All posts by Joe

Usual Rubbish

Open season.

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Whoa, was that a week from hell or wasn’t it?  Spring is here, after all, and the planet’s wrecked. Time to cultivate another one. Any preferences? Neptune, perhaps? Or…. maybe we can just open the mail bag.

Here’s one from a local:

Dear Big Green,

I think I saw one of your number tagged in a photo on Facebook, dressed up in a ludicrous leprechaun get-up. What’s up with that? Are you going to start playing traditional Irish music now? Should I look for you on Thistle and Shamrock any time soon?

Best,

Rich Taggert
Toad in the Hole, NY

Well, Rich…. that does seem to be my name, so perhaps it’s me. I may be a secret leprechaun, or perhaps I fell asleep at a St. Patrick’s Day bash and simply don’t remember what happened next. (Distinct possibility.) Then again, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have put me in the ludicrous outfit while I was sleeping and then invited local children in to have their photo taken with the funny, funny elf. I’m guessing here.

The closest we’ve come to Irish music is a Christmas number Matt wrote some years back called “McBridy”, which later segues into a country song called “Evening Crab Nebula”. Written around the times of the troubles in Northern Ireland – now thankfully past – the McBridy lyric went something like this:

Well, hiddly- hi, in the Christian World, it’s eye for eye
And hiddly-hi, we’ll get another try
It’s the same dear thing McBridy sang
before he caught up with the plan
that threw him on his back one Christmas ‘morn

McBridy, McBridy! You lived in a wholly Christian world
But still you blow your brother away
McBridy, McBridy! You lived in a holy Christian world
But died another link in the chain.

And no, not Thistle and Shamrock… but possibly Pagan FM, if you listen regularly.

Next missive…

Dear Big Green,

I don’t exist, and you can’t make me.

Yours truly,
Chester Ether

Thanks for writing, Chester. A lot of our listeners are in much the same condition. It’s a sign of these difficult times, as I’m sure you – a non-existent person – can truly appreciate.

Now back to work, damn it.

Political Rants

Obama’s twenty.

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I dimly recall an old Chris Rock routine about Bill Clinton back in the 90’s. It was that bit about Bill Clinton being the first black president; Rock’s proof was simple: “He hands them a twenty, and they hold it up to the light.” That pretty much defines the dynamic that brought about this week’s revealing of Obama’s long-form birth certificate. There’s a clear effort towards delegitimizing the president not so much because of his policies (which merit some substantial criticism) but rather on the basis of his being black. No, Donald Trump is not standing there saying Obama shouldn’t be president because of his skin color. He is merely amplifying the overtly racist insistence that the man hasn’t adequately proven his identity, that he must – again and again, in an ever-proliferating variety of forms – present his papers on demand. When has this ever in our lifetimes been demanded of a president of the United States?

This started with the Clinton campaign and was expanded by the McCain campaign with the ominous warnings from both halves of that ticket that Obama was “not like you and me.” True enough, if “you and me” is white people. It was the birth certificate, the church he belonged to, the African garb he wore on a trip, the middle name his parents gave him – all these attempts to make him appear alien and, therefore, threatening to middle America. (No need to enhance the fear factor on the far right- they were there already.) For the most part, it’s really just a process of drawing people’s attention to the fact that he’s African American, by subtracting the “American” part.

Stephen Colbert did a decent job of explaining this – hilariously – on his show this past week. (I think it was Wednesday night’s show.) Of course, Obama’s effort to still the beast by giving it something to chew on is a bit like paying off blackmailers. And sure enough, they’re already on to the next thing.

Got to go – papers to write. (End of the semester again.)

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Plugging.

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Another Web bucket to fill. Good grief, tubey! How many Web sites am I supposed to maintain? I’m the one with the arms, remember… and the cerebral cortex.

Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.

As always, money is a challenge. Copies of One Small Step are not exactly flying off the shelf on this planet (though I hear it’s moving quite briskly on Kaztropharius 137b, that nasty little planetoid that hosts us every year or so). It’s predictably hard to repatriate profits from other planets – that’s not surprising at all. They use a whole different kind of currency up there… not to mention a whole different kind of gravity, air, and background radiation. Hell, funds transfers are the least of it. If you’re a bank courier, you’re lucky to get out of there with your skin. Word of warning.

There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions. 

Note to Mitch: Your next invention should just be money. Just invent some cash, there’s a good chap.

Political Rants

Power.

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A year ago this time, on the eve of Earth day, millions of barrels of oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by millions of gallons of a toxic dispersant banned for use in the U.K. (but still, apparently, okay to use over here). Both substances were disastrous by-products of a rush to profit by multinational corporations tied to our seemingly unbreakable addiction to fossil fuels. As was pointed out at the time and many times since, such catastrophic events are inevitable at this stage in the depletion of global energy resources. All of the easy-to-get oil is gone or spoken for, so expanding this highly profitable extraction industry requires brinkmanship of the type that has soured the waters of the Gulf beyond the sorry point to which they had sunk previously.

This is generally true of the extractive energy industries. Oil is being sought from ocean depths far more profound than either drilling or safety technologies can facilitate. It is being rendered from the tar sands of western Canada, where the very earth is being ground to squeeze every ounce of the precious fluid for export to the U.S., mainly. (As a result, Canada was recently our single largest source of oil.) The volume of global reserves is calculated based upon those deposits that are economically feasible to extract – as the price per barrel rises, more reserves enter the equation. The trouble is, the very act of extracting them from an exhausted mother earth causes as much environmental degradation as burning the oil in generators and vehicles.

Last year’s spill did teach us one valuable lesson: the energy companies fear nothing more than public opinion. Before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, cable television was choked with ads about “America’s Gas and Oil Industry” and all the jobs they were creating, not to mention BP and other oil companies touting their commitment to the preservation our environment and the development of renewables. When the rig blew, they vanished – Poof! No ads until well after the hole was plugged. Now they’re back again, though a bit more muted than before the disaster. They know their limits … and they know that they can only push the public so far. The real power is with us, if we can manage to use it.

We have an opportunity, right here in my backyard. Local landowners are preparing to play host to hydrofracking – another post-peak energy extraction method now destroying water resources in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. We need to make our voices heard now, before the industry gets a foothold and destroys New York the way the coal industry has riddled West Virginia.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Wunderkind.

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Paul Ryan has come up with a remarkable innovation – gradually bring elderly and disabled folks back to the standard of living they enjoyed in the 1930s. Brilliant! Obviously the idea behind moving Medicare to a voucher system is to save the government – and, therefore, the collective “us” – money.  But it’s only a savings if you don’t count the vast, vast majority of elderly people for whom that voucher will be worth very little in terms of health services. This is a very serious issue for anyone planning to become elderly one day. (Note: if you care nothing about the elderly and disabled and plan on jumping off a cliff when you turn 65, the Ryan plan will probably be fine by you.)

I’ve blogged about this before, so forgive me for covering the same ground – it’s just that when a person of influence advances a legislative plan that overtly calls for the dismemberment of Medicare and Medicaid, I feel compelled to repeat myself. This isn’t a question of saving money. This is a question of what we collectively decide is necessary to preserve the well-being of the nation. I’m not trying to appeal to your sense of charity. I’m saying that virtually every one of us is liable to need this type of coverage at some point in his/her life. Like investing in first responders, this is something we all have an interest in preserving.

No matter how much Ryan and his associates claim that is precisely what they are trying to do, don’t buy it. A voucher plan will throw elderly people into the private insurance market – one that is already way too expensive for pre-retirees to afford. What kind of premium will an Excellus ask of a 75 year old with a weak ticker? Seriously… Medicare is there for a reason. Before its existence, elderly people relied on charity, family members, etc., and many had access to neither.

The only reason why wunderkind Ryan and his express can feel comfortable criticizing such vital programs is that Medicare and Medicaid cost so much. They do because they cover those most prone to serious illnesses. If we had a reasonable single-payer system – Medicare for all – the system would also cover those many millions of us who see a doctor once a year and no more. Include them (i.e. us) and the system will finance itself. And frankly, wouldn’t you be willing to trade whatever plan you have (if you have one) for Medicare coverage at a reasonable cost?

Note to Dems: there’s a reason why Medicare is a third rail issue. It’s because it’s freaking necessary.  

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Cheap seat post.

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All right, I admit it…. I got busy, then I got sleepy. We got busted, then we got badges.  But we can get into places they can’t.

Oooh, damn it. I’m channeling Tige Andrews on the Mod Squad. Just too many things to do around the Cheney Hammer Mill, and too little time. Ergo, this is a real cheap-seat posting, written on the fly. Just letting you know that our new single, “One Small Step”, has just arrived at iTunes and is ready to download for a low, low $.99 American.

You can dowload it today by going to: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/one-small-step-single/id432236664

Watch the ludicrous video at our YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/mansizedtuber

Okay… commercial’s over. I’ve got some sleeping to catch up on. Just let me get to it before Marvin (my personal robot assistant) starts playing that sousaphone again. (Don’t ask.) I’ll post a political rant sometime later this weekend, when I get my brain cells back in order. Cheers!

j

Usual Rubbish

Backlash.

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Is this the right control? Okay… I’ll try CTRL-ALT-DEL again. God damn! What the hell did I do that time? Bloody computers!

Okay, I’m struggling with my status as official Luddite of Big Green. (Originally that post belonged to my illustrious brother Matt, but now he’s the dude with the smart phone.) I don’t claim to be the most inept person ever to sit in front of a keyboard, but good goddamn – I’m making a doorstop out of this thing. If they just equipped PC’s with drawbars and foot pedals, I could drive the suckers, no problem.

Why am I spending so much time in front of the cyclopean eye of the decrepit computer originally left at our door by a malicious junk collector? Well, we have a new single in the works, as you may already know – a little number called “One Small Step”. Matt shot the video with only minimal assistance from yours truly. (I basically showed up in a turtleneck – he did the rest.) So the very least I could do is upload the sucker to YouTube and post it on our various Web haunts. Easier said than done, it turns out – especially when you’re working off of a 28.8 baud modem and a pirated phone line. (It’s like a party line, in that every time you make a call, your signal is drowned out by pirates yaaarrr-ing at one another.)

So yeah, we have our challenges. It’s tough to be a primitive band in a digital age. About the only advantage we have is our utter broke-i-tude. Because we’re broke and squatting in an abandoned hammer mill, we don’t need to make money. So we upload our songs to iTunes, etc., and make almost nothing from them. So in that respect, the business model of the modern music industry fits us to a tee. Sure, we’re playing broken guitars, scratched up washboards, old plywood tubs… but our tech support costs are almost zero. I smell success!

Anyway… let us know what you think of One Small Step. Then let us know again. With our Web connection, it may take a few tries for your email to get through.

Political Rants

Money down.

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Not sure whether or not the government will have been shut down by cartoon pirates by the time you read this, but there’s a fair chance of it. It never ceases to amaze me how deeply insane our national legislature can become when there are no effective checks placed upon it. And trust me, there are no effective checks. We have a bicameral legislature in a federal system that divides power into three branches. With respect to initially passing legislation, really only two of those branches are relevant; the Democrats control the executive branch and the upper house of the legislative branch, the Republicans the lower house of the legislature. So who calls the shots? The Republicans, of course, by default.

Boehner started negotiations on the current fiscal year budget with a demand for $30 billion or so in cuts. The Democrats have acceded to that and then some. So now, naturally, Boehner’s caucus wants $60 billion in cuts, plus the passage of a bunch of extreme right riders that defund the EPA, banish Planned Parenthood from any federal support whatsoever, and so on. This is what you get when you give them what they want. Like any good blackmailer, they always want more. Democrats should have bitten the bullet during the lame duck and passed a reasonable spending resolution before the log went into the spokes. But there was a lack of spine then, and it’s still lacking now.

Does anyone in America remember the 2010 election? Is it just my imagination, or did these tea-party and mainstream Republicans ride around the country promising that they were going to focus like a laser beam on fiscal issues and on the mutually-exclusive values of job creation and deficit elimination? Bad as that was, I believe people expected to get that. What they didn’t expect, for example, was an all-out vendetta against Planned Parenthood, which provides vital health services – most notably cervical cancer screenings, breast exams, etc. – to women in poor communities all across the country. None of the federal funds sent to Planned Parenthood cover abortion. (That’s the product of a far earlier Democratic cave, frankly.) To reprise Keith Olbermann – Mr. Boehner, where are the jobs?  

As with Scott Walker, John Kasich, and other new G.O.P. governors, Boehner and company’s legislative agenda – contrary to what they claim – has little to do with balancing budgets and everything to do with scoring political points with their deluded, misogynistic, crypto-racist electoral base – essentially, the five psychos you see planted outside the local PP clinic every freaking day. There’s no point in trying to please them.

luv u,

jp

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.