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.
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.)
Well, as you can see, we have had a house invasion. The perpetrator? None other than our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft started orbiting his adopted home world of Ceres, he became extremely agitated. Smoke began to pour out of his ears and mouth, like VOL, from Star Trek. He simply could not live with the idea of being spied upon by the space agency. What if they stole his ideas? he thought…. then his plan to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD would be scuttled. Shot down by a measly little, tin-pot space robot. THAT MAKES ME SO MAD …. !
I’m sorry you had to hear that (or read the transcript of it, rather). Yes, tempers are running a little thin around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill these days. Some see it as a variation on seasonal affective disorder – you know, it starts getting warm, we can’t afford air conditioning, and this clammy mill gets kind of toasty. But it goes deeper than that, I’m afraid. An erosion of trust, you might say. It’s the kind of thing that tends to happen with Big Green between interstellar tours. In fact, that’s what keeps driving us into space. I think that’s what, anyway.