Calling all cars. One Adam Twelve. C-Q, C-Q. What the… – this thing is faulty as hell, Mitch! You call this emergency communications? I call it trash.
Well, as you might imagine, we’re trying to prepare for the worst here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Hurricane season is just starting, after all, and this has been the worst year for tornadoes for as long as anyone can remember. So we’re getting all of our ducks in a row. (Kind of an ongoing project, as they keep waddling away and we have to keep having to chase them and carry them back.) We found some old tent stakes in the basement just in case anything… needs staking… down. Not sure when that’s likely to come up, but if it does, we’ll be ready. Then, of course, I’ve got some old tarps from my barnstorming days. Yeah, they’re moldy and motheaten, but we’re talking about emergency readiness here, not aesthetics. Get with the program!
Mitch Macaphee came up with some walkie talkies that we can carry around with us in case the lights go out. As you can tell from my earlier outburst, they don’t work so well. Not sure where he put his hands on the components. My suspicion is that he just bought them at a yard sale somewhere in town, probably from some 12-year-old entrepreneur willing to bilk an aging mad scientist. Hell, I used some of my best phony call signals, and nothing! Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) couldn’t copy me… and he was standing five feet away. (Perhaps his hearing circuits were on the blink. Another Mitch triumph.)
Our thought was emergency communications, of course. We’ve got some other measures we can take, too. Like running down the cellar. Sure, that’s where our studio is, but that’s okay – we can combine hiding from the storm with rehearsal. Should be a huge time saver this year, as it thundered and rained every day in May, I think. In fact, flood water was pouring down the basement stairs at a couple of points. I had to ask Marvin to act as a dehumidifier for a few days. (We just stuff him full of cotton wool and reverse the polarity on a couple of his cooling fans, then plant a bucket under him to catch the condensation. How easy is that?)
I know… we should treat Marvin better. We’re not nice. Guess it’s time we went back on the road again, work off some of this nastiness. Road trip!
Well, summer is upon us, friends. No, not summer by the calendar, but rather summer by the sweat of the brow. Or so it goes in the northern climes of the northern hemisphere, on that land mass known as “North America”, just below the mighty lake Ontario, maker of much snow in the darker months – a kind of ice goddess, if you will. (Hell, even if you won’t.) It doesn’t take much to raise the temperature in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – all that brick, you know, baking in the direct sunlight, no trees to protect us. It’s like spending a night in the box. Sure wish you stop trying to help me, Captain.
Yes, more strife here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, place of our birth, land of our fathers, and all the rest of it. What is Big Green up to this week? Gasping. Lots of gasping. As some of you may know (and many, I’m sure, don’t), May is the time of year when mad scientists tend to roll out all of their new world-destroying experiments. It’s in anticipation of the upcoming CrazyCom Mad Science Convention they hold in Madagascar every August. Everybody wants to show boat the new death ray, the improved zip gun, the killer robot, now with more sparks. Kind of a pissing match for high-tech cranks. Attend at your own risk. (The last one ended badly, I hear.)
Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.
There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions. 
Okay, I’m struggling with my status as official Luddite of Big Green. (Originally that post belonged to my illustrious brother Matt, but now he’s the dude with the smart phone.) I don’t claim to be the most inept person ever to sit in front of a keyboard, but good goddamn – I’m making a doorstop out of this thing. If they just equipped PC’s with drawbars and foot pedals, I could drive the suckers, no problem.
in that every time you make a call, your signal is drowned out by pirates yaaarrr-ing at one another.)
Oh, hi. Just spitballing here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Nothing to get excited about. Between Big Green tours, as you may already know, we tend to blow a lot of time in contemplation and various other pointless activities. Not because we are perennial time-wasters, you understand. No, no – it’s the ascetic lifestyle we aspire to. I know most bands drown themselves in drink, cloud their minds with illicit drugs, and indulge in multifarious pleasures of the flesh. Not this crew, my little friend – not a bit of it. We are like monks. (Did I say monks? I meant monkeys. Or Monkees. You take your pick.) We sit about, scratch, toss things at one another… until somebody says, get up there and play.
That’s just one example. And yeah, we’re aiming that at both an Earthbound audience and those folks out there in spaceland. Got to name-check a few communities they’re likely to recognize – kind of like those pop songs that have place names in them (like Huey Lewis naming cities at the end of “Heart of Rock and Roll”, for instance). When we’re up in the Crab Nebula, they wait for this song. They start waving their tentacles and nodding their oddly misshapen heads. It’s a gas.
What’s happening around this place? Usual kind of stuff. We’re preparing for the warm weather, which typically comes around this time in the northern hemisphere (for those of you browsing in from Madagascar). That’s kind of an involved process. We have to put out the fire we started in the basement last November. No, we don’t have a furnace – that’s for bourgeois rock bands and… what do they call them? …. symphony orchestras. Hell, no – no furnace for Big Green. We just bust up a bunch of old furniture, baskets, hammer stocks (of which there are many lying around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill), and other combustibles, chuck ’em down the basement stairs, light ’em up, and keep it going until March.
actual paint left is the stuff holding the windows closed.
Ah, got it. Scratched into my computer monitor, right about where the password field appears on the screen. Pretty clever, huh? No one would think of looking for it there! Let’s see… what is up at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill that might be of interest to you. Little inventory here. I think Mitch Macaphee is working on an experiment (either that or Qaddafi’s bombers are getting closer). Matt is either changing strings on a guitar, feeding animals, or transposing our heads with those of lunar astronauts. (A specialty of his.) Johnny White is catching up on his technical manuals, I believe. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has shut himself down for the weekend, taking a little break from his newly founded religious cult. I won’t get into what the Lincolns are up to.
“…most of the big green groups are loath to talk about economics and often don’t want to see themselves as being part of a left at all, see climate change as an issue that transcends politics entirely…. a lot of the big green groups, are also in a kind of denial.” 
Right. So, let’s see… what do we have in the old mail bag? Ah… here’s something…
I have entrusted it to my good friend, Big Zamboola, who will carry it straight over to you…. just as soon as he disengages himself from synchronous orbit over Aldebaran 7. (He is strangely attracted to that hideous little globe.) Give him a few thousand years or so. Orbits have decayed more slowly than that, to be sure.