Oh, Jesus … turn that thing up, Mitch. I’m just starting to get the feeling back into my fingers. No, I don’t want to burn them off, but geez … there has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.
Well, hello, friends of Big Green. Time for another dispatch from our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, an interstellar romp across the indie club circuit from Neptune to … well … Epsilon Indie. Except we may not make it quite that far, given the limitations of our transport. Mitch Macaphee’s used saucer lot vehicle has very little living space and can’t carry a lot of fuel, so we’re doing short hops across the void of interstellar space, hoping to bring some down-home joy to the lonely denizens of the forgotten worlds scattered across our modest galactic neighborhood. We take turns watching the planets pass by through the one viewport our ship affords. This is plain clothes, my friends … nothing but the best.
Our gig on Barnard’s Star b (that’s not a typo … the planet is named “b”, for crying out loud) was okay, I guess. Kind of a chilly reception. The surface temperature on “b” is -238 degrees Fahrenheit, and the inhabitants of “b” …. the B-ings, if you will … are a bit like our Neptunian fans. Picture ice crystals with arms and legs. You might call them pseudopods instead of appendages, but that would make you a microbiologist. When we played Jesus Has A Known Mind, they swayed a bit. A few of them held lighters over their head-like projections. There was something that could be called dancing, but the B-ings movements are so subtle you probably need special instrumentation to detect it.
One thing I’ll say for the inhabitants of Barnard b …. they need to get themselves a new star. Barnard’s star is meek, man, really meek. I mean, I’ve had space heaters that radiated more warmth than that little beacon. It emits only 0.4 percent of our own sun’s radiant energy, it says here, so if you’re waiting for summer to get there, stop waiting … it ain’t coming. Anyway, we played our tunes, collected our quatloos, chipped our spacecraft out of an ice sheet, and got the hell out of there before they asked for an encore.
Next stop is Procyon, in Canis Minor. That’s a bit of a hike, especially in this dumb-ass heap. What’s more, our navigational computer failed two days out from Barnard, so we had to hook Marvin (my personal robot assistant) up to the control panel so that his 486 processor can tell our various rockets when to fire and when to stand ready. Ahem …. may be problematic. We’ll just see where we end up.
