Tag Archives: agriculture

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.

Usual Rubbish

Agro-botics.

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2000 Years to Christmas

It think there’s room. Absolutely. We’ve got plenty of space on the shop floor. Just sweep those old discarded hammer parts out of there and we’re in business.

Oh, hi. Welcome to Big Green’s Cheney Hammer Mill headquarters, the innovation center of northeastern central New York! Sure, I know you folks all think we’re a bunch of layabout deadbeat motherfuckers, and, well, you’re mostly right about that, but I’m here to tell you that we’re on the verge of turning over a new leaf. And that leaf will be turned by the claw of a hired robot.

What am I talking about? Trends, my dear listeners, trends. Take a look at your non-existent newspaper. You don’t have to look very far at all to find stories about robots increasingly being used in agriculture. That’s right – robots plowing, robots planting, robots fertilizing, robots picking, etc., etc. Now look at us. (No, really …. look at us.) We are an independent band, planted in the middle of an agricultural community – a musical ficus plant, dying of thirst in a creative desert. Year after year, we seek something our community cannot give us: money delivered to our door in easy to negotiate, small denomination bills. After all this time, we’ve decided, why fight it? Let’s join the agricultural sector. Now … how can we do this without breaking a sweat?

Well, now there’s an answer to that age-old question: Robots! Robots are doing all the work these days, cultivating cash crops all across the country. Now you may say, “But Joe, you don’t have any land? Where will you grow the crops?” Well, nameless interlocutor, first, thanks for calling me Joe. Second, we’ve got all the growing space we need, right here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. We can set up a hydroponic garden on the shop floor. Hell, we won’t even need dirt! Just millions of gallons of water and … well, we’ll work that out.

And you may ask, “But Joe, where are you gonna get the robots?” My reply: Thanks for your question! In fact, we have robots. Well … at least one robot. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will be patient zero in our agricultural revolution. He will be the prototype, the one-bot vanguard for a future army of agro-matons. Right, Marvin? …. Marvin??

Marvin? Anyone seen Marvin today? It’s planting time, damn it!