Tag Archives: blog

Pulling the plug is never as easy as it looks

Get Music Here

I don’t know. I’m effing sick of this. Are you effing sick of this, too? You are? Wow … okay. For how many years? Damn …. why didn’t you say so? I was just doing this to keep YOU happy!

Well, you learn something new every day. Or at least every week. Except last week – I was kind of too busy to learn anything. It gets like that sometimes. Anyway, let’s just agree to say that you learn something new every little once in a while. Maybe every time Sylvie brings you some water. Like in the Leadbelly Song. But I digress.

What the this is

The “this” we’re kvetching about is this thing called blogging. We’ve been doing it for twenty years, and somehow – seemingly unnoticed by us – the world has kind of moved on. Now everything is social media, social media, etc. A few still blog, outside of the corporate shills, but it’s not really a thing anymore, and well … that’s a shame. Still, blogging has its place. I just don’t know whether or not its place is here, exactly.

Since we started this back in 1999, it’s been kind of a chronicle, a travel log, and a journal rolled into one. There have been a lot of twists and turns, like those times we went to the chewy center of the earth, blasting our way through miles of nougat until we hit molten caramel. Or the times we’ve visited the gas giants on the outskirts of our celestial neighborhood. We always felt that people would come away from those stories with valuable life lessons. Lessons like, DON’T TALK TO THOSE SQUATTERS!

The free hand

Now some of you might say, well, so you’ve been writing a stupid blog. What are you doing with your OTHER hand? It may surprise you to know that it actually takes two hands to type this stuff in. The fact is, we need to start doing other things …. things that are more, I don’t know, useful maybe? Not the right word. How about interesting? Probably still not ideal. Nevertheless, we need at least one free hand, even if we’re going hands-free.

Us, back in the day

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Matt’s been writing songs like a house on fire. Even in our salad days he didn’t put out THIS much stuff. And we didn’t have a lot of salad days. Anyway, we’re going to start recording these songs, first as demos, then maybe pull it together in another album. We have the makings of at least one other album in the Ned Trek library – the new stuff, though, is completely different. That’s the one thing we’ve never been short on: material. Everything else, yes, but not that.

Wait for it!

Long story short, I will be posting Big Green stuff on social media, maybe pull some of that into the blog, but these regular posts will be going on hiatus. If I hear a flurry of calls for them to return, I will start posting again … but I’m not holding my breath. Til then, you know where to find us. (Right here.)

Anudder home.

Where did I put my html tags? I thought I packed them with my socks, but they don’t appear to be in there. WFT, man…. getting a new home is always such a pain.

No, friends. We have not abandoned the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That would be something you might expect from the department of redundancy department (of redundancy). We have, however, abandoned our old web site and moved into a new one, designed by, I don’t know, professional web designers… as opposed to my sorry ass, who threw together our last site with Front Page and some tweezers … not to mention some cracked old photo manipulation software. Yeah, that’s right. Do I have to draw you a picture? (Actually… that would have been better than what came out of that software.)

Anywho… out with the old, in with the new. We’ve been using WordPress for Hammermill Days (and, earlier, Notes from Sri Lanka) for over five years, and so we thought, hey, why not build the whole freaking site using the same software? It actually works, you can edit it from anywhere using a Web browser…. How easy is that? Too easy! That’s what Mitch Macaphee says. Being a mad scientist, he thinks things should be hard … at least as hard as building Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was. Sure, he built Marvin out of spare parts and bric-a-brac he had lying about his lab, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. Building a sentient being never is, my friends.

Now, the cynical and suspicious-minded amongst you (and you all know who you are) will imagine that this web site face lift is all about our supreme ambition to become special assistants to inevitable president-elect and future king of the moon Newt Gingrich; that we somehow abandoned and discarded our illin’, aging old web site for a shiny, sexy younger one, like … well, like … something some politician did once. That is a dirty lie. Fact is, we have already been invited by Newt Gingrich – future president and current Lincoln in his own mind – to advise him on interplanetary relations including, most specifically, his plans for our nearest neighbor in space. In point of fact, we will be a bit like the late Richard Holbrook, who was given the Af-Pak portfolio. (We will be in charge of the Moon, Mars, and Saturn, so it might be called the LunaMaSa portfolio, in media culture shorthand-speak.)

So anyway… welcome to Big Green’s new home on the Web. Take a look around. Kick the tires. Leave comments. Move in to one of the pages and order expensive dinners. Glad to have yuh.