Tag Archives: Songs in the Key of Rick

Usual Rubbish

Inside April.

Jesus, that’s god-awful. Turn that shit down, man! What the hell are you listening to, anyway? Some kind of reality show reruns? Oh …. it’s our podcast. Nevermind.

Okay, so we have this podcast, see? And it kind of sucks, see? But we’re proud of it anyway, so that naturally leads me to want to tell you all about the latest episode, hot off the presses here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Let’s take a look under the hood, shall we?

Item the First: Ned Trek XXIII – Doo-Dah Dancing – This episode of our post-modern satirical space opera (a bizarre-ass mashup of classic Star Trek, Mr. Ed, and the 2012 Presidential election) is loosely based on the 3rd season classic ST episode entitled “Turnabout Intruder”, in which Captain Kirk’s body is taken over by an ex-girlfriend/scientist – typical season 3 ridiculousness, and perhaps the most asinine episode ever. In this distorted version of that degraded reality, Captain Willard Mittilius Romney is forced to exchange consciousness with a one-time dance partner with ambitions to, dare she say it, take over the Free Enterprise and rule … the universe! Special appearances by Peter Lorre and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, among others.

That's freaking childish.Song: Aw Shoot, by Big Green – This song is from our 2013 album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. It’s a funky little number, somewhat reminiscent of the theme music from a bad 80’s foreign sci-fi film whose name I won’t mention. Scandinavian accents are kind of a giveaway.

Put the Phone Down – Matt and I discuss a range of issues touching on matters of vital importance to the future of humankind … NOT. Mostly some bad singing, talk of racist friends of the family, insults heaped upon the memory of Al Jolson, and so on.

Song: Poor Dick, by Big Green – Another selection from Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. This one tells a tale of Rick Perry taking desperate measures to save his pal Dick Cheney by procuring a replacement heart for the ailing Vice President, taking care not to pick one that pumped life-giving blood through the veins of a socialist. Rick finds the perfect donor: Breitbart! Hilarity ensues. Only song I know that uses “aveoli” in a rhyme scheme.

Usual Rubbish

Pod-where? Dunno.

Not a real good bookkeeper, I admit it. Never have been particularly good with numbers. Don’t know much about geometry. (There’s a song in this somewhere.)

Tubey and the stump in the courtyard.So what happened to the March podcast? Well, as you’ve guessed if you follow our various pointless postings in cyberspace, we have moved to a bi-monthly format, given the production demands of Ned Trek, particularly the musical episodes. We’re currently producing five or six songs for what will ultimately be the June episode, and we should be recording the April episode in a week or so. So … production is moving forward, but like Issa’s snail climbing Mount Fuji, it is proceeding “slowly … slowly.”

My illustrious brother had a cold for a couple of weeks, like half of humanity up here in the great frozen north country. He spends a good deal of his day outdoors, feeding and entertaining all manner of wild critters. Not so different from being in the restaurant business, actually, and you know how demanding THAT can be. In any case, that pushed our production schedule back a couple of weeks … enough time for Mitch Macaphee to flesh out our plan to start a Mars colony before the end of the decade. (Well, THAT certainly took a strange turn.)

That leaves us a brief opportunity to mark the return of Spring and all the traditional rites associated with it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has taken it upon himself to erect a maypole in the hammer mill courtyard. Sure, it’s only five feet tall … and yeah, he made it out of the remnants of a sawed-off telephone poll, but it’s a good conversation piece, at least, and now the mansized tuber has some companionship out there as the warmer months arrive. Spring is busting out all over.

Cowboy Scat on YouTube: We posted another couple of songs to the YouTube playlist. For any of you who haven’t heard the whole album, here’s how to give it a listen.

Usual Rubbish

Zero interest.

I tried calling them this morning. What was my response? Well … have you ever shouted down an abandoned mineshaft? It sounded kind of like that. Except hollower. Less content.

Mars? Too easy, man.Oh, hi. Welcome to the land of the great ideas. I’m Joe Perry (not of Aerosmith) of Big Green, and well … I am responsible for many of the “great” ideas. Why “great” in quotes? Those are litotes, and I use those when I’m being painfully ironic. Which is to say … our great ideas are not great at all. In fact, most of our ideas are just plain STUPID. But hey, if we let THAT stop us, we probably wouldn’t get out of bed in the afternoon. (Did I say afternoon? I meant … uh … morning.)

Right, so … the latest “great” idea was Mars Zero – our answer to Mars One, the private initiative to land a group of humans on Mars by the year 2025. Our first reaction to Mars One was, hell, we’ve done that already, and dozens of times. Just read our blog, folks. But of course, people seldom do, so they don’t know the full extend of what humankind has been able to accomplish in the name of art in space. (I use the term “art” loosely enough to include things like Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, our most recent album.)

So what’s the problem with Mars Zero, our own attempt to reach the red planet (where we’ve already done several tours) in five years, rather than ten? Well, it’s the anticipated crush of inquiries. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, is absolutely terrified that a flood of emails will infest our servers and cause them to crash, vaporizing all of his malevolent code. I keep telling him there’s nothing to worry about – that this initiative, like so many previous Big Green efforts, will likely fall flat. He’s excitable, see … that’s the problem with Mitch.

Cowboy Scat on YouTube: Even as we prepare for the worst on Mars Zero, I have managed to upload ten songs from Cowboy Scat to our YouTube channel. The video content is a cheap-ass slide show – this is mostly for the listening. So if you haven’t heard the songs all the way through, here’s how to do it. (I’ll upload the rest of the album over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.)