Drat. Scuttled by a solar flare. That was a serious oversight on the part of that person we put in charge of planning our interstellar tour. Who was that again? Let’s see …. oh, right. It was me. Well … no ice cream for me tonight.
Okay, well … looks like we’re having the interstellar version of a rainy-day schedule today, but instead of coloring books and tunafish sandwiches, let’s break open the November episode of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast and see what’s crawling around inside.
Ned Trek 30: “The Deadly Queers”. This thirtieth episode of our Star Trek parody is based on the classic episode “The Deadly Years“, in which the Enterprise command crew is affected by radiation that quickly turns them all into raving geezers. In our version, radiation causes the Free Enterprise crew to become progressively more gay – a fate worse than death for our hyper-conservative, free market, confederate flag-waving heroes. There’s a lot of tasteless swanning about and gay sex references that none of us are proud of, but hey …. satire. Extra special appearances by Senators Lindsay Graham, Roy (aka “Roy-toy”) Blunt, and Bernie Sanders.
Songs: Embedded in Ned Trek 30 are seven new Big Green songs. These, as always, are rough mixes of recordings that will, in some version, appear on a future album or albums yet to be determined. Here’s what we’ve got:
Tinkerbell Neocon – Medium tempo guitar-driven rock duet sung by Perle and Doc Coburn. This one gets stuck in my head, quite frankly, so beware!
Fairy Dust – Another dirge by Sulu (the one original cast member that is somehow part of this “next degeneration” version of Star Trek). Very moody little number.
Oklahoma Mo – A slightly gay Doc Coburn nod to his cow town oil-patch upbringing.
Space Fandango – Romney song that should have been a tango (and may still be one day), all about Stephanie O (the captain’s Don Ho). Ummm … hilarious.
Let Me Go – The android Nixon does this over-the-top sixties rock ballad about needing to go to the can. I don’t think we’re breaking new ground here, but it’s certainly the first song I’ve ever done that places having to take a piss in the context of mid 20th century presidential history.
Potato Salad – Ned song with kind of a sixties vibe. No, it doesn’t make any sense, even in the context of this ridiculous and borderline offensive episode of Ned Trek, but here it is anyhow.
Spanking Machine – Pop song, sung by Willard, that harkens back to his boarding school days.
Put The Phone Down: Matt and I kvetch about the Trump election, rail at a useless media and an even more useless Democratic party, and look ahead in dread at what outrages lie before us. Laugh a minute.
What’s our plan B? Not sure we have one. There’s plan 9 from outer space, but hey … that’s a movie. Plan B might be to hunker down in the Cheney Hammer Mill, record some more songs, and venture out only to retrieve nuts and berries from the nearby Adirondack woodlands. Or pizzas from the nearby Adirondack Pizza Parlor. Or beer from the nearby …. well, you get the idea. I’m not at all sure why we opt for these interstellar tours in the first place. They’re not profitable. They’re long and pointless. They’re occasionally dangerous to the point of being life-threatening. But then, a desk job will kill you after 20-25 years, so … it’s probably just as well.
Sure, we’ve had our head down with music production just lately. Matt and I are working on 7 songs for release on the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek political parody that comprises the core of our 
Mitch Macaphee retreated into his lab and began tinkering with the thing, and just yesterday morning I awoke to the sight of a nosecone peaking over the courtyard wall. He managed to piece the thing together, but there were apparently a few parts missing. Engines, for one. (Or more precisely, for four, since there are supposed to be four of them.) Being a mad scientist, Mitch took this as a kind of challenge. Whereas any sane person would just phone the company and tell them to send the missing parts, he started adapting some odd pieces of technology he had lying around his workbench. There was that anti-gravity device he tinkered with a few years ago, for instance. Then there’s that big blow-dryer he invented.
Here’s the rub. The European space probe Schiaparelli appeared to have crashed during its attempt to land on Mars this past week. I think the truth is, Mitch may have taken it down. They were getting a little too close to his clandestine operation on the red planet, and he didn’t want to take the chance of being discovered. I keep telling him it’s inappropriate to break things, but the man is a child … one who plays with killer technologies, no less. He won’t ‘fess up, but this happens a bit too often to be an accident.
So whereas SpaceX has the famed “Falcon 9” rocket with the patented “Dragon” spacecraft, SpaceY offers the not-so-well-known “Plywood 9000” rocket powering its nearly designed (and no, that’s not a typo: it hasn’t been designed yet) “Malaysian Tapir 9000” spacecraft. (They seem to like the number 9000. That would explain their requested down payment.) I know what you’re thinking …. this doesn’t sound like it meets the reliability standard I set forward in the previous paragraph. My only rejoinder to that is, well … that was more than a paragraph ago. Are you going to hold me to EVERYTHING I’ve said in the past? How about gurgling noises I made as an infant – do you plan to hit me with those, too?
That of course puts us back into the spacecraft rental market. Never a good place to be, especially in this economy and with the election coming up. It’s just hard to get a low parsec ion-drive ship that can hold more than a couple of vertically challenged astronauts. We not only have our own asses, but an entourage and a whole load of equipment. (If the mansized tuber accompanies us, as he has threatened to do, we will need a greenhouse on board as well.) We’re considering a kickstarter campaign, frankly. Either that or hiring a grant writer. (Isn’t that just a fancy term for counterfeiting? If so, why the hell doesn’t Mitch just invent some freaking money for a change.)
Proxima b, as a staging area for some of his experiments. Why pick that one and not, say, Wolf 1061c? Well, it’s closer, for one thing. Like I said, the fucker is impatient as hell – he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time in transit. And while he does do some of his mad science work in remote areas of our own planet, Proxima b (or “Sven Njordlosc’s planet” as Mitch strangely calls it) gives him the space to do fun stuff like change the composition of the atmosphere or switch the gravity on and off a couple of times in rapid succession. Great times!
I’m here in what passes for my cabin in this rented spacecraft, editing the audio play we recorded a few days ago. We’ve also recorded a few songs, as is our tradition, to accompany the hack-job melodrama we’ll be posting in the coming weeks, so those will take some finishing. Work, work, work. I thought this trip was going to be something of a getaway, a chance of rest and relaxation, a hiatus in our otherwise hectic existence of hammer-mill squatting. Fat chance.
Not to put too fine a point on it, we are going to have to Mad Science the shit out of this thing. Mitch Macaphee is working overtime (as much as 3 hours a day) trying to adapt Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s solar power unit to the ship’s main drive. It is by no means a walk in the park for old Mitch. Good thing we brought some decent gin with us. (Though we left the rummy back at the mill.)