Tag Archives: NASA

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.

Usual Rubbish

Running late.

I guess my alarm clock doesn’t work. Don’t understand it. I wound it up tight as a drum sometime last year. Stupid bloody thing. Oh, well.

Yeah, maybe we WON'T fly Antares.Sometimes it actually pays to be late. I’ll give you a for instance. There was this gig on Mars we booked for next month, and we were planning to take a private rent-a-rocket up there, having lost contact with our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee. That’s fine. Only the rocket is an Antares Orbital CRS-3. Yes, THAT Antares Orbital CRS-3. The same one that blowed up real good a couple of days ago. Oh, yes. That’s the flight you WANT to be late for.

I know what you’re going to say. It’s an orbital CRS-3, Joe, not an interplanetary CRS-3. What the hell are you doing, taking an orbital ship on an interplanetary journey of this type? Well, my friends …. I’m glad you asked that question. My answer may surprise you. In fact, the reason why we’re doing that is that, as I mentioned earlier, we no longer have our mad science adviser, so we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. As good a reason as any. Better than most, in fact.

So, probably just as well that we didn’t take the CRS-3 to Mars. Looks like it may not have made it there in one piece. That scotches the gig, though – it was the only ride in town, now that NASA isn’t lighting candles anymore. For those of you who complain that we never perform live, I offer you this rejoinder: we would have done, except that the Antares rocket blew up. How are we supposed to perform live when that rocket blew up?

All bands have some excuse for what they do and what they don’t do. Big Green is no different. I will never say never, but most of what we do now is in the studio, stitching podcasts together, recording ludicrous songs, and asking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do his imitation of Joseph Cotton. Our only explanation for such sloth is, well, rocket engine issues.

Usual Rubbish

Winging it.

Interstellar Tour Log: March 11, 2014
Planet #253 in NASA list. Out Rigel way.

Next stop on our random interplanetary tour – or if you prefer, interstellar tour 2014, sans itinerary – is planet #253 on the list NASA generated off of their recent survey. (Now, I’m Get off my planet.not an astrophysicist, but I do have some experience with market research, so I’m guessing that this was a phone survey, and that our old friend Waleed Abdulati, NASA’s head scientist, simply hired a phone bank and had them dial distant star systems at random and ask, “How many in your solar system?” “Do you have a companion star or dark matter object?” “Is s/he working?”)

Turns out, much more is known about these unknown worlds than NASA is letting on. We are slowly coming to the realization that all of the science fiction movies and T.V. shows of our youth were not fictional at all … they were fairly accurate depictions of OUTER SPAAAAACE. Old number 253 is a good example of that. Did you ever see Vampire Planet with John Carradine and what looked like a band of refugee actors from European porn movies? Hmmmm… thought not. Well, it was bad. Really bad. And it was apparently filmed here on #253. No performance venues. Just caves and dinosaurs … again.

Interstellar Tour Log: March 14, 2014
Planet #79 in NASA list. sFshzenKlyrn‘s neck of the galaxy.

Big GreenYeah, we’re over near the cluster of nebulosity which sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, calls home. He’s taken his leave for a few days to visit his mother, another etheric creature of undetermined shape and mass. Splooge off the old nebula, that’s our sFshzenKlyrn, and man, he can really smoke that telecaster. (Seriously, I’ve told him not to go through them like cheap cigars – we’re not made of money, you know.)

Planet #79 offers some attractions for a traveling band. Fairly reasonable accommodations (there’s a Motel 6 down here). There’s even a grounded electrical outlet in our room, so we can plug Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in to charge. As a cheap advertising ploy, we plugged in our portable stereo and blasted Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick from Matt’s iPod. That got us, well, arrested and fined, but it was worth the gamble. We’ll be playing in the lounge tonight.