Tag Archives: Ned Trek Live

Usual Rubbish

One man’s ceiling.

Oh, Jesus … not again. If you don’t quiet down, I’m going to call the police! What? Of course they’ll come. The cops don’t hold a grudge. And besides, I doubt they even remember that little note l left on their cruiser last year. It was a joke, for chrissake.

Ah, hello out there. Back to domestic bliss here in the formerly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I say “formerly” because in our absence during our Ned Trek Live Springtime Tour Extravaganza 2019, not only did snapping turtles move into our basement studio, but some even more combative creatures took up residence on the third floor of the mill. I send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) upstairs to find out what the commotion was all about, and he came back with an upside-down pitcher on his head. We then sent him back up there with a bundt cake Anti-Lincoln’s aunt Mildred made, but they weren’t having it. They threw our peace offering into the courtyard! (It made a crater on impact. Auntie Mildred should have shelled those walnuts.)

Okay, now … let’s just try to keep our heads, shall we? After all, we don’t own this mill. We just squat here, and frankly it’s selfish of us to think that we can have this place all to ourselves. Still, those folks are noisy as hell. They party on until the wee hours of the morning, pulling together drum circles and howling at the moon. At one point we though we could out-gun them with our PA equipment, but that was a joke – our main speakers are about 40 years old and sound like freaking kazoos. And those people don’t seem to mind the sound of kazoos. In fact, they might enjoy Matt’s early composition, the theme from Destination Space, played by an orchestra of kazoos (all tracked by Matt himself). Then again … perhaps not. So let’s find it and crank it up to eleven! THIS IS WAR!

Better have another word with them, Marvin.

Damn. I lost my head in the span of a single paragraph. These are trying times indeed, my friends. On days such as this I rely on the sage counsel of Antimatter Lincoln, a man  who has seen his share of hardship and sorrow, who has navigated the treacherous shoals of total warfare, who held onto his vision for a better world through the worst of times. Well … I mean, his doppleganger did, anyway. Anti-Lincoln did the opposite of all that stuff; he basically watched the Twilight Zone and ate TV dinners for a living before he met us. (That’s when he moved on to beef jerky.)

Arrrgh. There they go again! Where are my headphones?

Usual Rubbish

Lights out.

I thought I told you to pay the bill before we left. Well, if you did, why the hell is it sitting here on the counter? Riddle me that, Batman! WHAT? Well, of course you can’t see it. The lights aren’t on …  BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T PAY THE BILL.

Man god damn, now I have to give lessons on household finance. I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do one thing, ONE THING, before we set off on our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, and he screwed it up. I put the electric bill in front of him, hooked a pen into his prehensile claw, and told him to cut a check to National Grid, post haste. Nothing. And now we’ve come home from our less than triumphant interstellar tour to a dark hammer mill with a leaky roof and a family of turtles living in our studio. And no, they’re not subletting.

Yes, friends, we are back on terra firma, and none too soon. No, we didn’t get to the Small Magellanic Cloud. We kept flying towards it, hoping it would get a little bigger in our forward view screen, but no luck. Saturday came and went – that was the date of our gig – and so we chose to turn around. I asked Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist, to send off some kind of automated vehicle in our stead, with a letter of apology sealed in its nosecone. Well, he sent some kind of missile out towards the Small Magellanic Cloud, but I’m not certain what it was, exactly. I guess they’ll find out in a couple of hundred thousand years. (Sometimes surprises are pleasant … and sometimes … )

In the studio? Uh ... okay.

Back here on earth, everything went to hell, as you might expect. The hammer mill is in a shambles – exactly how we left it. Aside from the lack of electricity, the air seems a little thin in here, like it’s been on a hunger strike since we left. I was hoping the mansizedtuber would have looked after the place a bit in our absence, but damn it, you can’t get good help around here, even if you grow it in a planter. Speaking of planters, we almost went nuts cooped up in that tiny flying saucer. That SOB made the lunar module seem spacious. It also made the LEM’s computer system seem sophisticated. (It wasn’t.)

I would like to be able to say that we made a pile of quatloos on this tour and that we now have the means to make this place habitable. Yes, that would be a nice thing to be able to say … I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Usual Rubbish

Cloud nein.

Okay, so what are you saying, Mitch? I thought you knew how to drive a space ship. This is a hell of a time to tell me you were just pulling my leg. No, I don‘t have any prayer cards on me. What a stupid question!

For crying out loud, why … why does this happen every time we go out on tour? We map out an itinerary, we hire a spacecraft, we commandeer a space commander of some description, we set off with confidence, and then BOOM – everything goes to hell. Before we know it, we’re bobbing around uselessly in intergalactic space, light years beyond the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, hoping some alien freighter takes pity on us and trains a tractor beam on our pathetic, rusting hull. And I ask myself, is this why I got into this business?

Right, so … now that I got that out of my system. Someone (could be anybody … but probably was me) suggested that as part of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 we play this gig in the Small Magellanic Cloud, some 200,000 light years out yonder. Now, necessarily, such a journey would require the development of technologies previously unthought of by humankind. Recall the challenges NASA faced when JFK charged them with putting a white dude on the moon within the course of a single decade. Christ on a bike, they had to invent miniaturized computing, develop advanced rocketry, perfect the concept of staged spacecrafts, and the only help they got was untold billions of dollars in public funds and the advice of retired Nazi ballistic scientists.

At this rate, we should get there by the end of time.

They did it, though. And what have we got? Well …. one mad scientist. (Actually, right now I would describe him as just a little grumpy.) One supercomputer – Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a Pentium processor from 1995 humming away in his little brass noggin. And a second-hand flying saucer, salvaged from some boneyard on the outskirts of Roswell, NM. Pull all of those resources together, and nothing can stop you … from getting about three feet off the ground. We’re still working on that first light-year, so we’ve signaled ahead to the promoter on the Small Magellanic Cloud that we may be a little late. Unfortunately, our message is traveling a bit more slowly than us – I can just about see it through the rear window.

Did NASA say uncle when things went wrong? Hell no. But then … maybe they should have. UNCLE!