Are you still tinkering with that thing? Holy shit, I thought you were a scientist. What kind of scientist spends a week screwing the legs into a mail-order ottoman? Whoa, Mitch …. put the hammer down. HEY!
Greetings, Big Green die-hards. This is what I sound like a moment after someone tries to brain me with a flying hammer. Our friend and mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is not all that pleased with me right now. I shouldn’t have asked how his latest experiment is progressing. Don’t know what he’s working on, but I can tell you that it came out of an Ikea box. Maybe it’s an ottoman, or perhaps a chesterfield. Kind of hard to tell from ten paces.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Mitch is a mad scientist in the traditional sense, right? His stock in trade is formulating theorems to crack the earth in half or poison the atmosphere (not that we aren’t already doing that without his help), BIG stuff … not build-it-yourself furnishings or other petty household trifles. Well, all I can say is, never underestimate the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He is truly ahead of the curve on domestic mad science, and that’s largely because of some YouTube clips he’s been watching on the Internet of Things (IOT).
Right, so … Mitch spent a few weeks YouTubing, and the next thing we knew he was tinkering with our aging refrigerator. The following day, Matt opened the fridge door and the little light went on. Hey … he’s finally making himself useful, we all thought. But then the thing started talking to me. One afternoon I reached in for a cold drink and I heard a mechanical voice say, “Are you going to have another one of those?” Then it locked the door on me. That was bad enough, but just this past week we started getting random shipments from the neighborhood grocer – eggs, milk, cottage cheese, lettuce. I thought it was Anti Lincoln planning one of his famous cotillions, but no … Mitch had hooked the fridge up to the internet, and the bloody thing has been shopping online and spending a freaking fortune.
So, hell … if Mitch takes a little heat on his home improvement projects, he has it coming. Not sure why an ottoman needs a gun mount, though …
Well, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. I think we’ve put about six months into these songs, and we’re only now at the mixing stage. Mind you, we have just a few hours a week to do anything on this at all, then it’s back to the salt mines. Still, taking time allows us to experiment a bit more, which is what Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was calling me out for just then. Not sure when he graduated from Julliard, but apparently the sight of me playing a coronet with a violin bow blew a few breakers in that little brass noggin of his. It’s called innovation, Marvin. Deal with it.
Of course it bloody doesn’t! What, point hi-def video cameras at our superannuated faces? Nothing doing. And as far as the archival footage goes, what we have is so rough and so primitive I doubt anyone would be able to interpret the hazy dark shapes on the screen in a way that would suggest real human activity. What director is going to take a bunch of VHS tapes and make a documentary? The idea is ludicrous, and yet Marvin is married to it, much like that time he married that stamp vending machine over at the corner drug store. The only thing that worked about that marriage was when it came to putting postage on the wedding invitations. In that respect, it was a match made in heaven.
I suppose more than a few of you have noticed that we don’t do a lot of tours anymore. Maybe the occasional day trip to a distant asteroid once in a blue moon (not to mention the gig we did on that blue moon once), that sort of thing. We have become more sedentary over the passing years, and one glance at those old blog posts confirm it. God knows, back in THOSE days we were sailing off to distant solar systems at the drop of a hat, teaming up with extraterrestrial guitarists (like 
I guess it’s the downloading the data part that makes him think he might be in the crosshairs of law enforcement. Even Mitch, with his fevered astrophysicist brain, knows that that is a bozo no-no, so to speak, in the eyes of the intelligence services. I told him just to shut Oumuamua down for a couple of weeks or send it to another solar system … preferably a slightly less repressive or litigious one. My guess is that he will eventually come around to doing something like that, though you would think the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might have worked that out for himself. No soap. So many difficult personalities to deal with in this business! So much freaking drama!
Now, it’s no secret that we’re not super fond of live performances. Our battles are fought in the laboratory, not the prize ring! I mean … we make music in the studio, for the most part. Hell, it’s easier, and you get do-overs. So the notion of traveling billions of miles in some dodgy rent-a-spacecraft with a mad man at the helm is not particularly appealing. At the very least, we would need to send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do the advance work, which on a gig like Ultima Thule would involve checking the gravitation (too strong, too weak) and doing an atmospheric analysis. I’m guessing the lab work could be finished maybe nine months after his return, which given current technology, might take 40 years.
Fast forward to the 2000s. As many will remember, we were living in a five room lean-to in Sri Lanka back in those days. We had scratched together enough filthy lucre to buy some recording equipment, which we used to record our first album, 
Or maybe you will. Either way, that’s what we’re dropping on the holiday table under the tree. For a sampling, check our 
But really the greatest danger is having Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, pick your name out of the hat for Secret Santa. Christmas is his time to offload all of the failed experiments from the past year, and there are usually quite a few of them. You may end up unwrapping a package that contains a beaker of radioactive sludge or something that’s ticking like a bomb. (“Hey, Mack …” you’d say in your 1940s New York accent, “What the heck is this thing? It’s ticking like a bomb!”)
So we’re walking into the twentieth year of this phase of Big Green’s existence, and really … not much has changed since 1999 except that our releases aren’t typically on CD anymore and we’re driving smarter cars. Other than that, everything’s about the same around the Hammer Mill. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) still has a lot of his original vacuum tubes, and his various grease fittings haven’t been lubricated since those early days. The mansized tuber is still man-sized …. he hasn’t grown into some kind of gnarly behemoth. And our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is still off his meds … at least the ones his doctor advised him to take so many years ago.