He’s screaming about “the probe” again. It’s like he’s the Six Million Dollar man or something. Does anyone have smelling salts? Maybe we should just hit him with one of the leftover hammers. Any other good ideas?
Well, as you can see, we have had a house invasion. The perpetrator? None other than our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft started orbiting his adopted home world of Ceres, he became extremely agitated. Smoke began to pour out of his ears and mouth, like VOL, from Star Trek. He simply could not live with the idea of being spied upon by the space agency. What if they stole his ideas? he thought…. then his plan to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD would be scuttled. Shot down by a measly little, tin-pot space robot. THAT MAKES ME SO MAD …. !
Ahem. Sorry – I was channeling Mitch for a moment. Anyway, he denounced the NASA probe as a space invader and started bombarding it with deadly baritold rays. Deadly, that is, for vegetation on Gamma Hydra 4, but completely ineffective against ion-powered orbiter spacecrafts. Frustrated, he packed up his portable lab and lifted off. That’s the good news. The BAD news is that he landed here, at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, mad as a badger and ready to take his quarters back from Anti-Lincoln, who had scattered all of his junk over the floor of Mitch’s lab. (Anti-Lincoln’s gotten into origami in a big way, so the whole room is full of paper shards and scissors.)
Now Mitch talks (or shouts) in his sleep, and by day he’s formulating theorems to destroy his imaginary enemies. I think he’s been on that asteroid way too long, as a matter of personal opinion. But please – keep that to yourself! I may be subjected to a withering barrage of baritold rays!
Projects. Matt and I are working on some new songs for Ned Trek. I will also be posting some songs from Cowboy Scat on our YouTube channel very soon, for those of you who like listening to music on YouTube. I’ll post, tweet, whatever when they’re up.
Right, well … I was just talking to our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee via Skype, and it seems he has a problem. And when Mitch has a problem, frankly, we all have a problem. That’s the thing with mad scientists. One day they’re inventing something dumb and innocuous, like Marvin (my personal robot assistant). The next they’re assembling the elements of some plane-smashing behemoth or a diabolical extreme weather machine (though I think that last one has already been invented by the mad “scientists” we call America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry).
Well, after several days of drifting aimlessly, we appear to have settled into orbit around Jupiter, the bull moose of the outer solar system. Our sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, sFhzenKlyrn, has volunteered to visit the surface of the gas giant to see if there are any performance opportunities, since we’re in the neighborhood. I’d go myself, but alas, I require oxygen and Earthlike temperatures, to say nothing of solid ground. Sure, we’ve played the Great Red Spot before, but that was back in the day. (It’s probably a gas station now, like most of the clubs we played back then.)
Yes, you read that right. We got a bull’s eye on Ceres, the big brass buckle of the asteroid belt. I’m beginning to understand what’s happening here. Our rented space vehicle has a very primitive voice-activated computer guidance system, a bit like the blue tooth set in my car. When I tell my blue tooth, “call Oscar,” it starts dialing the number of someone in Madagascar. Well, we told our guidance system to take us to Sirius, and it took us to freaking Ceres. Christ on a bike!