Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Usual Rubbish

Chain of contact.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Well, that’s a start. So, where did you go yesterday evening? Oh, okay. I didn’t know there was a pinball alley in this burg. News to me. Do they have any old Bally machines? Seriously? Got a quarter?

Oh, hi. Well, we were just starting to get back on our feet this week here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, Big Green’s adopted home, in the wake of last week’s medical debacle. Then fate moved its mighty hand, as Bill Conrad used to say in the opening sequence of The Fugitive. Now we’re all at sixes and sevens. In fact, some of us are at eights and nines, and that can’t be good. Pretty soon we’ll be fresh out of numbers.

So what’s the beef? Well, it turns out that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was at some point exposed to the COVID-19 virus. We don’t know how or when, but apparently it was someone at the pinball palace down the street … could be the quartermaster (you know, the guy who doles out the quarters to the punters) or the barmaid, or maybe a fellow patron. They can’t say, apparently, because of Hippa … Hippa McGillicutty, the owner of the joint, who apparently takes a dim view of such disclosures. Damnation.

Marvin's last known contacts.

You know what this means, right? We have to trace all of Marvin’s contacts over the past month or so. Even more problematic – some of those contacts are, well, us. Well, that shortens the list. To simplify matters a bit, I asked Mitch Macaphee to do a level-four diagnostic on his proud invention (Marvin) so that we can have a readout of his activities over that time. He told me that there was no such thing as a level-four diagnostic, even though I distinctly remember hearing it on a television program. After that little back and forth, he plugged what looked like a table lamp into Marvin’s USB port. The light bulb started flashing a semaphore-like code, and Mitch rendered it into this list:

  • Tumble dryer, corner laundromat
  • Stamp dispenser, post office
  • Gas pump, filling station, fourth and main
  • Air compressor, mechanic’s shop next door to filling station
  • Computer terminal, public library

Okay, so … those are all machines. Should we be concerned that Marvin’s only friends are inanimate objects? Or should we be thankful that he’s not rolling around town like Typhoid Mary on gimbals? Troubled times, indeed!

Usual Rubbish

Numero 1501.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Just taking a moment to celebrate 1500 posts on this ragged little blog. I’m celebrating from a hospital bed in Utica’s Faxton-St. Luke’s, waiting for doctors to tell me what’s what. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is minding the hammer mill in my absence. (“Minding” is a charitable way of putting it.) Don’t burn the mill down, Marvin! (Again!)

I’ll post more when I’m able. Stay well and be happy, people.

Usual Rubbish

Digi green.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmm. Try shift-F7. No good? Okay, wait. Isn’t there a big red button somewhere that gets you out of this shit? No? Huh. I must be thinking of the clothes washer.

Oh, yeah … hi. Well, as you might have guessed, your friends in Big Green are struggling to make ends meet, like most bands these days. It’s not easy. Frankly, it’s downright discouraging sometimes. This week, we spent at least three days trying to get the ends to meet, only to discover that the metaphor apparently doesn’t involve bringing ends together into a kind of loop, but, well … something quite different, it seems. There goes another three days! We spend time like company scrip at a Massey coal mine. (Which reminds me …. sixteen tons!)

Okay, so, a lot of bands are now doing digital performances in order to comply with social distancing guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are passing the digital hat, and that’s all good … very much like the sound of that. This whole thing has prompted a brisk discussion here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – should we start doing live performances via YouTube, Facebook, etc.? Should we record performances and just toss them up there? Or should we run around in circles, waving our arms above our heads and yelling “Catastrophe! Catastrophe!”? If we do that, maybe Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can hold up my smart phone and send it out on YouTube, Facebook, etc. Yes, a brisk conversation … brisk as Lipton Tea.

Okay, Marvin. Now hold the camera high.

Trouble is, nearly all of us are technically challenged when it comes to the internets. I’m not even sure how this blog works. I type shit into, press a button, and hey-presto, there it is, on the internets. Simple enough, right? But when it comes to broadcasting something into the ether, something that requires cameras, microphones, digital input devices, modems, routers, CAT6 cables, tin foil hats, clown shoes, cardboard backdrops, etc., we start getting into areas that are less familiar to us simple country folk. Sure, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee knows a thing or two about the internets, but every time we ask him for advice or assistance, he comes back with some claptrap about inventing an alternative to the internets. Always has to start from scratch, that Mitch. (God help us if he encounters that itch he cannot scratch.)

So, short answer, we’ll see if Shift-F7 gets us anywhere in the short run. Got better suggestions for magical key commands? Send them our way!

Usual Rubbish

Mumbly peg.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Well, Mitch’s idea went bust, and now he’s amongst the legions of unemployed. Turns out the Cheney Hammer Mill doesn’t meet the standards necessary to be designated a medical waste repository. This place doesn’t even make an adequate garbage can. Cheese and crackers.

So, here we are. Always wondered what it was like to be a band back in the Great Depression. Now it’s starting to look like the good old days. Anti-Lincoln, of course, remembers the panic of 1857, when he lost all that money he had dumped into railroad stocks. (His posi-tronic doppelganger, the actual Lincoln, came up as a railroad lawyer, which is why the two never saw eye to eye.) Then there was the post-war recession of 1865-67, when Anti-Lincoln lost his shirt again. (He found it in 1870. Turns out it was dropped into his neighbor’s laundry bin by mistake. He always blames the Jacobins for that, but then … he blames them for everything.)

With the social distancing requirements in place, we obviously can’t make money busking. I’ve been sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to do errands for people on the reckless assumption that COVID-19 doesn’t like the taste of brass and tin. He did a couple of grocery runs for our elderly neighbor, Peg, but he kept getting her order wrong, mostly because, at ninety-seven, she doesn’t speak very distinctly. Even with his hypersonic hearing, Marvin kept mistaking “cantelope” for “antelope”, and coming back with some nameless cuts of brawn that he would claim was antelope but which was probably beef or mutton. When he handed her a box of Cheerios instead of a bottle of Cheer, that was the last straw.

Well, times being what they are, we’ve all decided to pool our resources and conserve provisions to the greatest extent possible. Turns out Mitch Macaphee has been holding out on us – he’s got a veritable Aladdin’s cave of canned vegetables. Mostly wax beans, sadly, but that’s better than beets. We’re not super particular, as you know. The only thing Anti-Lincoln refuses to eat is Chicken Fricassee, which was President Lincoln’s favorite dish. (Again, those two just didn’t get along.) Hey, once you’ve sampled the fare on Aldebaran, you’ll be glad for whatever terrestrial food you can get your hands on. Those fuckers literally eat molten rocks. For breakfast! (Lunch, maybe. But only with a nice chardonnay.) Some think we’re not tough enough for hardships like this, and well, maybe they’re right, but – and this is important – it’s not nice to say things like that. You can hurt people’s feelings.

Hey, stay home, folks, and listen to some music … like, I don’t know … how about Big Green?

Usual Rubbish

Zombie playdate.

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2000 Years to Christmas

I think I saw them coming up the road, just past the post office. Did you see them, too? No? Maybe I’m imagining things. Or …. maybe you’re gaslighting me! WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO HIDE! SPEAK!

Oh … hello, readers. We were just, um … going over the household accounts. Seems the electric bill is overdue again. Just like last month … and the 120 months before that. (Maybe that’s why the lights are off.) Okay, I will own up to the fact that we are getting a little squirrel-y here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now that we’ve been ordered to shelter in place. Actually, the order doesn’t apply to us because, well … we’re not supposed to be living here, but what the law doesn’t know won’t hurt it. Still, in these plague times, it’s best to heed the warnings of public health officials. We’re masking up, donning the rubber gloves, and eating out of an autoclave.

Now, I’m not super fond of hoarders. That said, one of our number, and I’m not saying who (ahem … anti-Lincoln), came home with a boatload of canned soup, pasta, and toilet paper this past Tuesday. I know you’re going to tell me that he’s doing it for our own good, but you are so wrong, my friend – he’s keeping it all for himself. Anti-Lincoln has essentially walled himself off in the east wing of the hammer mill, cloistered in with his cache precious supplies, cackling through the brick walls at our hunger and privation. It’s not for nothing that he’s the anti-matter doppelganger of old honest Abe. I mean, think about it – would the great emancipator ever act in such a selfish way? Even when he was running for re-election?

Do not enter!

As the COVID-19 pestilence has closed in on our forgotten corner of the world, people appear to be heading for the hills. Our nasty upstairs neighbors lit out this week, lugging their high explosives and trained pole cats with them. Meanwhile, people from the low country who consider this “the hills” keep showing up at our door, seeking shelter. Some of them appear to think this is some kind of country estate, like in Boccaccio’s Decameron, where they can ride out the pestilence. They march out of the woods like zombies, hoping for a playdate, at least, if no apocalypse presents itself. We’ve stationed Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out in front of the mill as a sentry. Thus far, he has neither stopped any intruders nor invited anyone in, so on balance, I’d call that a success. (He did lose his balance once. Those gimbals need adjusting.)

Okay, well … back to the accounts. WHERE ARE YOU, YOU MISERABLE GUTTER SNIPE! I’VE GOT AN ACCOUNT TO SETTLE WITH YOU!

Usual Rubbish

Keeping distance.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, closer. A little closer. I said a little! Right, so push the tray this way. That’s good enough. Great, thanks. Now get away from me, you scavenging ghoul!

Oh, hi. I should have thought someone would be reading this blog today, as there is precious little else to do now that we live in plague times. (I’m sure someone out there is doing something more useful, like writing their own latter-day version of the Decameron.) Frankly, this is when it pays to live in a podunk town. New York’s governor has banned events with audiences of 500 people or more. While that’s a huge problem down in Manhattan, that’s like falling off a log up here. Hell, there aren’t even 500 people within five square miles of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Safe as houses! It pays not … to get paid.

Here inside the hammer mill, we’re taking drastic steps to respond to this crisis. Well, maybe “drastic” is too strong a word. Big steps. We’re stepping bigly, particularly when we see someone coming towards us. In other words, we’re practicing social distancing. In a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has determined the precise distance we need to keep from other human beings in order to remain safe from COVID-19. That’s 47.5 inches. Kind of a problem, as our corridors here in the mill are about seventy inches wide. So to remain on the safe side, we’ve adopted a single-user hallway policy for the foreseeable future. That means everyone walking in the same direction, like those mysterious figures in that M.C. Escher drawing, ascending and descending, except all one way.

That's it, guys. Stay in your lane.

Unfortunately for anti-Lincoln, the local St. Patrick’s Day parade has been canceled. That said, I think he fully plans to roll down main street in his log cabin float made entirely from bricks of expired government cheese. He’s agreed to fly the Big Green banner as a way of signalling that he’s not just some random crazy person, but in fact an antimatter ex-president from the nineteenth century representing a bunch of random crazy people. In the meantime, Anti-Lincoln plans to wear his float around the mill as his own version of social distancing. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been recruited to serve as his flag man, so that he doesn’t keep crashing into the hallway walls. Hey, we all cope as best we can.

So no worries, folks – we’re not sick yet. At least not in that respect.

Usual Rubbish

My back pages.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hmmm, let’s see …. here’s a fragment. I think I wrote this in 1987. Or maybe a couple of years before that. Yeah, more like ’85. It’s got tahini stains on it, and I swore off tahini in ’86.

Yes, here we are, doing what upstate New Yorkers typically do during the colder months, when we’re all frozen in place, afraid to leave our homes, waiting for the waxing sun to favor us once again – digging through the archives! Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we’ve got lots of room for old cardboard boxes and file folders, hundreds of which have somehow found their way here from wherever we came from previously. I don’t know about you, but all of my possessions follow me around like a lost dog. I just don’t have the heart to turn them away. Poor little motherless stand mixer! You’ll always have a home with me!

Right, well … I don’t want to trouble you with some shabby inventory of my personal possessions. I’m mostly interested in old compositions from the early days of Big Green, when we were all knee-high to a locust. Ah yes, I remember those days well, piled into our spartan garret, scribbling away into repurposed notepads leftover from school, crossing out drafts of expository writing essays and replacing them with angry verse, channeling the angst of a then-young generation choking on its collective anger over … uh … having to do expository writing essays. And a couple of other things. Hey, those were the immediate post-punk years. We all started on Dylan and the Beatles as pre-teens, then moved on to the harder stuff when we were 20. Those 60s hipsters were our gateway drug.

Okay, let's have a look, then.

So, what are we finding? Old songs, pieces of songs, idea tapes, etc. I’m guessing there’s an album in this somewhere, though it’s going to look a lot like that Mousetrap board game by the time it’s finished. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to help me evaluate what to do with all of this old material. That’s a fairly simple process. I find some lyrics, I insert them into Marvin’s scanner, and the music goes round and round, whoa, whoa, whoa, and it comes out as a series of numbers. I then look up the numbers on the decoder ring Mitch Macaphee built for me (coincidentally, it looks just like the ones I used to get in my Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes) which renders a “yes” or a “no”. If it’s yes, then we consider turning it into something. If it’s no, well, into the bin it goes.

I’ve been getting a lot of nos, frankly. Either there’s something wrong with this ring, or I really sucked my way through the eighties. It’s one of the other, folks.

Usual Rubbish

One hit.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Well, I wouldn’t call it a hit, exactly. Kind of more like a near hit. You know – the term George Carlin wanted to substitute for “near miss”. Let’s just say, hit-adjacent. That’s a bit more like it.

Oh, hi. Just having a little discussion with my chief discography advisor and personal robot assistant, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Yes, he’s wearing two hats on his tiny brass head today, largely because we currently have no incumbent in the position of chief discography advisor. I’m told most bands have trouble filling that post. The trade schools just can’t churn them out fast enough, I guess. Oh, well …. couldn’t pay them anyway.

Right, well … we were just going over our canon. You know – our body of work. It’s kind of a decrepit body, frankly, hunched over and showing its age in a dozen different ways, but nevertheless, we’re sifting through our output, looking for hidden gems … or at least a fieldstone or two. (Lodestone, perhaps?) Why have we taken on this weighty project when there’s still so much good sleeping to be done? Glad you asked. It seems Marvin has been listening to the radio again. No just any radio …. national PUBLIC radio, as it happens (no, wait … that’s the CBC), and he heard a segment called … I don’t know …. “one hit wonders”, or something like that. Marvin doesn’t have speech, so I have to interpret his various flashing lights and rotating gears into pidgin English …. then into French, then back into English with a stopover in semaphore. So damn time-consuming!

It was on that little one down there. But it was STILL a big hit.

Anyway, Marvin thinks we might qualify as one-hitters because we had a hit record on Aldebaran. Personally, I think that’s kind of a stretch. Though I suppose, because Aldebaran is a binary star, it might actually count as two hits. Perhaps the song played backwards on its companion star, where everything is a perfect mirror image of what’s on the surface of the red giant itself. Or perhaps not. In any case, we never got a dime out of that particular success story, just a bucketful of radioactive goop that Mitch Macaphee got really excited about. Funny thing, that … just a week or so after he took possession of the goop, that bank he owed money to disappeared into thin air. So in a way, you could say that goop was good for something. It’s a foul goop indeed that doesn’t glow somebody some good.

Okay, well … this is getting us nowhere. Marvin, I really don’t thing NPR is going to be interested in our Aldebaran “hit”. I somehow can’t picture them playing “The Dino Song” to a national audience. (However, if you Big Green fans out there ask nicely, we will definitely play it for you. Just tweet at me @BigGreenJoe and we’ll get it done … somehow.)

Usual Rubbish

Lights out.

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2000 Years to Christmas

So that’s what non-existence feels like. A little underwhelming, frankly. And I’m not a big fan of the tech support line hold music. Sheesh.

Howdy. Speaking for myself and the rest of Big Green (which, essentially, amounts to my illustrious brother and various bizarre hangers-on), I want to apologize most humbly for our little Web site outage over the last couple of days (February 12 – 13). Those of you who visit these pages regularly (all three of you) may have noticed an absence of …. well, anything on this and related domains during that time. Suffice to say we had a little dispute with ICANN over our true identity, which (of course) we have striven to keep secret so that we can continue to fight crime when called upon. That’s all I’m going to say about it. Now excuse me – the Bat Phone is ringing.

I know there are a lot of bloggers and self-managed web proprietors out there who have run into domain authentication issues like this and worse over the years, so I’ve got little to add to this common experience. All I can say is that, when you’re in the middle of an ambitious indoor agricultural initiative, highly reliant on robot labor, it’s a little disconcerting to have someone pull the plug on you because you gave them the wrong email address fifteen years ago. Fun fact: when this site goes down, the lights go out in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and we’re all frozen in place. Try calling a tech line in suspended animation! Good thing we have friends on the outside.

Oy! Who put the lights out?!

It’s just one of the drawbacks of being a virtual rock band: our existence is dependent on the availability of a reliable Web server, which, as any web proprietor knows, is simply an impossibility. That’s not the only link in the Big Green supply chain, of course. There’s the data input piece as well. Picture rows of chimps plunking at keyboards. Then there’s those two antenna like things with the electrical arc snapping between them – the one that Mitch Macaphee loves so damn much. In short, there’s a lot that goes into bringing this blog and our various podcasts into being. Sometimes there’s a break in the chain, and then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Makes you think.

Hey, what do I know, right? I’m just a guy who plays the piano and strums a guitar. All the science, I don’t understand. This ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids (up in). I got nothing.

Usual Rubbish

Yamtastic.

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2000 Years to Christmas

There are a thousand and one practical uses for them, Mitch. You can eat them, for one thing. And if you wire them up right, you can use them as primitive dry cell batteries. That’s two. Just nine hundred ninety-nine to go.

Damn, it’s hard to talk a man of mad science into something that doesn’t involve explosions. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are currently in the midst of an agrarian revolution. We’re feeling our roots here in rural upstate New York. Why fight it, Big Green? You are people of the land. You are born of the soil, and you refer to yourselves in the second person. Did I ever tell you my daddy was a poor dirt farmer from up in the hills around Milford? Well, if I did, I was either drunk or more drunk. Dad grew some tomatoes and hot peppers in the backyard, that’s about it. (Oh, and there were those grape vines, but I digress.)

Okay, so we DON’T have the soil in our blood. What of it? We are simply living up to the promise implicit in our name. If we call ourselves Big Green, we should be cultivating green things in a big way. And now, with the advent of robot-driven agriculture, we can, in a sense, plant our cake and eat it too. Though I understand that cake is very hard to grow hydroponically. It takes a lot of sun, and when it ripens, you have to frost the whole crop or your yield goes right through the floor. I’ve seen many a good man flounder on the shoals of cake farming, my friend. Nope …. not for me.

Me bairns! Me poor bairns!

No, we’ve decided to go with sweet potatoes. That’s not entirely by accident (though most of what we do is). Our long time associate, the mansized tuber, is himself an overgrown sweet potato, and he has graciously consented to contribute some shoots to the cause. I’ve instructed Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to plant the shoots in such a manner as might be recommended by people who know how the hell to do this. Marvin duly checked YouTube, then started poking shoots into little pots, all lined up on tables in the dilapidated main assembly room. Before any of us knew it, he was raising a small army of mansized tubers …. only they weren’t yet man-sized, unless we’re talking about very tiny men. They were more mouse-sized. Give them a chance!

I don’t know where this is going, but I know this: our friendly mansized tuber is going to have a lot of company this spring.