Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Helladay house.

What? What time is it? It’s too early, tubey. You’ll get your Miracle Gro at 9:00 and not before. Christ on a bike.

Oh, hi out there. As I’m sure you already know, the morning after Thanksgiving is always a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you have a mansized tuber who has just discovered juicing. (He’s trying to win some of his bi-weekly pickup basketball games, but I think even with the Miracle Gro he’s reaching.) Morning starts kind of early around here – sometimes before noon, even. (You fellow rock musicians out there better sit down: There is a thing called morning. It’s not just another hallucination. That’s right … I’m talking to you, pothead.)

Excuse that digression. Hope you had a wonderful, glorious Thanksgiving, full of holiday cheer and/or anticipation (if you spent most of it queueing up in front of Wal-Mart or Best Buy). Perhaps you spent part of your morning watching the bizarre spectacle known as the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I certainly did. It’s kind of a tradition around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where you don’t ordinarily get exposed to a lot of unfiltered promotional messages (aside from the ones that come on soup can labels).

Little known fact about the Hammer Mill: This is actually the end-point of the T-day parade. It’s a lot longer a procession than most people think. Folks get the mistaken impression that the march ends with the arrival of ersatz Santa Claus in front of Macy’s. Not true. For most of the next day and a half, the floats and balloons come marching up the West Side Highway, take the G.W. Bridge over to the Palisades Parkway, then pick up the NYS Thruway and process all the way up to the Little Falls exit. In a gesture of magnanimous welcome, we throw the compound doors open to them and allow them into the Hammer Mill courtyard for a little R&R. Then Mitch Macaphee and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) aid their technicians in deflating the enormous parade balloons and packing them away for another year. True* story.

Sure, you thought Christmas was just a throwaway songwriting theme for us. Oh ye of little faith.

* Note: veracity of story subject to unverifiable truth conditions. Contact Big Green for details.

Usual Rubbish

Splitting Lincoln.

I think I left my guitar plugged in. I’ve been hearing that buzzing all night freaking long. What’s that? It’s the orgone generating device? Jesus on a bike … that thing again?

Hey howdy. Welcome back to the hammer mill. Who won the Lincoln contest? Still up in the air. My bets are on Anti-Lincoln, but that’s just a hunch. He does have an ace in the hole – namely, Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, the monstrosity of modern engineering that brought him here from the past in the first place. Anti-Lincoln seems to think that by stepping into that thing and turning it up to eleven, he’ll get the full Daniel Day Lewis treatment.

Never can tell what’ going to happen with mad science technology. Just ask Mitch Macaphee – he invented Marvin (my personal robot assistant) after all. Anyway, anti-Lincoln must have dialed the wrong settings into that orgone generating device because it split him into two equal parts: Jerry Lewis and Doris Day. Close, right? Fortunately, that thing has an undo button. I like the 1950s as much as any man (which may, in fact, amount to not at all) but I don’t want dead decades following me around like  a zombie. Ever have that problem? Thought so.

Well, we’ve got another podcast in the can. Another groundbreaking episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring as many as three songs (including one previously unreleased Rick Perry number), a rather lengthy and convoluted episode of Ned, the Talking Dressage Horse, and the usual copious amount of pointless blather my illustrious brother and I put forth on a monthly basis. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost much … in fact, it doesn’t cost anything at all. Free media! Liberty! That’s what podcasting is all about, right? That’s why we’re aboard her…… Oh, right. I should keep the Star Trek quotes to a minimum. My apologies.

Best move along. We’re expecting workmen any minute. There are still a few copper pipes left in the hammer mill, so they’ll be stopping by to remove them. (In lieu of rent.)

Usual Rubbish

Honest, Abe?

No, no. Not that hat. That’s a porkpie hat. Don’t you know anything? The great emancipator would never have worn a hat like that. Not unless he played the saxophone. (Did he play the saxophone? Best ask.)

Oh, right…. I’m keying this into the internets, not merely speaking to some disembodied listener. What was I thinking? Right, well…. as busy as things get here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, we never seem to stop finding other things to do with our time. Last week Marvin (my personal robot assistant) discovered numismatics … with a little encouragement from his creator, Mitch Macaphee, who was really attempting to program a penchant for petty larceny into his brass hide. Not one of Mitch’s proudest moments, convincing Marvin that lifting stray coins out of people’s pockets is how coin collecting works. (That mad science grant from the Cato Institute must not have come through.)

Anyway, there was that. Then there was the new Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln, starring Daniel Day Lincoln. That naturally perked up more than a few ears around this hammer mill, let me tell you … four ears in particular: the ones on Lincoln and his anti-matter doppelganger, Anti-Lincoln, both still acting as historical figures in residence with Big Green. Well, naturally enough, Lincoln (the positive one) took issue with some of the historical details in the new film. “I never said that!” I could hear him exclaim as he watched his pirated copy. “And that crap about vampires – none of that ever happened!” (I  think he got his hands on the wrong DVD, frankly, but… it’s not my place to say anything.)

Anti-Lincoln, on the other hand, was strangely pensive about the whole matter. I thought for sure, with his irrepressible temper, that he would blow sky high, rail at the heavens, demanding justice and revenge. Nothing of the sort. He’s been doing a Lincoln Memorial imitation now for the last three days. I just can’t get a rise out of him. I’ll tell you, nature abhors a vacuum, so it may not surprise you that some of the other denizens and hangers-on we have around the hammer mill are getting into the Lincoln act, trying to channel Anti-Lincoln’s stifled rage. Mansized tuber is one, though he can’t get the hat quite right. And don’t even ask about Marvin’s dime store beard.

Well, we’ll work it all out, I’m certain. Now … back to the podcast hellscape.