Which star is this again? I get them mixed up sometimes. We did Betelgeuse. We did Aldebaran. One big red, the other little yellow. Now it’s time for a blue star … Rigel. Perfect place to play the blues.
Big Green playing the blues … on our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? Well … sure, why not. That’s some of what we started out by playing many, many moons (and many suns) ago, before we started writing a lot of our own music. We played Taj Mahal numbers, real standards like Statesboro Blues, and similar stuff, along with songs by The Beatles, The Band, Neil Young, etc. In our early days as Big Green, we had an alter ego cover band that performed under a series of ridiculous names, including “The Space Hippies”, “I-19”, and others. (One club owner, I recall, refused to hire The Space Hippies, claiming that, if he did, he would be “laughed out of Utica.” That’s when we founded the band, “Laughed out of Utica”.)
Right, so … our first night on Rigel, we started out with our old club date rendition of Corrina, Corrina. The non-corporeal beings of Rigel 3 went wild, as far as we can tell. The only way we can register any type of response is through highly sophisticated scanning equipment we borrowed from Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (they use it to track labor organizers in their mines and on their plantations). According to th
e sensodyne magenetometer, the charged particles that make up most of the mass of Rigelian “bodies” were vibrating at a particularly high frequency during Corrina, Corrina. I call that success.
Of course, we are having some mechanical problems with our spacecraft. Nothing new there. Just a matter of thrust, or lack of same. Too many Rigelian casabas in the fuel mix, I suspect. We’re likely to stay on Rigel 3 for a couple more days, since we can’t seem to escape its orbit. sFshzenKlyrn, our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, has gone on to the next engagement ahead of us, since he does not require a space craft to travel between worlds. Handy, that. One day, perhaps he’ll show me how it’s done. Then I’ll make Marvin (my personal robot assistant) do it.
Next stop: Capella.
Or it would have been, but for the fact that the gravity reversed itself halfway through the evening. I guess that happens all the time on Betelgeuse Five. (That would explain the suction cups on their hands and feet, right? Isn’t nature wonderful!) Still, who knew … and before I could say HAAALLP! I was flying off into the exosphere, a missile without a cause, along with my hapless bandmates.
Energy refugees. While talking heads praise the fracking-fueled resurgence of America’s energy sector, people in places like Casselton ND are paying the price, driven from their homes in the middle of winter by the dramatic derailment and explosion of a sludge-oil train laden with fracking chemicals. This is the latest in a series of toxic spills as the country hurriedly ramps up production of the last-century fuels that are destroying our atmosphere in pursuit of short-sighted economic growth. Once again, it’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs … if by that we mean, profits, profits, profits for the oil and gas industries and the corporations that support them.
So we hit it pretty hard last night, with 
pact that is described even by bland media outlets like NPR as having benefited only corporations in the 3 countries affected. Twenty years after its passage and signing by President Clinton, the evidence is in and it seems clear that many if not all of the criticisms were justified. And now that it is well-established and that we have entered into numerous other trade deals modeled on NAFTA, mainstream news organizations can report the obvious, namely:
This month’s episode features Rick Santorum, Mitch McConnell (sounding a bit like Walter Brennan), and others as Mitt and the crew encounter a fantastic world on which Christmas happens every other day (and twice on Sunday).
Really? Just a little bit of context might be nice. What was Kerry doing there in the 1960s again? Vacationing? No. Oh, that’s right – he was part of a massive invasion force that was grinding Vietnam – particularly southern Vietnam – to a bloody pulp, leaving probably 2 million dead and three countries destroyed; a massive crime that we have never been held accountable for. I think it’s a little premature to lecture Hanoi on human rights, frankly.
That was the good part. The bad part was when the cable snapped in the vicinity of Jupiter, a hostile world that gave Cowboy Scat a right panning (like I said, I read the freaking trades!). We were caught in the gas giant’s gravitational pull, helpless but for the fading memory of Star Trek plot devices from fifty years ago. Or was it Lost in Space? Well, whatever the source, we used the “slingshot effect”, accelerating toward the planet and using its gravity to hurl us straight out the other side of the solar system.