Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

Anudder home.

Where did I put my html tags? I thought I packed them with my socks, but they don’t appear to be in there. WFT, man…. getting a new home is always such a pain.

No, friends. We have not abandoned the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That would be something you might expect from the department of redundancy department (of redundancy). We have, however, abandoned our old web site and moved into a new one, designed by, I don’t know, professional web designers… as opposed to my sorry ass, who threw together our last site with Front Page and some tweezers … not to mention some cracked old photo manipulation software. Yeah, that’s right. Do I have to draw you a picture? (Actually… that would have been better than what came out of that software.)

Anywho… out with the old, in with the new. We’ve been using WordPress for Hammermill Days (and, earlier, Notes from Sri Lanka) for over five years, and so we thought, hey, why not build the whole freaking site using the same software? It actually works, you can edit it from anywhere using a Web browser…. How easy is that? Too easy! That’s what Mitch Macaphee says. Being a mad scientist, he thinks things should be hard … at least as hard as building Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was. Sure, he built Marvin out of spare parts and bric-a-brac he had lying about his lab, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. Building a sentient being never is, my friends.

Now, the cynical and suspicious-minded amongst you (and you all know who you are) will imagine that this web site face lift is all about our supreme ambition to become special assistants to inevitable president-elect and future king of the moon Newt Gingrich; that we somehow abandoned and discarded our illin’, aging old web site for a shiny, sexy younger one, like … well, like … something some politician did once. That is a dirty lie. Fact is, we have already been invited by Newt Gingrich – future president and current Lincoln in his own mind – to advise him on interplanetary relations including, most specifically, his plans for our nearest neighbor in space. In point of fact, we will be a bit like the late Richard Holbrook, who was given the Af-Pak portfolio. (We will be in charge of the Moon, Mars, and Saturn, so it might be called the LunaMaSa portfolio, in media culture shorthand-speak.)

So anyway… welcome to Big Green’s new home on the Web. Take a look around. Kick the tires. Leave comments. Move in to one of the pages and order expensive dinners. Glad to have yuh.  

 

Usual Rubbish

Luna, oh, Luna.

How much does the moon weigh? I don’t have an answer to that, for chrissake. What am I, a freaking scientist or something? Go ask Mitch Macaphee. What? He told you to ask me? Mother of pearl…

Oh, hi. Was wondering when you would drop by. Not the best time, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. We’re working on our proposal to the Gingrich campaign to be their official liaison to the Moon people and their special counsel on all matters Moonly. This is an ambitious move for Big Green – certainly as bold as our attempt to glom onto the W. Bush campaign and presidency way back in 2000 (the distant future… the year 2000…). That started with something as humble as sharing an interstellar tour bus with the man himself, but resulted in our brief but fruitful installation into the corridors of power. (We still have some of the fruit from that little sojourn, though it’s a tad ripe now.)

Right, so anyway … back then it was clear that Bush would be the nominee. This time, it’s clear that Gingrich will be the NOMinee. I mean, he said so himself, right? And is he ever wrong? I’ll ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) … if he ever gets his head out of his ass. But I digress. Come the inevitable Gingrich presidency, our nation’s relations with the Moon will occupy center stage. He will need the best advice available, and who better to tap for that particular responsibility than the Hammermill team, right? We’ve performed on the Moon. Moon people are our people.

That said, I was a little surprised to receive this request for proposal (RFP) from the Gingrich group. Do we really need to substantiate our wild claims with fact? What kind of a world is this becoming? In any case, we are being asked to demonstrate our knowledge of Earth’s nearest neighbor in space on the most rudimentary level imaginable. How much does the moon weigh, for pity’s sake. As any expert know, that depends on what phase the moon is in. Right now, it’s close to full, so its weight today is going to be a hell of a lot greater than when it’s in first quarter phase, right? Any Earthbound knucklehead knows that. But can anyone write you a slamming anthem? One that will appropriately accompany your pressure-suited legions when you conquer the moon?

Okay… clearly I’ve said too much. It wouldn’t do for Newt’s plan of lunar domination to gain to great a currency prior to his inevitable election, so … keep it under your hat for now. There’s a good chap.

Usual Rubbish

Lock, stock, and barrel.

Is that the time? Right – time to close up for the day. It’s 4:20 in the afternoon and I’ve been slaving away for nearly half an hour. Shut it down.

Woe is he who must labor in vain. I don’t know what that means, but whatever… your friends in Big Green are proprietors for the nonce. That means we have proprietary interests, perhaps for the first time in our lives. And you know what they say… as soon as you get a stake in the world, it’s all over. Kiss your altruism goodbye, my little scaly friend. Forget your deeply held values – this is cash, Jimmy-boy, cold hard cash! To hell with all that other stuff. All we care about is pushing product out the door at a tidy profit.

What products? Hey…. whatever comes flying out of that hole to China. Mitch Macaphee burned a tunnel through the earth so clean, it doesn’t even whistle when it spins (and it should). Now it’s like one of those air-tube delivery systems in an old department store. On the other end, probably just outside the gates of a Foxcon plant, somebody’s dropping consumer items into a hole … and they come flying out of the opening in our forge room floor moments later. It’s a tunnel to the bank, my friend.

Okay, so… on our marketing advisor Noname’s recommendation, we opened a storefront in the Mill that we’re calling, “GREENMART”. People come in with plastic shopping carts they borrow from the supermarket up the street and load up on cheap swag built by slave labor – an all-American pastime if ever there was one. (And there was one.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been working the cash register, so to speak. Actually… there is no cash register. Marvin just does the calculations using his own processor unit, then spits out a receipt. He even takes major credit cards, which is news to me. (If I’d known that during our last tour, I would never have hocked my Bean Boots for that hoagie back on Neptune.)

Yes, I know… this is like selling stuff that fell off the back of a truck. Where’s the outrage? Ask Bob Dole.