Tag Archives: Neptune

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!

Usual Rubbish

Get ready.

Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Our sorry asses to perdition. Prepare for launch sequence start. Roger! Roger! Stay away from that engine nozzle! Man, that guy’s an idiot. I don’t understand how he ends up on every mission.

Well, we’re about to launch our spring Interstellar Tour, which we’ve dubbed the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019.  Not a moment too soon, I should add. It’s getting pretty strange down here on planet Earth, and we’d just as soon watch the various developments from a safe distance of maybe 75 light years. From that remote prospect, all of the cares and woes of human kind are reduced to a mere point of light. A sobering thought … unless you’re drinking that basement hooch Mitch Macaphee has been working on recently. Not one of his better experiments. Speaking as someone who’s about to embark on a perilous deep space excursion in a ramshackle craft, I can say I’m more afraid of imbibing that noxious beverage.

Yes, we did secure transport. It’s a used saucer someone abandoned in exchange for something much, much better.  Mitch picked it up from some used car dealer, caulked up all of the gaps, and it appears to hold air pressure for the most part. Then there’s the engines, and well … they’re a little vintage. There are some rudimentary sleeping quarters, a kitchenette, strangely one of those snack fridges where you get charged five bucks for a Snickers bar. (It shows up on your bill.) There appear to be navigational controls, some direction-finding devices, a few dozen flashing lights, and an old reel-to-reel machine done up to look like a computer. We’ve loaded our gear in and we’re going through a list of final checks before liftoff. (Hey … I never saw that check before!)

How about this little Jewel, Mitch? Just one owner ...

So … we’ve got two days to get to Neptune. And really, we shouldn’t merely arrive on time. It’s awfully hard to find the venue down in that mass of impenetrable atmosphere. Oh, and the Neptunians don’t appreciate tardiness. Come to think of it, they don’t appreciate much of anything … including our music. Why they keep hiring us I could not say. I think it’s because we’re cheap and we provide our own transportation. As you can imagine, being one of the outer planets, they go to great expense to import just about anything, and that includes music. In any case, just a short stop there, then it’s off to the next solar system over … Proxima something or other. Can’t miss it. Just take a right at the Kuiper Belt.