Tag Archives: Ned Trek Live

Usual Rubbish

Hot spot.

What the hell kind of itinerary is this? I have never seen a more incompetent attempt at organizing a freaking interstellar tour. Who put this bullshit together, anyway? Me? Oh … oh dear.

Well, as usual, I spoke too soon.  Not the first time. Honestly, I don’t know why my bandmates don’t look over my shoulder when I volunteer to do shit like this. After all, I’m just connecting dots on a map. I’m not a rocket scientist or anything. Sure, I used to launch Estes rockets when I was 10 or 11, but that was kind of a long time ago, and I think technology has moved on a bit since those days of cardboard tubes, butyrate dope, and solid fuel engines. Oh, and ignition wires. Yeah …. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has moved beyond those texts. He of all people should have known that what I was suggesting was just plain impossible.

Let me explain. The third leg of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 brought us to Sirius and then back to the great red spot on Saturn. All well and good, right? Trouble is, our next gig is on Saturday in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which I am now reliably told is nearly 200,000 light years away. Jesus. No wonder it looks small. Even pedal to the metal, it will probably take far longer than the rest of human history for us to get even halfway there.

Damn. Just imagine the size of the BIG one.

What’s worse, even if we were to make it the the Cloud by Saturday or several aeons after that, it’s a freaking galaxy that is itself about 7,000 light years wide, so it may take us a while to find exactly where we’re expected to perform. (My contact in the Cloud told me we couldn’t miss it, but then she or he is a transcendental being without form or persistent location in time-space, so everywhere is as close as it needs to be for that fucker.)

I hate to cancel a paid engagement, but unless we find a serious wormhole or radically rewrite the laws of physics in the next day or so, we may have no choice. Besides, that gig on Sirius was a serious pain in the butt, and the big Red Spot isn’t as hot as it used to be back in the day. Hell, the older it gets, the slower it turns, and well … there goes the electricity, my friends. So I’m for packing up and heading home. What about the rest of you? Show of hands? All in favor, say aye! Anyone for an aye? Don’t all speak at once.

Usual Rubbish

Cold comfort star.

Oh, Jesus … turn that thing up, Mitch. I’m just starting to get the feeling back into my fingers. No, I don’t want to burn them off, but geez … there has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

Well, hello, friends of Big Green. Time for another dispatch from our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, an interstellar romp across the indie club circuit from Neptune to … well … Epsilon Indie. Except we may not make it quite that far, given the limitations of our transport. Mitch Macaphee’s used saucer lot vehicle has very little living space and can’t carry a lot of fuel, so we’re doing short hops across the void of interstellar space, hoping to bring some down-home joy to the lonely denizens of the forgotten worlds scattered across our modest galactic neighborhood. We take turns watching the planets pass by through the one viewport our ship affords. This is plain clothes, my friends … nothing but the best.

Our gig on Barnard’s Star b (that’s not a typo … the planet is named “b”, for crying out loud) was okay, I guess. Kind of a chilly reception. The surface temperature on “b” is -238 degrees Fahrenheit, and the inhabitants of “b” …. the B-ings, if you will … are a bit like our Neptunian fans. Picture ice crystals with arms and legs. You might call them pseudopods instead of appendages, but that would make you a microbiologist. When we played Jesus Has A Known Mind, they swayed a bit. A few of them held lighters over their head-like projections. There was something that could be called dancing, but the B-ings movements are so subtle you probably need special instrumentation to detect it.

Looks inviting?

One thing I’ll say for the inhabitants of Barnard b …. they need to get themselves a new star. Barnard’s star is meek, man, really meek. I mean, I’ve had space heaters that radiated more warmth than that little beacon. It emits only 0.4 percent of our own sun’s radiant energy, it says here, so if you’re waiting for summer to get there, stop waiting … it ain’t coming. Anyway, we played our tunes, collected our quatloos, chipped our spacecraft out of an ice sheet, and got the hell out of there before they asked for an encore.

Next stop is Procyon, in Canis Minor. That’s a bit of a hike, especially in this dumb-ass heap. What’s more, our navigational computer failed two days out from Barnard, so we had to hook Marvin (my personal robot assistant) up to the control panel so that his 486 processor can tell our various rockets when to fire and when to stand ready. Ahem …. may be problematic. We’ll just see where we end up.

Usual Rubbish

Saint Barnard.

Captain’s log, star date May 17, 2019 … which just happens to be the same as today’s “Earth” date. Strange that those two calendars would coincide on this of all days! But no matter.

Yes, Big Green is currently en route to Barnard’s star, coming off a successful string of performances on Neptune (5/12) and on the third planetoid in the Proxima system (5/15). Tickets were pretty hard to get, so if you’re reading this you probably didn’t see either of those shows. Our performances were live-streamed, but given the vast distances from Earth, the stream won’t get to terrestrial devices until sometime in late 2027. (That’s what passes for “live” on an interstellar tour.)

So … the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 is off to a barn burner of a start, at least according to our publicist. Frankly, between the two of us, I consider any Neptune show I can walk away from a success. When your audience is submerged in a lake of frozen methane, it’s a little hard to tell how you’re going over. I thought I saw some movement when we played “Two Lines”, but it may have been a trick of the light. There’s a strange electromagnetic pulse that zaps through the methane, causing a greenish shimmer. I like to think of it as applause, but …. critics may differ.

Next came the Proxima system. We played on Proxima Centauri b, popularly known as Alpha Centauri (AC), the fabled destination of the Space Family Robinson, who took a wrong turn at Pluto and ended up in the worst kind of trouble television has ever seen. It’s a consensus among the Big Green crew that the Robinsons weren’t missing much when they gave AC a miss. Sure, it’s a rocky world, 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, and sure, it is inhabited by little blue space creatures who snap their finger-like appendages in time with the music. Okay, and the accommodations were better than expected. So … maybe the Robinsons SHOULD have gone there before going back to Switzerland. Who am I to judge?

Proxima? That's close.

Right about now I’m sure someone’s asking, “How’s the ship?” Well …. it’s adequate. Mitch Macaphee is somehow keeping it all together, which is a good thing, because Barnard’s Star is six light years away and we need to be there on the 20th or we forfeit about 4,000 quatloos. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) thinks the place is inhabited by St. Bernard dogs. He doesn’t spell so good. Or think so good.

Spaceward, my friends! Into the breach!