Well, we don’t have any more guitar strings. Used the last set in early April. And those used ones on the bureau are from 1997, so they may be a little dull. How about some electrical wire? I’ve got some decent coax in the cupboard.
Oh, hello. Welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, adopted home of Big Green and burgeoning center of innovation. And by innovation, I mean making do with what you have at hand. Which, I know, is not the same thing, but hey …. “innovation” sounds more, uh … innovative. In any case, provisions are running a little low around here, there being a Great Depression under way. I suppose you could argue that we’ve been experiencing a kind of Great Depression for a good many years, just within the rubric of our commercially failed alt-pop group project. That said, the tumbleweeds are blowing down the dusty street in front of the hammer mill. In the distance, you can hear a banjo playing. Somewhere a dog was barking.
Okay, so … we’re out of milk. That’s one thing. Fortunately, we don’t drink milk, so the fact that we haven’t had any for six or seven years hasn’t significantly impacted our quality of life. Pork chops, same deal. (Actually, Mitch Macaphee claims to have invented some kind of faux pork substance, but I can’t vouch for its authenticity.) The real pinch, though, comes from lack of instrument accessories and supplies. We were discussing guitar strings earlier. That’s not the only thing that’s missing around this dump. Patch cords. Stomp boxes. Tubes. Other tubes. Speaker cables. Batteries. And keys, damn it … replacement keys for my dumb-ass Roland A90EX, which has missing teeth right in the freaking middle of the board.
We were thinking about starting a GoFundMe, but given our reputation, we just assumed it would have quickly transitioned to a GoFuckYourself. Besides, passing the hat has never been a big winner for us. I remember back in our busking days, sitting around random street corners with an open guitar case set on the sidewalk, waiting for coins. Mind you, we weren’t playing any music. Fact was, we were even poorer then, so we didn’t have guitars, just guitar cases. So we would sit there and wait for people to drop some cash in the hole. In a way, we’re sitting there still. (Sometimes I get on Google Street View and wander through our old neighborhood in downtown Albany, NY just to make certain we’re not still there. That would be freaky, but not beyond the realm of possibility.)
Oh well. Little we can do for the time being, except strum rusty guitar strings, plunk on broken keys, and watch inspirational corporate TV ads that start with reverb-y piano notes and solemn voices.
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.
But more than anything else, we are thankful to you, our listeners and readers. (That includes all you little Russian bots – I see you!) And that’s why we have chosen to express our gratitude by posting a warmed-over installment of Ned Trek entitled 
Hey, anyone out there who works with audio and video knows, this stuff is time consuming. Especially when you’re a lazy sloth like me. I’m a bit more like Bobby Sweet than I care to let on, truth be told. I like to sit back and strum on my old guitar, pound out a few chords on the old piano, drop some canned fruit in the old blender and swear at the fact that it still doesn’t work. All I can say is that, despite the distractions, we are working on the 
Right, so … Mitch Macaphee has his own theories. And his theories usually lead to some nameless device that looks like a ham radio rig from the 1960s, with dials and meters and knobs and blinking lights. It makes a “woo-woo” sound. Sometimes he puts arms and legs on it and calls it Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sometimes he throws a switch and things disappear … or appear. This time around, he adjusted the right combination of buttons, switches, lanyards, etc., to suspend gravity in the hammer mill. An anti-gravity machine, as it were. And that means more than floating hammers, my friends. Suffice to say, I haven’t had to use the stairs all week. If this keeps up, we may be battling obesity before long.