Okay, so what are you saying, Mitch? I thought you knew how to drive a space ship. This is a hell of a time to tell me you were just pulling my leg. No, I don‘t have any prayer cards on me. What a stupid question!
For crying out loud, why … why does this happen every time we go out on tour? We map out an itinerary, we hire a spacecraft, we commandeer a space commander of some description, we set off with confidence, and then BOOM – everything goes to hell. Before we know it, we’re bobbing around uselessly in intergalactic space, light years beyond the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, hoping some alien freighter takes pity on us and trains a tractor beam on our pathetic, rusting hull. And I ask myself, is this why I got into this business?
Right, so … now that I got that out of my system. Someone (could be anybody … but probably was me) suggested that as part of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 we play this gig in the Small Magellanic Cloud, some 200,000 light years out yonder. Now, necessarily, such a journey would require the development of technologies previously unthought of by humankind. Recall the challenges NASA faced when JFK charged them with putting a white dude on the moon within the course of a single decade. Christ on a bike, they had to invent miniaturized computing, develop advanced rocketry, perfect the concept of staged spacecrafts, and the only help they got was untold billions of dollars in public funds and the advice of retired Nazi ballistic scientists.
They did it, though. And what have we got? Well …. one mad scientist. (Actually, right now I would describe him as just a little grumpy.) One supercomputer – Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a Pentium processor from 1995 humming away in his little brass noggin. And a second-hand flying saucer, salvaged from some boneyard on the outskirts of Roswell, NM. Pull all of those resources together, and nothing can stop you … from getting about three feet off the ground. We’re still working on that first light-year, so we’ve signaled ahead to the promoter on the Small Magellanic Cloud that we may be a little late. Unfortunately, our message is traveling a bit more slowly than us – I can just about see it through the rear window.
Did NASA say uncle when things went wrong? Hell no. But then … maybe they should have. UNCLE!
