Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

Take down.

Calling all cars. One Adam Twelve. C-Q, C-Q. What the… – this thing is faulty as hell, Mitch! You call this emergency communications? I call it trash.

Well, as you might imagine, we’re trying to prepare for the worst here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Hurricane season is just starting, after all, and this has been the worst year for tornadoes for as long as anyone can remember. So we’re getting all of our ducks in a row. (Kind of an ongoing project, as they keep waddling away and we have to keep having to chase them and carry them back.) We found some old tent stakes in the basement just in case anything… needs staking… down.  Not sure when that’s likely to come up, but if it does, we’ll be ready. Then, of course, I’ve got some old tarps from my barnstorming days. Yeah, they’re moldy and motheaten, but we’re talking about emergency readiness here, not aesthetics. Get with the program!

Mitch Macaphee came up with some walkie talkies that we can carry around with us in case the lights go out. As you can tell from my earlier outburst, they don’t work so well. Not sure where he put his hands on the components. My suspicion is that he just bought them at a yard sale somewhere in town, probably from some 12-year-old entrepreneur willing to bilk an aging mad scientist. Hell, I used some of my best phony call signals, and nothing! Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) couldn’t copy me… and he was standing five feet away. (Perhaps his hearing circuits were on the blink. Another Mitch triumph.)

Our thought was emergency communications, of course. We’ve got some other measures we can take, too. Like running down the cellar. Sure, that’s where our studio is, but that’s okay – we can combine hiding from the storm with rehearsal. Should be a huge time saver this year, as it thundered and rained every day in May, I think. In fact, flood water was pouring down the basement stairs at a couple of points. I had to ask Marvin to act as a dehumidifier for a few days. (We just stuff him full of cotton wool and reverse the polarity on a couple of his cooling fans, then plant a bucket under him to catch the condensation. How easy is that?)

I know… we should treat Marvin better. We’re not nice. Guess it’s time we went back on the road again, work off some of this nastiness. Road trip!

Usual Rubbish

Air break.

All right – give it back. It’s my turn to use the gas mask. More than ten minutes counts as a “bogart”, right? Fifteen minutes? All right…

Yes, more strife here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, place of our birth, land of our fathers, and all the rest of it. What is Big Green up to this week? Gasping. Lots of gasping. As some of you may know (and many, I’m sure, don’t), May is the time of year when mad scientists tend to roll out all of their new world-destroying experiments. It’s in anticipation of the upcoming CrazyCom Mad Science Convention they hold in Madagascar every August. Everybody wants to show boat the new death ray, the improved zip gun, the killer robot, now with more sparks. Kind of a pissing match for high-tech cranks. Attend at your own risk. (The last one ended badly, I hear.)

Seriously, I hate this time of year. Mitch Macaphee always goes way over the top, trying to one-up the other mad scientists on the block (by “block”, they mean solar system… they’ve got a different name for everything). Last year it was an anti-gravity machine. I spent the better part of April sleeping on the ceiling. (And that was the better part.) The year before, some kind of trans-dimensional salad shooter, I believe – not his most ambitious endeavor, I must say. Close to ten years ago, he actually got an honorable mention for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who Mitch built from odds and spares in his one-room lab back in old Jakarta.

It’s a bit hard to get into the spirit of this competition, especially when Mitch’s obsession is sucking all the air out of the room. That’s not a metaphor: he has invented a machine that sucks all the air out of a room. Don’t bother trying to work out the practical applications for such a device – he is a mad scientist. What part of mad scientist do you not understand? He’s cobbled together some kind of contraption that’s belching black smoke as we speak. John thought to tap our old militant neighbor, Gung-Ho, for some surplus gas masks, but he could only spare one. Hence, the ensuing competition.

Hmmmm… what do you think? Can we hold our breath until August? We shall see.

Usual Rubbish

Plugging.

Another Web bucket to fill. Good grief, tubey! How many Web sites am I supposed to maintain? I’m the one with the arms, remember… and the cerebral cortex.

Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.

As always, money is a challenge. Copies of One Small Step are not exactly flying off the shelf on this planet (though I hear it’s moving quite briskly on Kaztropharius 137b, that nasty little planetoid that hosts us every year or so). It’s predictably hard to repatriate profits from other planets – that’s not surprising at all. They use a whole different kind of currency up there… not to mention a whole different kind of gravity, air, and background radiation. Hell, funds transfers are the least of it. If you’re a bank courier, you’re lucky to get out of there with your skin. Word of warning.

There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions. 

Note to Mitch: Your next invention should just be money. Just invent some cash, there’s a good chap.