Tag Archives: robots

Poditis.

How do you spell XML again? Does it rhyme with “smell”? No coincidence, I suspect. Jesus christ on a bike. Technology is for fools. And forever a fool I shall be.

Oh, hi. Just got done cobbling together this month’s episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our notorious podcast, and placing it online with the technological equivalent of stone knives and bearskins. My approach to programming is akin to placing several monkeys at computers loaded with self-peeling banana screensavers. Trial and error… but mostly trial. Anyway, it got done, and that’s just as well, because this month’s episode is chock full of something. Yes, friends, it’s full of ingredients. It contains contents. Should I draw you a picture?

Right. You’ll see from the program notes that there are not one but TWO new songs from Cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas. These are two more in a series of “first draft” recordings that will comprise (in a more finished form) Big Green’s upcoming album, tentatively named Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Our cousin has inspired an album’s worth of material, to be sure, including one jaunty little number called “Awesome Hair”:

It once adorned Reagan, now on your head it sits
and not on that wanna-be latter day Mitt’s.
When you’re nonsensically talking, it especially fits
If anyone tries to muss it up, you mess with their shit.

Pure audio dynamite, that’s what that is.

Thankfully, things were a little quieter around the hammer mill this week. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) finally gave up any idea of going to robot camp for the summer. “Just because all of the neighbors’ robots are doing something,” I heard myself telling him, “that doesn’t mean you have to do it, too. If they all rolled into the car-crusher, would you follow them?” At that point, Marvin emitted a metallic cluck and rolled his eyes. I just can’t say anything right, it seems. (He’s at that difficult age when robots start pushing the boundaries a little bit. )

One other thing about the podcast, before I forget. You might want to listen to it with something running in the background, like maybe an espresso machine. That would give a better sense of what’s going on in our heads when we record it. Just a suggestion.

 

Lights out.

Must be the generator, Mitch. Did you use that nefarious contraption again? Probably pulled too much current, and now look at us. Clueless and in the dark. What’s new, eh?

Yes, my friends. More power issues here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That long extension cord I had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) run from the pizza place across the street? Well, someone discovered it, unplugged it, etc. Last time I order a pizza from those cheapskates! And when we found an alternative power source (i.e. the antique store on the other side of the alley… their back door latch is a little unreliable), what happens but Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, decides to crank up the old Orgone Generating Device in the basement where Trevor James Constable left it years ago, and… and… well, I hate when that shit happens.

This always happens when we’re between tours. People get bored, start looking for distractions. For the two Lincolns (posi and anti), it’s Yahtzee – game after game of freaking Yahtzee. No wonder they lost the war! (Home schooling… what can I tell you?) For the mansized tuber, it’s that stupid ant farm he got for Christmas. (He just loves to watch the little guys dig tunnels.) For Matt, it’s running around after wild animals with bags of seed and video cameras. Johnny White? He’s all about flying aeroplanes. Mitch Macaphee’s tastes, however, are a bit more exotic. Time travel, the thirst for limitless power, formulating theorums to destroy galaxies …. idle hands, you know. So he fires up the old Orgone Generating Device, blows a fuse next door, and now I can’t even post a podcast, for chrissake.

Then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his latest obsession. He picked up my Harper’s magazine the other day, thumbed through it, and read a statistic about how many robots there are in the world today. Not counting household appliances, it’s apparently in excess of one million – that’s right, more than a million automatons in the world today! Well, this hit Marvin like a truck. “I am not alone” I heard him repeat to himself in standard, monotonous robotian fashion. That’s what he’s been up to. Wheeling around the mill, Harper’s issue in hand, muttering to himself. What’s next? Will he find a nice, wind-up pen pal? Will he volunteer for the Romney campaign?

Well, that’s all I’ve got. My between-the-tours pastime, somewhat less enjoyable, is trying to keep the lights on in this freaking dump. Any suggestions on where I should run this extension cord next?

Hey, check it out – new January episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. You’ve been warned.

Air break.

All right – give it back. It’s my turn to use the gas mask. More than ten minutes counts as a “bogart”, right? Fifteen minutes? All right…

Yes, more strife here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, place of our birth, land of our fathers, and all the rest of it. What is Big Green up to this week? Gasping. Lots of gasping. As some of you may know (and many, I’m sure, don’t), May is the time of year when mad scientists tend to roll out all of their new world-destroying experiments. It’s in anticipation of the upcoming CrazyCom Mad Science Convention they hold in Madagascar every August. Everybody wants to show boat the new death ray, the improved zip gun, the killer robot, now with more sparks. Kind of a pissing match for high-tech cranks. Attend at your own risk. (The last one ended badly, I hear.)

Seriously, I hate this time of year. Mitch Macaphee always goes way over the top, trying to one-up the other mad scientists on the block (by “block”, they mean solar system… they’ve got a different name for everything). Last year it was an anti-gravity machine. I spent the better part of April sleeping on the ceiling. (And that was the better part.) The year before, some kind of trans-dimensional salad shooter, I believe – not his most ambitious endeavor, I must say. Close to ten years ago, he actually got an honorable mention for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who Mitch built from odds and spares in his one-room lab back in old Jakarta.

It’s a bit hard to get into the spirit of this competition, especially when Mitch’s obsession is sucking all the air out of the room. That’s not a metaphor: he has invented a machine that sucks all the air out of a room. Don’t bother trying to work out the practical applications for such a device – he is a mad scientist. What part of mad scientist do you not understand? He’s cobbled together some kind of contraption that’s belching black smoke as we speak. John thought to tap our old militant neighbor, Gung-Ho, for some surplus gas masks, but he could only spare one. Hence, the ensuing competition.

Hmmmm… what do you think? Can we hold our breath until August? We shall see.