Tag Archives: Qanon

Usual Rubbish

Dispatch from the string recycling center

2000 Years to Christmas

Hey … this one doesn’t have so much twang in it. No, not Tang! Twang! You know – the sound that doesn’t occur when you pluck this dead-ass string you gave me. That’s the stuff.

Yeah, hiya, folks. It’s your old pal Joe from Big Green. No, don’t get up – just relax and have another glass of lemonade. We believe in hospitality here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our longtime squat house. You’re more than welcome to stop by, take a seat, and watch us attempt to record pop music using stone knives and bear skins.

Friends of the band will know that I’ve been framming on the guitar just lately, as seen in my recent nano-concert on YouTube. I’m not a virtuoso, to put it mildly. In fact, I beat that mother like Betty Crocker, even when I’m practicing. That’s why I found myself in need of replacement strings.

The principle of scarcity

Now, with MOST bands, when someone breaks a string, someone else runs up with a fully stringed and pre-tuned spare guitar. The musician need not trouble him/herself with menial maintenance duties and can concentrate on the performance. The music deserves their FULL attention, and that is exactly what it gets.

Well, that’s not the way things work around the hammer mill. When i snap a string, I start looking for some old set I left lying around five years ago, then pirate it for a spare. We simply don’t have a running inventory of replacement strings – that would demand too much in the way of resources. And for all you macroeconomics students out there, that means strings are scarce, real scarce.

Doc takes a detour

Sure, I know what you’re thinking: we have a mad scientist at our disposal. Why not utilize his talents towards keeping our instruments in good working order? Well, aside from the fact that Mitch Macaphee never thinks of himself as part of our entourage, the fact is that he’s skipped town.

Where did he go? Way on down to Texas. He thought he’d slip into the Q-Anon subgroup rally in Dallas to see if JFK junior might be interested in underwriting some of his projects. (Yeah, I know …. I told him.) In the end, though, those Q-folks can spot a fed when they see one. Though I think what probably gave Mitch away was his decision to bring Marvin (my personal robot assistant) with him. Even in a crowd of crazy, that makes you kind of stand out.

Hey, is JFK Jr. behind that robot?

The Macaphee bail fund

From what I understand about Texas law, it may be illegal to have an unregistered automaton. If that’s the case, Mitch might wind up in the crowbar hotel. We may have to resort to GoFundMe or the like. Might not be a bad idea. Maybe we can use part of the proceeds to buy some freaking guitar strings.

Usual Rubbish

Porpoise in life.

I told you what I saw, Mitch. What else can I say? If you choose not to believe me, well that’s your affair. All I can tell you is that I know a primordial proto-whale when I see one, and I SAW one.

Oh, hi. As you can see, our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, and I are having a little scientific disagreement. I am making an empirical argument that primitive whale ancestors still roam the earth, whereas Mitch is advancing a kinetic argument of sorts. In other words, he threw a chair at me. Fortunately, my reflexes are still relatively sound for a man of my years and I was able to duck quickly enough to make it a near miss. Then came the brick bats. Let’s just say that I lost the argument, not so much on the merits. More on the bruises. Ouch.

I never suspected Mitch would get so worked up about the field of paleontology. He’s more of a physicist, chemist, bomb maker. You never know what he’s going to cook up next. Last week he was muttering something about somebody named “Q” he met on the internets. I think he’s been watching too many reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In any case, he’s been building armaments for some event that’s been on the horizon for some time. I know what you’re going to say … we should do something about him. Hey, look – when he shows up on the barricades with some kind of plastic bazooka, THEN call me.

There it is again. Hey, Mitch!While he’s been busy with that and Matt’s been busy with falcons, I’ve been woodshedding a bit, trying to teach my arms to play the piano again. (It’s faster than teaching your legs.) The archiving project is nearly complete, at least the part about digitizing songs from analog tapes. I still need to clean them up, sort them, etc. Some of them are pretty spare; others come with a vest and a second pair of pants. The whole nine yards, as they say. (I don’t know why they say these things.)

Oh, and we dropped an encore episode of Ned Trek at nedtrek.com. It’s episode #27, Who Mourns For Science (originally aired in Feb. 2016), which features a giant Carl Sagan. Can’t be bad, right? Give it a listen and let me know if it’s improved with age. (I know I haven’t. That’s why I think I’m seeing proto whales.)