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Next stop: who knows?

Interstellar Tour Log: February 19, 2014
An unnamed rock garden in deep space, somewhere east of Jupiter

Big GreenWell, once again, we were sold a bill of goods. I think we’ve got some canned peas in there, maybe a little hard tack, some burlap sacking material (in case we have sack races), a jar of peppermints for the children, and an oil lamp. Who knew there was a general store on Ceres?

Aside from that, though, we were given bad advice. That Mr. Nerim character wasn’t telling us the truth at all. Apparently, hydrofracking is not utterly harmless. My evidence? Ceres, the alpha asteroid – the big brass buckle in the asteroid belt – is now a little smaller than it was when we arrived. Fact is, part of the asteroid was blown to bits and hurled into deep space. And as luck would have it, it was the part that we were camping out on.

So when old Nerim pushed the plunger on his cartoon-TNT detonator rig, it sent that side of Ceres (and our sorry asses) on a journey of undetermined length and destination, our battered rent-a-spaceship floating in a swarm of asteroid fragments, some the size of a house. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is beginning to regret having accompanied us on our Interstellar Tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. His rationality processor must be working properly.

Oh yes, one more thing …  YAAAAHH!

Interstellar Tour Log: February 21, 2014
Orbit of Jupiter, gas giant

Let's check it out, man. (You first.)Well, after several days of drifting aimlessly, we appear to have settled into orbit around Jupiter, the bull moose of the outer solar system. Our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFhzenKlyrn, has volunteered to visit the surface of the gas giant to see if there are any performance opportunities, since we’re in the neighborhood. I’d go myself, but alas, I require oxygen and Earthlike temperatures, to say nothing of solid ground. Sure, we’ve played the Great Red Spot before, but that was back in the day. (It’s probably a gas station now, like most of the clubs we played back then.)

Usual Rubbish

What the frack?

Interstellar Tour Log: February 12, 2014
The still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Greetings from camp slag! As you can see from the subject line of this dispatch, Big Green and entourage are still stranded here on alpha asteroid Ceres, here in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a veritable no man’s land of broken planets and random shards of rock, careering through an airless void in an endless race to hell. (Sounds like my morning commute, actually.)

Readers of this asinine blog will know that Big Green, in the third leg of its Interstellar Tour 2014 to support galactic sales of our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, had performances booked in the system of Sirius, the dog star. Trouble was, our GPS navigation system – Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – got the names mixed up in his tiny 1978 Texas Instruments calculator of a brain, and ended up sending us to this lifeless slag in space. It’s a bit like camping out, except without the fun (if you think camping’s fun). The weird thing is, not only is there no where to play on this rock, but there’s no one freaking here, period! I was expecting a hard rock cafe or something, at the very least.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 14, 2014
The still, still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Hmmm. It seems I spoke too soon a couple of days ago. There is somebody else here. Anti Lincoln was taking his morning constitutional the other day (he has this thing about the Constitution … he takes it everywhere!) and he ran across a little mining operation on the other side of the asteroid. Looks like Halliburton / Brown and Root has somehow secured mining rights up here, as well. (They say it’s part of Obama’s See? Solid as a rock.“all of the above” approach to energy production and development … so I guess that means everything above the Earth’s surface is up for grabs.) They’re apparently fracking the place. I know, because Anti-Lincoln got a job working the bilge pumps. (They also let him handle burning off the gas leaks. He has a lot of practice with that.)

That puts us in an awkward position. Broken spacecraft, under repair, and intensive fracking operations going on. But it’s okay: the project supervisor, a Mr. Nerim, tells us that this asteroid is made of layer upon layer of solid rock soooo thick you could lay a burning sun on its surface, and the sun would just burn itself out and leave the asteroid untouched. So I guess we’ve got some time.

Plug: Hey, if you haven’t heard the February podcast yet, give it a listen. Cheap laughs, and plenty of ’em. Check it out.

Usual Rubbish

Remote podcast rundown.

We return to the ongoing saga of Big Green’s Interstellar Tour 2013-14: Cowboy Scat goes galactic.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 5, 2014
Unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

After a solid week on the surface of this, well, remarkably solid asteroid (a crust of solid titanium! … or so my geologically impoverished mind/brain tells me) we’re coming to the realization that this is not so brief a layover in our Interstellar Tour 2013-14. Given this reality … and the fact that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is insisting that I do so, I will take a few moments to share my usual dissection of our recently distributed podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN – now with more Green!

Anyway, here’s what we have for the February podcast,* posted only days ago:

Ned Trek XVI: A Mock Time
Yes, believe it or not, we are on the 16th episode of this ludicrous audio remake of several failed sixties television shows, starring Willard Mittilius Romney as Captain Romney of the Starship Free Enterprise, and his first officer, Mr. Ned the dressage horse (loosely based on Mr. Ed). This month parodies the classic Star Trek episode “Amok Time,” when Spock gets the seven year vulcan itch in the worst way imaginable. Our take involves dancing, insults, and an enormous pile of dung … so it’s not so different from the original. Enjoy! That’s an order!

Put The Phone Down
Matt and I engage in our usual random conversation about changing Matt’s name to “Oliver Remote Control”, why Andy Williams never did a special with us, and how many times worse than Neil Sedaka we truly are. We also remember Pete Seeger, friend of the planet, and discuss our plans for the Super Bowl (which Matt was planning to flush this year).

I'm being played by a talking horse, Jim!Song: Paradise
We’ve played this one on the podcast before. This is a remake of a song Matt wrote in the 90s, part of a larger, kind of slow-mo effort on our part to reclaim at least a portion of the hundreds of songs we recorded for cassette distribution back in the day.

Song: Kublai Khan
Another retread of an older number; this one with shades of Reverend Moon. Written around the same time as Paradise, actually.

That’s the show, in essence. Now … if someone could ship about a dozen box lunches to Ceres, and maybe a cylinder of fireplace matches. Just follow the gas cloud rising from the asteroid’s surface. It’s freaking cold out here.

(*Editor’s Note: those of you hunting for evidence of a January podcast, your hunt is in vain. The February TIBG installment is actually a resuscitation of our January podcast, which got lost in all that discarded wrapping paper. January’s a chaotic month for us, too!)