Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Mars Zero.

I don’t know, Mitch. It could work, or maybe not. Let’s give it a shot, then. Just promise me one thing – no launch tests in the courtyard, okay? Last time you tried a stunt like that the neighbors called in the local SWAT team. It took all of our collective savings to get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out of jail.

Talk about LAME!Oh, hi. Just settling a few details with our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, recently repatriated from the dwarf planet Ceres. Mitch is helping us plan the launch of Big Green’s newest venture. Let me give you the background. You’ve all heard of Bas Lansdorp’s Mars One project, no doubt. Lansdorp is inviting volunteers to go on a one-way mission to colonize Mars. He says he can get the whole thing going in time for a 2025 launch date.

Well, here at Big Green’s abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we way that’s pure bullshit. Lansdorp is obviously engaging in gross exaggeration – an exercise in self-aggrandizement, no doubt. 2025 indeed! The notion is ludicrous on its face. Why, with Mitch’s help, we could get to Mars tomorrow (or, at least, next week sometime). And it wouldn’t be a suicide mission like Lansdorp’s; our missions are decidedly two-way. That’s just how we roll.

So we’ve decided to launch a new project we’re calling Mars Zero. No, it’s not a new low-calorie candy bar or soft drink. Mars Zero is our effort to claim Mars for colonization a full five years before Lansdorp’s goons get there. The red planet is ours! We saw it first! (I’m speaking for Mitch, here. He gets a little overheated about this stuff.)

Want to be a part of the Mars Zero crew, set to leave the surly bonds of Earth in April of 2020? Just contact us via our comment form or our Facebook page or our Twitter account – whatever. We’ll test your endurance through feats of strength and … um … endurance. (Send us valuable government coupons, known as money, and we’ll waive the feats of strength.)

Cowboy Scat on YouTube. Speaking of endurance tests, we’ve uploaded the first installment of our album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick to our YouTube channel. Give it a listen and let us know what you chuck … I mean, think.

Usual Rubbish

Ceres rising.

Look … they were bound to find out sooner or later, right? I mean … you can’t commandeer a whole planet … even a dwarf planet … without someone taking notice at some stage. Mitch? Mitch, are you still there? Hello?

Whoa. You're all steamed up, Mitch!Right, well … I was just talking to our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee via Skype, and it seems he has a problem. And when Mitch has a problem, frankly, we all have a problem. That’s the thing with mad scientists. One day they’re inventing something dumb and innocuous, like Marvin (my personal robot assistant). The next they’re assembling the elements of some plane-smashing behemoth or a diabolical extreme weather machine (though I think that last one has already been invented by the mad “scientists” we call America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry).

As you may recall, we’ve been wondering what Mitch has been up to for the last couple of years. Last we’d heard he’d gone on an extended mad science bender in Madagascar. (We’d been expecting the place to begin levitating or emitting deadly baritold rays at any time.) Turns out we’d been misinformed. Mitch had somehow relocated himself to the former asteroid, now dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits the sun at a respectable distance, in the deadly asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. (Yes, asteroid “belt”. Imagine our solar system as a middle-aged American; Jupiter is his/her corn-syrup enhanced abdomen, poking out from just south of this so-called belt.)

Well, as you might imagine, Ceres is the kind of place where a mad scientist can pursue his passions undisturbed. Until today. Nasa’s “Dawn” space probe (apparently underwritten by the people who make the detergent) has just achieved orbit around the dwarf planet. That’s why I got the interplanetary Skype call – Mitch is livid! He obviously thought he had the whole place to himself, oversized golf ball that it is, but apparently NASA has been working on this “invasion,” as Mitch calls it, for the last seven years. “Stupid Obama!” he shouted over Skype, and I nodded quietly to myself.

All right, well … this may not end well. We’ll keep you posted on what emerges from this encounter (assuming it isn’t painfully obvious).

Usual Rubbish

When the hell?

I know what you’re all saying out there. You’re saying, “Where’s my socks?” and “The paper’s late again this morning. Stupid paper carrier!” and “You’ll eat it and like it!” Stuff like that. Am I right?

Squx.Well, right or wrong, I like to think that you’ve been wondering about a couple of things with regard to the band Big Green, denizens of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and the alien intelligence behind this skimpy little blog. One is, well, when the hell are we going to release another album? I mean, it’s been nearly 18 months since we put out Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. What the hell are we playing at, anyway? Or maybe you’re uttering that same thought in Swahili. It could be anything!

Then there’s the performance question. I know, I know … we’ve been extremely remiss in this area. Big Green hasn’t performed in front of a terrestrial audience in uncounted thousands of years. Sure, we’ve played in the solar system, which is practically in your neighborhood. You could easily see our performances with the Hubble Space Telescope, and perhaps hear them with a radio telescope. That has been the best we’ve been able to do up to now. Squint hard and you can see us.

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) took it into his little tin head to do some advertising for us, hiring some firm to do smoke signals on Mars. All he managed to do was confuse NASA royally, and make a bunch of astrophysicists scratch their heads like monkeys and throw bones in the air, hoping they’ll turn into futuristic space shuttles. If that’s brand advertising, I’m an astrophysicist’s uncle. And I’m not. So just pretend you didn’t see that puff of smoke on the red planet, friends. Nothing to see here.

The fact is, we will get around to putting out some more music sometime soon. I’m working on posting some of our existing catalog on YouTube. And we’ve got new music, so ultimately it will be out there. Way out there.