It’s not just the noise, man. It’s just a stupid thing to do. For one thing, we don’t HAVE a lawn. For another, it’s three o’clock in the freaking morning!
Oh, hi. Sorry… I was reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Not that he needs to be reminded of its contents – It’s been posted on a spike inside his memory banks for a good many years now. Nevertheless, I felt he needed reminding because he’s been unusually disruptive of late. Sure, there have been times when Marvin’s programming has gone south or when he’s unduly under the influence of nefarious telemetry from alien planets (don’t think it doesn’t happen, because it does!). Only recently he’s been trying his hand (or robotic claw, more properly speaking) at a number of different small enterprises, hoping to make a marginal living in these hard times. (What exactly he needs money for, I don’t know. Perhaps some kind of automatonic inebriants.)
I don’t know for sure, but I think this may have something to do with his having been trapped in a virtual mine shaft with the man-sized tuber for the better part of a month. (Even an electronic brain can go crazy. Just ask the robot on Lost in Space.) Whatever the cause, Marvin is obsessed with new ventures. He opened up a flower stand in front of the Cheney Hammer Mill last week, assisted by the man-sized tuber (who knows a thing or two about flowers, being what amounts to an enormous tulip bulb himself). When he heard about the president’s plan to send men to an asteroid in the distant future, he desperately attempted to put himself on the short list for the trip, thinking the rewards to be great (like many pentagon contracts). Both of these, of course, fell flat.
Okay, so I’m in the studio, pounding on the keys, trying to make something that sounds vaguely like music. I hit the playback button, and I hear this grinding sound that bears no resemblance to the one emitted by my aging Oberheim rack unit. It was, in fact, motor noises being picked up by an ambient mic. So I go upstairs and see Marvin mustering a small army of robots – I don’t mean five or six normal robots, but about 40 to 50 toy-sized automatons, all with little purring lawn mowers. He apparently crimped the little suckers into being the muscle behind his new landscaping business, and they were practicing on the Hammer Mill courtyard. Which is made of cobblestones. Genius!
Now that all their mower blades are dull, I’m guessing Marvin will talk the best of his little crew into putting together a band. He’ll likely call it, “Marvin and the Lawn Robots”. So great – Big Green brings him up from nothing, and now he’s competing with us.
Oh, man. Typing in my sleep again. Someone should really take this laptop away from me. I’m liable to post ANYTHING while I’m sleeping, even (dare I say it?) the password to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). That’s all you would need to make him do YOUR bidding, however inaccurately. Actually, (*yawn*) his password is a vegetable that starts with “P” followed by the fifth number up from zero. Do your worst. Don’t forget to oil him regularly, and if he asks you to feed him, just ignore it. He fancies himself some kind of humanoid or cyborg, but that’s pretty far from the truth. For chrissake, Mitch Macaphee made him out of bits and spares. Nothing of value in … HEY! STOP KICKING ME, MARVIN! THAT HURTS!!
Mitch, thankfully, has given up on his idea to build a radical new transportation system circumventing the surface of the Earth entirely in favor of direct routes through its chewy nougat center. However sound that idea may have seemed, it turned out to be surprisingly impractical. Who knew there were so many obstacles deep beneath the Earth’s crust? I always assumed this was one of those relatively inexpensive planets – you know, the ones that are hollow inside? A hollow chocolate world. No, sir… turns out it’s not. The Earth, you see, is like an enormous malted milk ball, except instead of some kind of hydrogenated artificially-flavored wad of sugar and cornstarch, it’s full of rock and dirt and molten lava. Yeah, man… who knew? Guess I should have paid more attention in school. Let that be a lesson to ALL of you kids out there. STOP READING THIS BLOG! SAVE YOURSELVES WHILE THERE’S STILL TIME!
Yeah, it’s us again. Big Green, standing at the rim of another hole to the center of the Earth. Damn, this gets tiresome sometimes. We’re not complicated people, you know… aside from that psychology thing. All we want to do is hang out at our abandoned hammer mill, make a little music, watch the stars from the rooftops, bend pretzels on alternate Thursdays, and shoot arrows through the persistent space/time warp in the washroom that Mitch created so many months ago. It’s the simple things that give the most pleasure, is it not? (No, really… I want to know. It is the simple things, isn’t it?) And yet we are perpetually faced with these complications, these Gordian knots, these Rubic Cubes, these Junior Jumbles, these Uncle Art’s Funland spot-the-differences cartoons, these…
Okay, right… well, this little problem we have may not be as difficult as one Uncle Art can typically dish up, but it’s a poser, that’s for sure. You see, Mitch has been building this complex system of tunnels to various destinations on the globe (some actually on the surface of the globe, but – and this is important – NOT ALL). Of course, a project this ambitious requires rigorous testing to ensure the safety of the patrons Mitch hopes to eventually charge MUCHO DINERO for the privilege of riding his trans-Earth trolley through the planet’s chewy center.