Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Don’t let it be.

Why not? Because I said so, damn it. Will you just listen to me once? No, Marvin, no. We’re far to … uh … well-done for that. Too crispy. If “The Colonel” saw us, he’d try to put us in a bucket with some nice pre-fab buttermilk biscuits. Mmmmm boy.

Oh, hello. Funny that you always seem to show up when we’re having a little disagreement over here. Nothing serious, you understand – just a difference of opinion. Between me and a robot. Not just any robot, of course – I mean Marvin (my personal robot assistant). I should keep him off Facebook, frankly. That’s where he saw that article that’s been driving him frantic ever since. It was probably planted on Facebook by the IRA – the Internet Robotics Agency – as a black ops effort against gullible automatons.

What’s the story about? Glad you asked. It was a piece about how filmmaker Peter Jackson is going to make a documentary out of hours of archived film footage of the Beatles originally gathered for the movie Let It Be. That got Marvin thinking … maybe WE could do something like that. First, find a director (preferably a famous, gullible one), then send him all of our home movies from the past thirty or thirty-five years. Make it forty. After that, they could shoot interviews of all of us while we talk about the content on the footage and make pithy comments while the Director checks his phone. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?

Make a movie out of THAT?Of course it bloody doesn’t! What, point hi-def video cameras at our superannuated faces? Nothing doing. And as far as the archival footage goes, what we have is so rough and so primitive I doubt anyone would be able to interpret the hazy dark shapes on the screen in a way that would suggest real human activity. What director is going to take a bunch of VHS tapes and make a documentary? The idea is ludicrous, and yet Marvin is married to it, much like that time he married that stamp vending machine over at the corner drug store. The only thing that worked about that marriage was when it came to putting postage on the wedding invitations. In that respect, it was a match made in heaven.

So, short story, we’re not doing it … no matter what the black ops people say.

Usual Rubbish

Looking back.

Are you sure that happened in 2007? I’m pretty sure it was in 2006, but if you say so, I guess I’m wrong. The years all fold into one another, don’t they? I was just saying that last year, and … well … there you have it,

Oh, hi. Just playing a little game of total recall here with Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Now, of course, he can’t say much aside from a few metallic squeaking sounds, but he can give me tickertape readouts like any good electronic brain from the middle of the last century. We’re trying to recall when our first subterranean tour happened. Hell, I don’t know why I don’t just look at our old blog pages instead of relying on Marvin’s Commodore-era processor. (Except that when I wrote those blog posts back in the day, it was on a computer almost as primitive as him.)

Did we actually do this at some point? 'Fraid so.I suppose more than a few of you have noticed that we don’t do a lot of tours anymore. Maybe the occasional day trip to a distant asteroid once in a blue moon (not to mention the gig we did on that blue moon once), that sort of thing. We have become more sedentary over the passing years, and one glance at those old blog posts confirm it. God knows, back in THOSE days we were sailing off to distant solar systems at the drop of a hat, teaming up with extraterrestrial guitarists (like sFshzenKlyrn of the planet Zenon, a real shredder), braving all manner of threat and hostile conditions. Heady times indeed!

Well, that was then. Now we hang around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, wandering our way into our makeshift studio a few times a week to record songs or podcasts or what have you. Some would say we have given up. Others would say we’re a bunch of useless assholes who don’t deserve the time of day. Still others might argue that our dietary preferences are an abomination and run counter to the laws of god and man. Who am I to say that any of them are wrong? Busted!

We’re about looking forward, not backward. That’s the only way I can keep myself from walking into walls. I’m a practical man, some might say.

Usual Rubbish

Witness protection.

Beard and glasses are no good. You’ve already got a beard and glasses, remember? Maybe you should just shave and squint more. Not sure anyone would recognize you anyway, but there’s no point in taking chances.

Oh, hi. I was just attempting to help our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, with a little problem he’s experiencing with law enforcement. No, he didn’t get one of those threatening IRS calls demanding thousands of dollars in iTunes cards on pain of arrest. Nothing that exciting. Apparently, Mitch has been running a side-hustle. He built some kind of interstellar surveillance drone, and it’s been spotted by NASA and disseminated to the press. Now he thinks the feds are after him for horning in on their game.

Yes, I know. He’s got nothing to worry about. But Mitch’s nerves have been kind of raw just lately, and he wants to go into hiding … a kind of witness protection program, only the kind that shields you from the government. His probe – named “Oumuamua” by astronomers – collects call data from the planets it orbits, then transmits it down to Mitch’s lab, where he puts it through a grey box with flashing Christmas lights and a kind of electrical arc that runs between two rods. (I told him he could use a standard toggle switch on the thing, but he insisted on the big-handled wall switch. It’s no fun being a mad scientist without one of those.)

Hmmm... Doesn't look like a drone.I guess it’s the downloading the data part that makes him think he might be in the crosshairs of law enforcement. Even Mitch, with his fevered astrophysicist brain, knows that that is a bozo no-no, so to speak, in the eyes of the intelligence services. I told him just to shut Oumuamua down for a couple of weeks or send it to another solar system … preferably a slightly less repressive or litigious one. My guess is that he will eventually come around to doing something like that, though you would think the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might have worked that out for himself. No soap. So many difficult personalities to deal with in this business! So much freaking drama!

Okay, so Mitch is in a funk, and we’re still inserting the funk into our latest raft of songs. Be patient, my friends … they will drop one day soon, funk and all.