Tag Archives: Barnard’s Star

Usual Rubbish

Are you Sirius?

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Homeward bound, I wish I was … Hoo boy, I hope Paul Simon isn’t super litigious, like those folks who own the rights to Happy Birthday. Who the hell are they again? And for chrissake, DON’T SING THE BIRTHDAY SONG!

Thing is, we will be heading in the general direction of home over the coming week, that is, after our gig on Sirius tomorrow … depending on how THAT goes. Like most of our interstellar tours, the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 is presenting certain challenges and unexpected turns of events. Our concert on Procyon was overshadowed somewhat by a large, dry alien moon. (Fun fact: “dry alien moon” is an anagram of the name Leonard Nimoy.) When I say overshadowed, I mean cast in darkness … which is problematic when you’re playing outdoors. No lights in the venue, because the denizen of Procyon 3 can see in the dark. Interesting evolutionary trick, as it’s a binary system, so when Procyon A goes down, Procyon B is over your shoulder …. until the dry alien moon intervenes.

I ask you – does any other band have to put up with this shit? We need freaking night vision goggles to get through a night. I was playing organ parts on my piano, string parts on my organ. Matt picked up a 12-string guitar to play six string ( of course …. that’s just the way he strings his Ovation Balladeer … nothing to do with the darkness, you understand). The lunar eclipse was still in progress when the gig ended and the promoter handed us our pay packet. We were well out of the planet’s atmosphere before I realized they had paid us in Betelgeusian quatloos, which are virtually worthless back on Earth! Well … you can spend them at Circuit City, Radio Shack, and Blockbuster Video, but that’s about it.

Which Procyon?

Of course, that means when we get to Sirius we have to make some hay. I’m talking Sirius money, people. Their currency is more ethereal, I understand …. most of their transactions take place via thought transference. So if you’re playing a song that someone likes, they think a few shekels into your membrane. It makes busking a whole hell of a lot easier – none of that passing the hat bullshit. So Marvin (my personal robot assistant), you’re off the hook this week.

Anyway, we’ll see how well we go over on the dog star. Hope they don’t request Werewolves of London. My Zevon is a little rusty.

Usual Rubbish

Cold comfort star.

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Oh, Jesus … turn that thing up, Mitch. I’m just starting to get the feeling back into my fingers. No, I don’t want to burn them off, but geez … there has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

Well, hello, friends of Big Green. Time for another dispatch from our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, an interstellar romp across the indie club circuit from Neptune to … well … Epsilon Indie. Except we may not make it quite that far, given the limitations of our transport. Mitch Macaphee’s used saucer lot vehicle has very little living space and can’t carry a lot of fuel, so we’re doing short hops across the void of interstellar space, hoping to bring some down-home joy to the lonely denizens of the forgotten worlds scattered across our modest galactic neighborhood. We take turns watching the planets pass by through the one viewport our ship affords. This is plain clothes, my friends … nothing but the best.

Our gig on Barnard’s Star b (that’s not a typo … the planet is named “b”, for crying out loud) was okay, I guess. Kind of a chilly reception. The surface temperature on “b” is -238 degrees Fahrenheit, and the inhabitants of “b” …. the B-ings, if you will … are a bit like our Neptunian fans. Picture ice crystals with arms and legs. You might call them pseudopods instead of appendages, but that would make you a microbiologist. When we played Jesus Has A Known Mind, they swayed a bit. A few of them held lighters over their head-like projections. There was something that could be called dancing, but the B-ings movements are so subtle you probably need special instrumentation to detect it.

Looks inviting?

One thing I’ll say for the inhabitants of Barnard b …. they need to get themselves a new star. Barnard’s star is meek, man, really meek. I mean, I’ve had space heaters that radiated more warmth than that little beacon. It emits only 0.4 percent of our own sun’s radiant energy, it says here, so if you’re waiting for summer to get there, stop waiting … it ain’t coming. Anyway, we played our tunes, collected our quatloos, chipped our spacecraft out of an ice sheet, and got the hell out of there before they asked for an encore.

Next stop is Procyon, in Canis Minor. That’s a bit of a hike, especially in this dumb-ass heap. What’s more, our navigational computer failed two days out from Barnard, so we had to hook Marvin (my personal robot assistant) up to the control panel so that his 486 processor can tell our various rockets when to fire and when to stand ready. Ahem …. may be problematic. We’ll just see where we end up.

Usual Rubbish

Saint Barnard.

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Captain’s log, star date May 17, 2019 … which just happens to be the same as today’s “Earth” date. Strange that those two calendars would coincide on this of all days! But no matter.

Yes, Big Green is currently en route to Barnard’s star, coming off a successful string of performances on Neptune (5/12) and on the third planetoid in the Proxima system (5/15). Tickets were pretty hard to get, so if you’re reading this you probably didn’t see either of those shows. Our performances were live-streamed, but given the vast distances from Earth, the stream won’t get to terrestrial devices until sometime in late 2027. (That’s what passes for “live” on an interstellar tour.)

So … the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 is off to a barn burner of a start, at least according to our publicist. Frankly, between the two of us, I consider any Neptune show I can walk away from a success. When your audience is submerged in a lake of frozen methane, it’s a little hard to tell how you’re going over. I thought I saw some movement when we played “Two Lines”, but it may have been a trick of the light. There’s a strange electromagnetic pulse that zaps through the methane, causing a greenish shimmer. I like to think of it as applause, but …. critics may differ.

Next came the Proxima system. We played on Proxima Centauri b, popularly known as Alpha Centauri (AC), the fabled destination of the Space Family Robinson, who took a wrong turn at Pluto and ended up in the worst kind of trouble television has ever seen. It’s a consensus among the Big Green crew that the Robinsons weren’t missing much when they gave AC a miss. Sure, it’s a rocky world, 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, and sure, it is inhabited by little blue space creatures who snap their finger-like appendages in time with the music. Okay, and the accommodations were better than expected. So … maybe the Robinsons SHOULD have gone there before going back to Switzerland. Who am I to judge?

Proxima? That's close.

Right about now I’m sure someone’s asking, “How’s the ship?” Well …. it’s adequate. Mitch Macaphee is somehow keeping it all together, which is a good thing, because Barnard’s Star is six light years away and we need to be there on the 20th or we forfeit about 4,000 quatloos. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) thinks the place is inhabited by St. Bernard dogs. He doesn’t spell so good. Or think so good.

Spaceward, my friends! Into the breach!