That was firecrackers, right? It’s getting closer to fourth of July, I guess. Or maybe it’s someone’s birthday. Please tell me that was firecrackers, because if it wasn’t … ugh … there goes the neighborhood.
Yeah, well … we went to bed to the sound of gunfire last night. Some knucklehead pulling a Yosemite Sam imitation right out in front of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Could be they thought the place was empty – it is, after all, abandoned. Anyway, we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out there to have a look. He’s kind of like one of those tactical bomb-sniffing robots, except that he doesn’t have a tactical bone in his body and he hates the smell of explosives.
Anyway, he tottered out there and took a look around, then came back in with a couple of bottle caps. Not 100% sure that was related to what we sent him out there for, but there you have it. We may be looking for a gunman who enjoys drinking soda while he/she is shooting up the place. Hey, look … we have to go with the robot we have, not the one we wish we had. He’s not a tactical robot; he’s more of a strategic robot in that he helps us map out our plans for interstellar tours. (Trouble is, he does it in a language I don’t understand … a language shared by maybe a half-dozen robot assistants worldwide, all built by Mitch Macaphee.)
Needless to say, the recent degradation of our little neighborhood is hastening our decision to go out on the road again. And when I say “road”, I mean deep space pathways … imaginary lines through the trackless void. We’re working on an itinerary for a Spring Tour 2019, starting off in the outer reaches of our own solar system, then moving on to some of the more distant locales where the gravity is unpredictable and the audiences more profoundly diverse. It’s all still on the drawing board, but we’re thinking it looks something like this:
- May 12, Neptune
- May 15, Proxima system
- May 20, Barnard’s Star system
- May 27, Procyon system
- May 30, Epsilon Indi
- June 5, Jupiter, red spot
Naturally, we’ve got some gaps to fill. And then there’s the question of transportation. Details, details! Don’t bother me with trifles. We gotta get on the road before some of these local Yosemite Sams start using us for target practice. Tour for your life! (Hey … there’s a theme.)
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 
Then there’s the interstellar tour idea we were kicking around. What happened to that? Well, apparently someone kicked it into next week, figuratively speaking. I’m not ruling it out, but no one aside from Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his inventor, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has any inclination towards doing the fucker. And frankly, neither one of them can play an instrument (though Mitch can use instruments in his work … and Marvin sometimes makes a noise like a fire whistle). That’s not the kind of band I can bring to Neptune! Those crystalline ice creatures would laugh us out of orbit, and THEN where would we be.
I’m guessing there’s a little pill we can take for stage fright. And there’s probably one we can take for 290 degrees below, too. I’m sure we’re not the only band to grapple with these types of questions. Why, I hear Mumford and Sons spent a week on Neptune waiting for a connecting flight to Proxima Centauri. Nobody said this was going to be easy, people. Look on the bright side. We have Mitch Macaphee, our own in-house mad scientist, who will no doubt contrive (or perhaps borrow from one of his fellow madmen) an appropriately appointed interstellar spacecraft. We’ve got, I don’t know … Marvin, who can … lift very heavy things. We’ve got the mansized tuber who … will not be joining us because he’s taken root in the garden. Okay, scratch that.
Okay, so …. here’s the hole we dug ourselves into, at least on paper (or, rather, concrete). Two weeks of engagements in the greater Jovian system – you know, the Great Red Spot, then on to Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (we limit ourselves to the Galilean moons because, well, they’re more well-rounded). As stop-over at Saturn and Titan (always a lively show). Then from there, straight out of the solar system, assuming we can rent a vessel that will handle interstellar travel. Our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee says he knows a guy. We’ll see about that.
Actually, in point of fact, he wants two or three. And well, they’re expensive, for chrissake. Mitch has no sense of cost. I can’t even talk him into buying some generic knock off BEAM from China; no, he wants the brand name version. It’s essentially a quality argument … I get it. But what the hell, man – you’re an inventor. Why don’t you invent some freaking money for once?
That means we have a mad scientist on the lamb. Or on the rent-a-rocket, to put a finer point on it. I think his ultimate destination will be the newly discovered planet KIC 8462852 (and no, I don’t mean it was discovered by Anthony Newly), but there are a lot of potential stops between here and there. So I’m just putting this out there: if you astronomers, amateur or professional, notice any unusual activity on the outer planets, particularly Jupiter (about which Mitch has harbored a strange fascination for many years), notify us immediately. Use the comment form on this blog post, or send us a note by snail mail to … well, just write “Big Green, Cheney Hammer Mill” on the envelope – we’ll get it.