Tag Archives: podcast

Usual Rubbish

20 questions.

No, the moon is NOT a planet, nor a star. And you may THINK you just saw an ankylosaurus, but they died out 65 million years ago during the late Cretaceous. Don’t you know anything?

Christ on a bike, what the hell am I, anyway, a grade school teacher? How is it that people (and robots … and sentient oversized vegetables) can reach adulthood without knowing all this stuff? We may live in a very sheltered environment here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (and I use the word “sheltered” very, very loosely here), but some light does peek in through the crack in the wall, and a bit of the real world does seep into our isolation. Once in a while. Happened last year, as a matter of fact.

You know what it’s like when it’s the dead of winter and you spend a stretch of days indoors – nothing but you, your personal robot assistant, and a man-sized tuber. Idle minds run in neutral. Ends up being a long game of 20 questions, for chrissake. But you have to keep the kids entertained, right? Otherwise, they start busting the place up. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might try his hand at plumbing. That’s all anybody needs. (If that happened, I’d have to get the ankylosaurus after him.)

It's probably just a big dog, MarvinIt’s not all fun and games, you understand. Matt and I have been hard at work on another crop of songs that will be featured in the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek parody we include in our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. We’re talking maybe five or six new songs, not sure exactly. It’s a bit like baking for the holidays. Some things come out right, others go into the compost heap. For Big Green, when a song goes flat in the middle of tracking it, we chop it up and put it into the mansized tuber’s flower pot. There’s usually enough nitrates in there to perk him up for a few hours. Waste not want not.

So, yes … Keep your eyes peeled. Not for stray late-Cretaceous throwbacks … for the next episode of our podcast. Should be coming through any … week, month … whatever.

Usual Rubbish

Old home week.

You can’t just look through the telescope. You have to squint really hard to see them. That’s because, well, they’re either really, really small or really, really far away.

What are we doing now? Good question. Aside from working on yet another episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our somewhat-monthly podcast, we are trying to catch up with some of the incidental characters in the shaggy dog story of our lives. Isolated from the world as we may be here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, buried in a mountain of snow, we still have a fitful internet connection and at least one hand free. We can track down pretty much anyone on the other end of that “series of tubes” known as the Web. (Precious little else we can accomplish, at least until Spring.)

For instance, what is Mitch Macaphee doing? Well … a quick investigation using various search engines turned up next to nothing. So I guess what I said in the last paragraph is not entirely true, at least when it comes to the nut jobs that hang around with this band. In any case, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) suggested clicking on Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device and just shouting Mitch’s name into the swirling space-time vortex it creates. We did that and, interestingly, heard back almost immediately. He’s in Colorado. I don’t think I probably have to tell you why. (Things usually look a little cloudy through the time portal, but I don’t think that’s the reason we could barely see the guy.)

The Pillars of CreationThen there’s sFshzenKlyrn, our occasional sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon. It seems sFshzenKlyrn has gotten back together with his old band, “The Pillars of Creation”. I didn’t actually find that out from him directly. They apparently did another photo shoot with NASA, using the Hubble Space Telescope. (I hear they’re doing a promo spread in Sky and Telescope). If you look closely, you can see how sFshzenKlyrn has changed over the past couple of years. A little older, a little wiser, a little cloudier, perhaps.

So, sure … keeping our hands busy, our minds engaged. Recording new numbers. And calling old friends out of the blue. Sounds like winter to me.

Usual Rubbish

Pulling it together.

Holy Moses. Where did all this snow come from? The sky? That’s where it ordinarily comes from. There have been exceptions, sure, but … how likely is that?

Now, that's a better fit, tubeyWell, here we are. First days of the year and we’re already snowed in. Mountains of the stuff piled up against the front door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Just as well that it’s relatively congenial in here, that is if you don’t mind being cooped up with crazy people. There’s Matt, of course, though he mostly occupies himself with tending the wild creatures and feathered friends. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) does have some annoying habits, much as I’ve tried to program them out of him. (I’m not a scientist – I just play one on the internet.)

The most troublesome companion we have in the Mill is anti-Lincoln, the antimatter doppelganger of the Great Emancipator, who was chrono-teleported into our midst some years back by Mitch Macaphee, using Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating device. The device is, shall we say, a less-than-optimal time portal/matter transportation gizmo, so it made an antimatter copy of Lincoln as he was passing through the wormhole on his way to his future, our present. Lincoln has since returned to his Civil War glory days, while anti-Lincoln has remained behind to vex us unceasingly. Arrogant, selfish clone!

Our companion the man-sized tuber is not that bad, though he does require some tending. He had retired to the courtyard and was beginning to take root, but his retirement planning didn’t take Winter into account, and as the days grew colder, he yanked himself out of the ground and rolled back inside, taking his place in a terracotta planter we had lying around. Of course, one of us has to bring him water, plant food, reading material, etc. He’s been asking for wi-fi lately. I keep telling him, just get a freaking data plan, but he won’t listen.

Right, so … distractions aside, we are planning the next phase of Big Green’s conquest of the universe. Well … not the WHOLE universe; just one little tiny corner of it. Namely, this web site, where the next episode of our podcast will appear at some point. Come snow or high water.