Tag Archives: Plywood 9000

Usual Rubbish

Thrust.

Did you guys hear that sound last night? Maybe about 3 a.m., I don’t know. It was raining like hell, I think – pounding on the windows like a freaking hammer. At least I think that’s what it was. Either that or a … a … rocket lifting off …

Well, that last paragraph is a depiction of what I sounded like when it first dawned on me that our leased Plywood 9000 rocket was hijacked in the middle of the night. As some of you recall, just before Thanksgiving we were preparing for a brief tour of some lesser known planets that don’t get a lot of respect, like KIC 8462852. That appears to have been, well, scuttled. And while the Plywood 9000 is not what you might call luxury transportation, it apparently was functional enough to be stolen.

Who is the thief? Can’t be 100% sure, but the fact that Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has disappeared probably isn’t a coincidence. I think he was getting a little tired of our antics, or lack of same – it’s been weeks since we first discussed this tour and still no action. The man just hates waiting around, particularly when there are discoveries to be made. Who can blame him? No one likes waiting, least of all a mad scientist. And when it became obvious that the Trump administration was not going to tap him to be Chief Scientist at NASA, he did seem to be weighing his options.

Hey, man ... what's that noise?That means we have a mad scientist on the lamb. Or on the rent-a-rocket, to put a finer point on it. I think his ultimate destination will be the newly discovered planet KIC 8462852 (and no, I don’t mean it was discovered by Anthony Newly), but there are a lot of potential stops between here and there. So I’m just putting this out there: if you astronomers, amateur or professional, notice any unusual activity on the outer planets, particularly Jupiter (about which Mitch has harbored a strange fascination for many years), notify us immediately. Use the comment form on this blog post, or send us a note by snail mail to … well, just write “Big Green, Cheney Hammer Mill” on the envelope – we’ll get it.

Fuck all. Then there’s the lease payment for the Plywood 9000 rocket. DAMN YOU, MITCH!

Usual Rubbish

Last one out.

Try moving it to the other side of the tail fin. No, not that one! The dorsal tail fin! Okay, now hit it with a hammer a few times. Nothing? Hmmm …. how about if we light it on fire. Sometimes that helps.

Oh, damn. I didn’t realize I was typing this all into our blog. (I think that’s called auto-typing.) Well, as you can tell, Big Green is working furiously to get our rented Plywood 9000 space rocket ready for launch before the election on Tuesday, when all hell is likely to break loose. At least, that’s what the little voices in my head tell me. There are times when you feel compelled to stay and fight the good fight, and then there are those other times when you … well … decide to take a rented rocketship to another planet. That’s a hasty decision, I know, but again … those persistent little voices!

Seriously, I am looking forward to a perhaps non-remunerative jaunt out to the Kuiper belt if only to free ourselves from the pressures of terrestrial life. You have no idea how much maintenance an abandoned Hammer Mill requires. If you’re wondering why we haven’t put out a new episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN in nearly two months, there’s part of your answer, my friend. At least on planet KIC 8462852 we might find time to finish a project here and there. And my guess is that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) won’t have to worry about being apprehended by Trump’s ICE deportation force. (He has nightmares about that stuff.)

Is that really where the fin goes on this thing?Sure, we’ve had our head down with music production just lately. Matt and I are working on 7 songs for release on the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek political parody that comprises the core of our TIBG podcast. You might say, 7 songs! That’s practically a freaking album, man! Why don’t you just put out another album, freak!? Well, first of all …. don’t call me “album freak”. I don’t deserve that. After all, we haven’t put out an album in three years. (And our LAST album was Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, so technically we haven’t put out a sane album in eight years.) What was I saying again?

Right. Spacecraft maintenance can make your mind wander. Check back a little later this week when I don’t have a monkey wrench in my fist. (That’s what I’m doing wrong! I need a rocket wrench!)

Usual Rubbish

Serious gravity.

Well, maybe a larger booster rocket would help. Or some tightly wound springs. Then there’s the lever option, like a catapult – give me a lever large enough and I will move the world, that sort of thing. No? Okay, never mind.

Oh, hi. Yes, we’re grappling with the same conundrums that so vexed our predecessors in flight – how to defeat that old devil gravity. It’s a little hard to imagine being able to reach planet KIC 8462852 without finding some way to break the surly bonds of Earth, whatever that means. Sure, it would be easier for Big Green to just give in and start doing terrestrial tour dates, packing ourselves into a multi-colored school bus and teetering down the road to Springfield and Lodi and East Aurora (unless we get stuck in Lodi … again …), but that would be an abandonment of all we hold dear. And in all frankness, gravity would still be vexing us! (Especially after a particularly long night.)

The other day, a big semi backed up to the front gate of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) and dropped an enormous cardboard box with Mitch’s name scrawled on the side. We had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) haul the thing into the courtyard as a precautionary measure – it was ticking and smelled vaguely of sulfur, so I certainly didn’t want to touch the sucker. Well, it turns out that the box contained our ride to the Khyber Belt: the promised Plywood 9000 space rocket we rented from SpaceY, some assembly required. It’s here, it’s here!

So that's it, then, is it?Mitch Macaphee retreated into his lab and began tinkering with the thing, and just yesterday morning I awoke to the sight of a nosecone peaking over the courtyard wall. He managed to piece the thing together, but there were apparently a few parts missing. Engines, for one. (Or more precisely, for four, since there are supposed to be four of them.) Being a mad scientist, Mitch took this as a kind of challenge. Whereas any sane person would just phone the company and tell them to send the missing parts, he started adapting some odd pieces of technology he had lying around his workbench. There was that anti-gravity device he tinkered with a few years ago, for instance.  Then there’s that big blow-dryer he invented.

So, I don’t know. Maybe a big catapult is more practical. If you have random thoughts on advanced interplanetary propulsion, please send them here.