Lights out.
Must be the generator, Mitch. Did you use that nefarious contraption again? Probably pulled too much current, and now look at us. Clueless and in the dark. What’s new, eh?
Yes, my friends. More power issues here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That long extension cord I had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) run from the pizza place across the street? Well, someone discovered it, unplugged it, etc. Last time I order a pizza from those cheapskates! And when we found an alternative power source (i.e. the antique store on the other side of the alley… their back door latch is a little unreliable), what happens but Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, decides to crank up the old Orgone Generating Device in the basement where Trevor James Constable left it years ago, and… and… well, I hate when that shit happens.
This always happens when we’re between tours. People get bored, start looking for distractions. For the two Lincolns (posi and anti), it’s Yahtzee - game after game of freaking Yahtzee. No wonder they lost the war! (Home schooling… what can I tell you?) For the mansized tuber, it’s that stupid ant farm he got for Christmas. (He just loves to watch the little guys dig tunnels.) For Matt, it’s running around after wild animals with bags of seed and video cameras. Johnny White? He’s all about flying aeroplanes. Mitch Macaphee’s tastes, however, are a bit more exotic. Time travel, the thirst for limitless power, formulating theorums to destroy galaxies …. idle hands, you know. So he fires up the old Orgone Generating Device,
blows a fuse next door, and now I can’t even post a podcast, for chrissake.
Then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his latest obsession. He picked up my Harper’s magazine the other day, thumbed through it, and read a statistic about how many robots there are in the world today. Not counting household appliances, it’s apparently in excess of one million - that’s right, more than a million automatons in the world today! Well, this hit Marvin like a truck. “I am not alone” I heard him repeat to himself in standard, monotonous robotian fashion. That’s what he’s been up to. Wheeling around the mill, Harper’s issue in hand, muttering to himself. What’s next? Will he find a nice, wind-up pen pal? Will he volunteer for the Romney campaign?
Well, that’s all I’ve got. My between-the-tours pastime, somewhat less enjoyable, is trying to keep the lights on in this freaking dump. Any suggestions on where I should run this extension cord next?
Hey, check it out - new January episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. You’ve been warned.
Gingrich, who led the nation to a constitutional crisis over a presidential blow job, is now appalled that his pseudo-romantic foibles are considered a matter of national concern. Welcome to the world you helped invent, big guy.
Why am I amused by this? Hey… when you call a dump like this “home”, you must find amusement wherever it may be lurking. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are always looking for new distractions. Is that because Big Green is not what you would call a “performing” band? Perhaps, perhaps. Fewer reasons to venture out of the mill, particularly now that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes our grocery runs for us. “You trust him with money?” I imagine you’re thinking right now. My imaginary answer would be, “No; we program him to work as a day laborer before he goes to the store. That’s how we roll.”
So hell, I’m building a new Big Green web site. It will be big… and green. Perhaps shiny, perhaps not. I’m not super crazy about shiny, to tell the honest truth - it makes things look too much like what’s looking at them. Anyway, that’s what all the hammering is about - that’s the sound of Web development up here in the sticks. That’s what it sounds like when someone is building a Web site you can really sink your teeth into. A site that is chewy, not cakey… just the way you like it.
This, my friends, is the power of the fossil-fuel industry. Through their marketing and their political surrogates, they have taken a nation on the brink of consensus regarding climate change back in 2007 and turned it 180 degrees into deep denial. The great recession has helped in this regard, of course - jobs versus environment has always been an effective diversion. It has particular resonance now that the Democrats are effectively missing in action on this issue, running scared on the threat of nastiness from the other side. Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland election year.
Ensconced once again within the crumbling walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, I can report that we of Big Green are back to doing what we do best: inventing snacks out of items collected from the goodwill box. If it weren’t for all this music stuff we might be good at it by now. Oh, the burden of servings such a demanding muse! Nothing is good enough, nothing! We work our fingers to the bone - nay, to the marrow - hammering out songs in the clammy basement of this condemned factory, then tossing them skyward… only to see them knocked back in anger. “Send me hooks!” demands the disembodied voice. “We are not amused!”
Lincoln! It shouldn’t happen to our quality Lincoln!
American military might. They mark the beginning of the recession in the Obama administration, not the Bush administration. They see the national debt as the cause of unemployment. On their planet, the only problem with our electoral system is fraudulent voting - i.e. people (perhaps “illegal” immigrants) breaking federal law to usurp a franchise very few Americans are inclined to exercise legitimately. All domestically produced fossil fuel, in their tiny minds, is somehow reserved for use by Americans alone, not simply dumped into the global market and snapped up by whoever pays for it (i.e. how it actually works).
Okay, truth is… I don’t know for certain that Jim Bob is responsible. It may well have been Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who knocked the lamp post down during the first snow storm of the year. Here it is, the week after Christmas, and people are still driving like it’s July. Spoiled by global warming, I suppose. In any case, I only have myself to blame. It was I who suggested that Marvin serve as our chauffeur until a suitable replacement might be found. What? You didn’t know we had people driving us around? Well, that’s because we haven’t up until now. We’ve just recently adopted the Bowie-esque doctrine of acting successful to become successful. It’s like priming the pump, man.
I know, I know - I shouldn’t complain, what with this being the season of kindness and gratitude. (Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, sees it more as the season of mindlessness and attitude, but that’s how he rolls.) We’re still recording, still flailing away at the canon, committing item after item from the seemingly bottomless vat of unrecorded material to virtual tape. You can hear the results of these sessions on our podcast,
Korea invading Korea - but not on the devastating attack we mounted against them. Christine Ahn of the Korea Policy Institute spoke to this fact on
As I mentioned last week, all of our little elves have been laboring under harsh working conditions in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, hammering together the disjointed fragments of Big Green’s 
party’s failure to find its spine on this issue, the Republicans have managed to position it in a similar way as they have with the gun control issue. It seems like the very mention of global warming or climate change brings a chill to Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Only Republicans ever seem to use the terms, and only then as a means of attacking their cowardly opponents. They have been given the upper hand, once again, by default, just as Democrats have deserted the barricades on the gun issue, on the death penalty, on “missile defense”, etc.