Tag Archives: spacecraft

Usual Rubbish

Ice ball diary.

Break out the ice cube tray. I need to warm my hands up over it. Yeah, that’s better. It’s all relative, my friends.

Ned Trek, the podcastWell, here we are, out on GJ 1132b on the first and final leg of our Fall 2015 Tour, entitled BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT), brought to by Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (Slogan: If it says Hegemonic, you know it’s for keeps.) Hey, nobody told us it would be this freaking cold out here, way beyond the limits of our solar system. That’s probably because nobody asked. In any case, we’re here on this frozen piece of real estate, some 39 light years from Earth, trying to chip a performance venue out of the rock-solid CO2, and having very little success I’m sorry to tell you.

How is the tour going? Well … let me put it this way. Have you seen the movie “The Martian”, by any chance? How about “Marooned”? If not, the essential point is this: never rent a spacecraft from a dodgy neighbor of Mitch Macaphee. (If that ever comes up, take if from me and refuse! REFUSE, I tell you!) Yeah, the sucker’s ion drive leaves a great deal to be desired. That is to say, it’s very existence was just a desire on the part of the ship’s owner. The actual propulsion unit runs on cottage cheese and ketchup, and we appear to be fresh out of those commodities. (And to paraphrase Warren Oats, there are no 7/11’s out yonder.)

Think warm thoughts.Not to put too fine a point on it, we are going to have to Mad Science the shit out of this thing. Mitch Macaphee is working overtime (as much as 3 hours a day) trying to adapt Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s solar power unit to the ship’s main drive. It is by no means a walk in the park for old Mitch. Good thing we brought some decent gin with us. (Though we left the rummy back at the mill.)

I’m not sure why the creator of the universe bothered to conceive of this shriveled little world. It’s basically just a rock in space, orbiting a random star, spinning out its eons in total obscurity. Sounds a bit like us, actually. Maybe we should name this place after ourselves. Or just call it Preplanus – I don’t think that’s being used anymore.

Usual Rubbish

Time wasting.

Ever see that episode of Lost In Space when they’re rushing to get the piece-of-shit Jupiter 2 spaceworthy before the planet they’ve been living on for an entire television season explodes beneath them? Yeah, well … that’s sort of where Big Green is right now.

Big GreenNo, a stereotypical t.v. gold miner named Mister Nerim is not fracking the Cosmonium out of the living rock beneath us (at least, not yet), but it’s nearly as bad. Our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (also known as Hegephonic) has arranged for an interstellar tour to support the release of our most recent album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, which – while it hasn’t done squat down here on earth – is selling briskly on Aldebaran, I hear.  (Great music always finds its audience. And, well, ours does, too, if it travels far enough.)

Of course, Hegemonic subcontracted the tour arrangements to some underworld figures, as they typically do. That has its upsides, like … I don’t know …. valet parking on Aldebaran? Free breakfast for gamblers? No, it’s the downsides I’m more concerned with. Like the fact that the contractors just handle the booking; the transportation is completely up to us. So as you saw last week, we’ve been scrambling to pull together some kind of interstellar space vessel – quite a challenge in the continued absence of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who is sunning himself in beautiful Madagascar right now.

Well ... a little ambitious, perhaps. Don’t know if you know this, but underworld booking agents take breach of contract kind of seriously. That’s why we’re resorting to just about any means of getting from one planet to the other. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) helpfully suggested a design for a new space craft, but it seems a little ambitious, to be perfectly frank. I’m not certain that we need anything with forty-story legs and a cavernous exercise room. I was thinking something more on the modest size. Maybe a step up from the 1954 GMC city coach, but not a large step.

Hey, however we do it, we’ll need to have it done in a few weeks. Got suggestions? Put them behind the hot water pipes. I’ll find them.

Usual Rubbish

Dude, where’s my mill?


This looks like it might be the place. Yes, this is most definitely the place. Kind of. Hey, Mitch…. are you SURE this is the place?

All right. We’ve been out on tour for a while, but not that bloody long. Certainly not long enough to forget where we came from. And yet here we are, trying to work out which abandoned mill belongs to us (and when I say “belong,” I mean that in the broadest sense imaginable… broad enough to encompass loose associations). Trouble is, so many mills have closed down around here even since our departure some weeks ago that it’s hard to sort it all out. Seems a lot of people are getting into the abandoned mill trade. It’s a buyers’ market, so to speak… or a squatters’ market, actually.

Yeah, so anyway… we limped back home, dropped into orbit, threw the anchor over the side, and shimmied down the rope to terra firma. Of course, our rent-a-wreck spaceship was not in stationary orbit, so the freaking anchor was dragging along the ground at about 40 miles an hour, bumping over great rocks and trees, smashing car windows, and so on. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was called into action – we got him to clasp the anchor in his prehensile claws and wheel it along the ground as smoothly as possible while we, one by one, climbed down to safety. (if you can call life on Earth “safe”).

The ship was picked up by its owner – some obscure rental maven on a nearby alien moon. And as we tried to find our way home in the dark, they undertook to ship all of our gear, postage due, back to the mill. When we found the right joint, it had battered cardboard boxes stacked to the rafters in the front entrance. One more mountain to climb – so ends ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE.

So… now that we’re home again, I wish to hell we weren’t. Work, work, work. To hell with it… maybe I’ll just blow it off and shoot a New Year’s video…. just for all of you out there.