyard or in the basement of the mill. We’re trying to prepare for that eventuality. Matt’s got a shovel handy. I’m ordering a couple of pizzas. Carrot and stick, friends.

Usual Rubbish

Density rising.

You may say I’ve got a lot to learn. Seems like this is the perfect spot to learn. No, I’m NOT playing Vegas … not yet, anyway. (Though I did spend a summer in Reno once. Long story, which I’ll spare you.)

Raining like hell here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Wish we had invested in that new roof a few years back, when we were overflowing with Neptunian shekels from our last interstellar tour. Those were the days …. NOT. Yeah, the water is coming in like … well … water from the sky. The mansized tuber is loving it. Not Marvin (my personal robot assistant), though. His brass finish is getting tarnished in the humid summer weather we get up here in upstate New York, and this is certainly not doing it any good. (Kind of vain, actually, that robot. I think he sees himself as a Tyrone Power lookalike. He needs to download some newer movies.)

Over the last few weeks the humidity has been rising. Our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin, insists that it is atmospheric density, not the humidity, that is rising. He has been hammering away at some kind of device that he claims will control the weather, or something to that effect. I could share with you what he told me, but it might cause you some distress. Suffice to say that throughout his diatribe, he managed to end each sentence with the term (and I quote) “BWA-HA-HA-HA!”  I have asked Y'know, I kinda see it.anti-Lincoln, our resident language history scholar, to find me a gloss on that. So far no luck.

We’re still working on our next album, working title “WORKING TITLE”. (We were thinking of renaming the band “Various Artists”, just so that we would show up in the Columbia House 8-track tape catalogs.) It’s slow going, to say the least. We’re re-thinking parts that we put down over the past two years, building on old tracks that were hastily recorded and shipped out via our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Some are rougher than others. And we’re starting with the roughest ones … I hope. (These are pretty freaking rough!)

So, we’ll keep scratching. Keep your eyes open …. especially if you’re driving.