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Usual Rubbish

Mars Zero.

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I don’t know, Mitch. It could work, or maybe not. Let’s give it a shot, then. Just promise me one thing – no launch tests in the courtyard, okay? Last time you tried a stunt like that the neighbors called in the local SWAT team. It took all of our collective savings to get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out of jail.

Talk about LAME!Oh, hi. Just settling a few details with our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, recently repatriated from the dwarf planet Ceres. Mitch is helping us plan the launch of Big Green’s newest venture. Let me give you the background. You’ve all heard of Bas Lansdorp’s Mars One project, no doubt. Lansdorp is inviting volunteers to go on a one-way mission to colonize Mars. He says he can get the whole thing going in time for a 2025 launch date.

Well, here at Big Green’s abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we way that’s pure bullshit. Lansdorp is obviously engaging in gross exaggeration – an exercise in self-aggrandizement, no doubt. 2025 indeed! The notion is ludicrous on its face. Why, with Mitch’s help, we could get to Mars tomorrow (or, at least, next week sometime). And it wouldn’t be a suicide mission like Lansdorp’s; our missions are decidedly two-way. That’s just how we roll.

So we’ve decided to launch a new project we’re calling Mars Zero. No, it’s not a new low-calorie candy bar or soft drink. Mars Zero is our effort to claim Mars for colonization a full five years before Lansdorp’s goons get there. The red planet is ours! We saw it first! (I’m speaking for Mitch, here. He gets a little overheated about this stuff.)

Want to be a part of the Mars Zero crew, set to leave the surly bonds of Earth in April of 2020? Just contact us via our comment form or our Facebook page or our Twitter account – whatever. We’ll test your endurance through feats of strength and … um … endurance. (Send us valuable government coupons, known as money, and we’ll waive the feats of strength.)

Cowboy Scat on YouTube. Speaking of endurance tests, we’ve uploaded the first installment of our album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick to our YouTube channel. Give it a listen and let us know what you chuck … I mean, think.

Usual Rubbish

Floating room only.

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Hand me that bottle, will you, Marvin? That’s right – the one with the brownish-green liquid in it. I think it’s spiked with marzipan or something. That’s about as hard as it gets on this miserable pimple of a planet. Jesus Christmas.

Oh, hi, friend of Big Green. Well, here we are on Aldebaran Five, soaking up the radiation, drinking gloog, making slemoth, and generally doing what living beings do on Aldebaran Five, at least when they’re in between performances. As you might have surmised from our previous posts, we were hideously late for the one-week run we had booked on A-5, so we had to shuffle things around a bit. Actually, we canceled a gig on Sirius (the star system, not the satellite radio network). Can’t think it bothers them much. They never take anything …. serious …. lee. My apologies.

Anyway, how is it going here on A-5? Not too shabby. Our current album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick has sold relatively well here. Fact is, we would be living on easy street if there were some way to convert Aldebaranian thought waves into hard currency. (That’s how they exchange goods and services around here – just thinking up some negotiable value in their oddly misshapen heads.) Still, they know the songs, they sing the lyrics, they dance like zombies … they even wear Texas-style ten-gallon hats on their, well, oddly misshapen heads. And they utter something that sounds a bit like “yee-ha” when we play “I’m Saving Myself for America”. Creepy, yes, but touching also.

So we hit it pretty hard last night, with sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, taking all the solos. Lucky to have him back, though he’s a bit louder than I remember … either that or my hearing has backed off a few notches since 2007. He must have studied Chet Atkins back on Zenon, between hits of acid, judging by the way he’s playing. I guess you could say it was fun for the whole family. We had them floating upside-down in mid-air, which is actually kind of normal here – the gravity’s a little weak.

Next stop: Betelgeuse.

Holiday hack job. Big Green threw together a video to support one of our podcast numbers, a little holiday sketch called “Make that Christmas Shine,” sung by Captain Romney of the Starship Free Enterprise. Check it out:

Usual Rubbish

Small step.

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No, I can’t hang upside down. Not for three hours, for chrissake… from a helicopter. Why don’t you just turn the camera upside down? Never thought of THAT, did you? (You did… ?)

Oh, hi. Just walked in on another acrimonious production meeting here  at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We keep a tight production schedule around here, let me tell you, averaging as many as one music video a year (sometimes more). Yes, breakneck speed rivaling our audio production schedule. Punishing! Matt is our director, though he sometimes puts Mitch Macaphee in charge of the second unit. Video production does not come naturally to our mad science advisor, I’m the first to say. He tends to confuse special effects with reality. (I can’t quite bring myself to ask him how he faked that exploding building in our last video…. too afraid of the truth.)

Okay, so… we’re releasing a single. A goofy little number called “One Small Step”. All I can say about it is that it attempts to explain the unexplainable, namely the moon landing, Armstrong’s flubbed first words from the cratered surface of Luna, and the severe mental and metaphysical consequences of that flubbing. The video? Well…. it features cameos by two ex presidents (both deceased) – one puts in a screaming sax solo. It features spectacular (or spectacularly dumb) depictions of interplanetary travel. And… well, what else can I say but watch it and judge for yourself.

“One Small Step” is one of those songs that has been sitting around for a time, waiting to be finished, begging to be released. They’re like errant children, you know? You make them, they start to grow, and next thing you know – before they even think about striking out on their own – they’re giving you a massive pain in the ass. “One Small Step” hung around for a while; we redid it, remixed it, changed it up…. then just threw our hands in the air. It was never going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or even a tailor or dry cleaner. So it’s just a song; Matt gave it a fittingly bizarre video, and the rest is history. (Or will be history, once it’s past.)

Here’s hoping you enjoy this modest little number. Now if you’ll excuse me, my helicopter awaits.

Usual Rubbish

The thing is.

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Just settling in here. Man, but it’s good to be back home! If by home, you mean … something a little more congenial than this dank, drippy, drafty old mill.

It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green, being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket… and some oxygen.) It’s a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire… but not TOO close. It’s a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you.

So, yeah, it’s snowing, soon as we get here, and the freaking place is cold as a polar bear’s ass. Basically we’re confining ourselves to indoor activities. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is on the treadmill. Hour after hour he pedals away. What’s the point? Perhaps in his robot mind he is actually going somewhere interesting. (Actually, Matt thinks he’s road testing some new kind of lithium battery.) The Lincolns are catching up on their reading. Carl Sandberg is the selection this week. (Last week, too, as it happens.) And Mitch Macaphee? Off to the lab, creating something that may enable him to (dare I say it?) rule…. the world…! (Or perhaps making a club sandwich. Turns out it’s a very similar process.)

How am I wasting my time? Well… usually it’s my job to waste OTHER people’s time. But this week, bored, I opted to do a little video New Year’s greeting for all you folks out there. Just a brief tour of the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, a little look inside our “creative process” – what it looks like when we’re making the sausage we call “music” – and so on. I have posted same for your edification on our YouTube site and other internet haunts bearing our likenesses. Marvin was of some help, though…. his attention was divided, as per usual.

Man, it’s cold. Maybe I can get Mitch to try some kind of fusion reaction to generate a little heat in here. Not too hot, you understand…. (he measures everything in Kelvin scale).

 

New Year’s Video: