Tag Archives: Mitch Macaphee

Usual Rubbish

One hit.

2000 Years to Christmas

Well, I wouldn’t call it a hit, exactly. Kind of more like a near hit. You know – the term George Carlin wanted to substitute for “near miss”. Let’s just say, hit-adjacent. That’s a bit more like it.

Oh, hi. Just having a little discussion with my chief discography advisor and personal robot assistant, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yes, he’s wearing two hats on his tiny brass head today, largely because we currently have no incumbent in the position of chief discography advisor. I’m told most bands have trouble filling that post. The trade schools just can’t churn them out fast enough, I guess. Oh, well …. couldn’t pay them anyway.

Right, well … we were just going over our canon. You know – our body of work. It’s kind of a decrepit body, frankly, hunched over and showing its age in a dozen different ways, but nevertheless, we’re sifting through our output, looking for hidden gems … or at least a fieldstone or two. (Lodestone, perhaps?) Why have we taken on this weighty project when there’s still so much good sleeping to be done? Glad you asked. It seems Marvin has been listening to the radio again. No just any radio …. national PUBLIC radio, as it happens (no, wait … that’s the CBC), and he heard a segment called … I don’t know …. “one hit wonders”, or something like that. Marvin doesn’t have speech, so I have to interpret his various flashing lights and rotating gears into pidgin English …. then into French, then back into English with a stopover in semaphore. So damn time-consuming!

It was on that little one down there. But it was STILL a big hit.

Anyway, Marvin thinks we might qualify as one-hitters because we had a hit record on Aldebaran. Personally, I think that’s kind of a stretch. Though I suppose, because Aldebaran is a binary star, it might actually count as two hits. Perhaps the song played backwards on its companion star, where everything is a perfect mirror image of what’s on the surface of the red giant itself. Or perhaps not. In any case, we never got a dime out of that particular success story, just a bucketful of radioactive goop that Mitch Macaphee got really excited about. Funny thing, that … just a week or so after he took possession of the goop, that bank he owed money to disappeared into thin air. So in a way, you could say that goop was good for something. It’s a foul goop indeed that doesn’t glow somebody some good.

Okay, well … this is getting us nowhere. Marvin, I really don’t thing NPR is going to be interested in our Aldebaran “hit”. I somehow can’t picture them playing “The Dino Song” to a national audience. (However, if you Big Green fans out there ask nicely, we will definitely play it for you. Just tweet at me @BigGreenJoe and we’ll get it done … somehow.)

Usual Rubbish

Lights out.

2000 Years to Christmas

So that’s what non-existence feels like. A little underwhelming, frankly. And I’m not a big fan of the tech support line hold music. Sheesh.

Howdy. Speaking for myself and the rest of Big Green (which, essentially, amounts to my illustrious brother and various bizarre hangers-on), I want to apologize most humbly for our little Web site outage over the last couple of days (February 12 – 13). Those of you who visit these pages regularly (all three of you) may have noticed an absence of …. well, anything on this and related domains during that time. Suffice to say we had a little dispute with ICANN over our true identity, which (of course) we have striven to keep secret so that we can continue to fight crime when called upon. That’s all I’m going to say about it. Now excuse me – the Bat Phone is ringing.

I know there are a lot of bloggers and self-managed web proprietors out there who have run into domain authentication issues like this and worse over the years, so I’ve got little to add to this common experience. All I can say is that, when you’re in the middle of an ambitious indoor agricultural initiative, highly reliant on robot labor, it’s a little disconcerting to have someone pull the plug on you because you gave them the wrong email address fifteen years ago. Fun fact: when this site goes down, the lights go out in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and we’re all frozen in place. Try calling a tech line in suspended animation! Good thing we have friends on the outside.

Oy! Who put the lights out?!

It’s just one of the drawbacks of being a virtual rock band: our existence is dependent on the availability of a reliable Web server, which, as any web proprietor knows, is simply an impossibility. That’s not the only link in the Big Green supply chain, of course. There’s the data input piece as well. Picture rows of chimps plunking at keyboards. Then there’s those two antenna like things with the electrical arc snapping between them – the one that Mitch Macaphee loves so damn much. In short, there’s a lot that goes into bringing this blog and our various podcasts into being. Sometimes there’s a break in the chain, and then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Makes you think.

Hey, what do I know, right? I’m just a guy who plays the piano and strums a guitar. All the science, I don’t understand. This ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids (up in). I got nothing.

Usual Rubbish

Yamtastic.

2000 Years to Christmas

There are a thousand and one practical uses for them, Mitch. You can eat them, for one thing. And if you wire them up right, you can use them as primitive dry cell batteries. That’s two. Just nine hundred ninety-nine to go.

Damn, it’s hard to talk a man of mad science into something that doesn’t involve explosions. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are currently in the midst of an agrarian revolution. We’re feeling our roots here in rural upstate New York. Why fight it, Big Green? You are people of the land. You are born of the soil, and you refer to yourselves in the second person. Did I ever tell you my daddy was a poor dirt farmer from up in the hills around Milford? Well, if I did, I was either drunk or more drunk. Dad grew some tomatoes and hot peppers in the backyard, that’s about it. (Oh, and there were those grape vines, but I digress.)

Okay, so we DON’T have the soil in our blood. What of it? We are simply living up to the promise implicit in our name. If we call ourselves Big Green, we should be cultivating green things in a big way. And now, with the advent of robot-driven agriculture, we can, in a sense, plant our cake and eat it too. Though I understand that cake is very hard to grow hydroponically. It takes a lot of sun, and when it ripens, you have to frost the whole crop or your yield goes right through the floor. I’ve seen many a good man flounder on the shoals of cake farming, my friend. Nope …. not for me.

Me bairns! Me poor bairns!

No, we’ve decided to go with sweet potatoes. That’s not entirely by accident (though most of what we do is). Our long time associate, the mansized tuber, is himself an overgrown sweet potato, and he has graciously consented to contribute some shoots to the cause. I’ve instructed Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to plant the shoots in such a manner as might be recommended by people who know how the hell to do this. Marvin duly checked YouTube, then started poking shoots into little pots, all lined up on tables in the dilapidated main assembly room. Before any of us knew it, he was raising a small army of mansized tubers …. only they weren’t yet man-sized, unless we’re talking about very tiny men. They were more mouse-sized. Give them a chance!

I don’t know where this is going, but I know this: our friendly mansized tuber is going to have a lot of company this spring.