Tag Archives: KIC 8462852

Usual Rubbish

It’s about time.

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I don’t know, I’m thinking it’s time. What do you think? Not sure? Okay. When do you think you’ll have an answer? I don’t know about you, but … I’m thinking it’s time.

Okay, well … I’ll be frank with you. (Just call me “Frank” from now on.) We are grasping at straws here in Big Green land, now that our interstellar tour has been scuttled. And here it is, the holidays. We were thinking that we’d be traversing interstellar space when Christmas week came, but no dice. Trouble is, that was going to be our excuse for not getting anyone presents – sorry folks, we’re headed to a big gig on planet KIC 8462852. No time to shop! Well, THAT’S out the window. Any other good ideas for cheapskates?

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) humbly suggested we hand out signed copies of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, which appropriately follows a theme somewhat tangentially related to the holidays. Of course, we’ve resorted to that tactic before – it’s been a full 17 years since we put the sucker out, so everyone we know (and quite a few people we don’t know) has a copy. By this point, they’re stacking them under broken table legs and using them for drink coasters. I saw one of our friends re-purposing the jewel cases. Talk about a post-apocalyptic music hell-scape – people are mining our album like it’s a natural resource. (And it’s anything but natural.)

Give them discsThe gift of music is always an early resort for us. That’s basically how 2000 Years To Christmas was born – Matt writing songs as holiday gifts, back in the day. Then there’s the gift of podcasting. There, we have some good news and some bad news. The GOOD news is that we are working on another Christmas pageant as we speak – a Ned Trek holiday classic that will have some new songs embedded in it. The BAD news is that … at the rate we’re going, it likely won’t be finished until AFTER Christmas, so … hot holiday leftovers are coming your way.

For the holiday week itself, we may put out a rerun podcast with some additional “members only” elements. (Oh, right – we don’t have membership levels. Scratch that.) Back to the grind, boys!

Usual Rubbish

Thrust.

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Did you guys hear that sound last night? Maybe about 3 a.m., I don’t know. It was raining like hell, I think – pounding on the windows like a freaking hammer. At least I think that’s what it was. Either that or a … a … rocket lifting off …

Well, that last paragraph is a depiction of what I sounded like when it first dawned on me that our leased Plywood 9000 rocket was hijacked in the middle of the night. As some of you recall, just before Thanksgiving we were preparing for a brief tour of some lesser known planets that don’t get a lot of respect, like KIC 8462852. That appears to have been, well, scuttled. And while the Plywood 9000 is not what you might call luxury transportation, it apparently was functional enough to be stolen.

Who is the thief? Can’t be 100% sure, but the fact that Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has disappeared probably isn’t a coincidence. I think he was getting a little tired of our antics, or lack of same – it’s been weeks since we first discussed this tour and still no action. The man just hates waiting around, particularly when there are discoveries to be made. Who can blame him? No one likes waiting, least of all a mad scientist. And when it became obvious that the Trump administration was not going to tap him to be Chief Scientist at NASA, he did seem to be weighing his options.

Hey, man ... what's that noise?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.

Fuck all. Then there’s the lease payment for the Plywood 9000 rocket. DAMN YOU, MITCH!

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Up the creek.

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What the hell, Mitch. A week ago you didn’t care whether we went on this tour or not, and now you’re acting like the mill is on fire. What’s the matter with you, boy? And don’t point that deadly laser at me – you know how nervous I get about that kind of thing.

Well, it seems like Mitch is in kind of a hurry now to get off this miserable pimple of a planet known as Earth. Not sure what’s behind the sudden change of mood. He woke up in a bit of a mood Wednesday afternoon after a long night of what I assume was mad science experimentation, and now he’s all about planet KIC 8462852. That’s fine and good, right, but if we’re going there in the Plywood 9000 rocket we rented from SpaceY, well … we may have trouble breaking out of Earth orbit. In fact, we may have trouble clearing the treeline. The truth is, that thing isn’t getting off the ground at all.

Nah. That'll never work.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.

I told you last week about the latest episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, which should be posted soon-ish. We’ve done rough mixes of all 7 songs, and it’s a strange lot, I will admit, but you be the judge. Hey, be the jury as well. What the fuck, go ahead and throw our sorry asses in music jail. At least THAT would keep me from having to climb aboard a Plywood 9000 rocket with a madman at the helm. P.S. …. HAAAALP!

Usual Rubbish

Last one out.

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Try moving it to the other side of the tail fin. No, not that one! The dorsal tail fin! Okay, now hit it with a hammer a few times. Nothing? Hmmm …. how about if we light it on fire. Sometimes that helps.

Oh, damn. I didn’t realize I was typing this all into our blog. (I think that’s called auto-typing.) Well, as you can tell, Big Green is working furiously to get our rented Plywood 9000 space rocket ready for launch before the election on Tuesday, when all hell is likely to break loose. At least, that’s what the little voices in my head tell me. There are times when you feel compelled to stay and fight the good fight, and then there are those other times when you … well … decide to take a rented rocketship to another planet. That’s a hasty decision, I know, but again … those persistent little voices!

Seriously, I am looking forward to a perhaps non-remunerative jaunt out to the Kuiper belt if only to free ourselves from the pressures of terrestrial life. You have no idea how much maintenance an abandoned Hammer Mill requires. If you’re wondering why we haven’t put out a new episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN in nearly two months, there’s part of your answer, my friend. At least on planet KIC 8462852 we might find time to finish a project here and there. And my guess is that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) won’t have to worry about being apprehended by Trump’s ICE deportation force. (He has nightmares about that stuff.)

Is that really where the fin goes on this thing?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 TIBG podcast. You might say, 7 songs! That’s practically a freaking album, man! Why don’t you just put out another album, freak!? Well, first of all …. don’t call me “album freak”. I don’t deserve that. After all, we haven’t put out an album in three years. (And our LAST album was Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, so technically we haven’t put out a sane album in eight years.) What was I saying again?

Right. Spacecraft maintenance can make your mind wander. Check back a little later this week when I don’t have a monkey wrench in my fist. (That’s what I’m doing wrong! I need a rocket wrench!)

Usual Rubbish

Serious gravity.

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Well, maybe a larger booster rocket would help. Or some tightly wound springs. Then there’s the lever option, like a catapult – give me a lever large enough and I will move the world, that sort of thing. No? Okay, never mind.

Oh, hi. Yes, we’re grappling with the same conundrums that so vexed our predecessors in flight – how to defeat that old devil gravity. It’s a little hard to imagine being able to reach planet KIC 8462852 without finding some way to break the surly bonds of Earth, whatever that means. Sure, it would be easier for Big Green to just give in and start doing terrestrial tour dates, packing ourselves into a multi-colored school bus and teetering down the road to Springfield and Lodi and East Aurora (unless we get stuck in Lodi … again …), but that would be an abandonment of all we hold dear. And in all frankness, gravity would still be vexing us! (Especially after a particularly long night.)

The other day, a big semi backed up to the front gate of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) and dropped an enormous cardboard box with Mitch’s name scrawled on the side. We had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) haul the thing into the courtyard as a precautionary measure – it was ticking and smelled vaguely of sulfur, so I certainly didn’t want to touch the sucker. Well, it turns out that the box contained our ride to the Khyber Belt: the promised Plywood 9000 space rocket we rented from SpaceY, some assembly required. It’s here, it’s here!

So that's it, then, is it?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.

So, I don’t know. Maybe a big catapult is more practical. If you have random thoughts on advanced interplanetary propulsion, please send them here.

Usual Rubbish

Water cooler to Mars.

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Look, Mitch … you don’t have to solve every problem with explosions. I know that cuts against the grain a bit, but at least try …. TRY not to dial it up to eleven every time you feel slighted. Thank you! Good day, sir!

Jesus Christ on a bike. If you want anything done around here, you have to talk until you’re green in the face. (That’s probably how we ended up with the name Big Green, but I digress.) As I mentioned in passing last week, we are contemplating a little trip out into the nether regions of the solar system – not the most desirable area, it’s true, but you have to book where they’ll have you, right? Isn’t that the first lesson of the music trade? Or maybe the second. The first is, play on, no matter what happens. Even if they set your banjo on fire, keep plucking. Then comes the bit about bookings. With me?

Okay, so our plan was to fly out to KIC 8462852 with a brief stop at the as yet undiscovered Dwarf Planet at the edge of our solar system (and perhaps the hidden giant world lurking just beyond). We think we have a line on a spacecraft from the cheap-ass carrier SpaceY, who will lease us a Plywood 9000 rocket … kind of an interstellar panel van, if you will. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has been handling the negotiations. He has also been running some tests on the surface of Mars to see if this might be a good time to try out his patented new gravitational field hyper drive module. The thing looks like a water cooler, in all honesty. Only thing is, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is the only one among us who can drink out of it safely.

I don't know, Marvin. He looks kind of sullen.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.

God damn it, if we’re going to fly out of here on a Plywood 9000 space probe, I want to be on the right side of the European Space Agency. Unless we intend on doing a tour of continental jails.

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Big rock, little rock.

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Going to Little Rock? But Big Green doesn’t have any fans in Arkansas … at least as far as I know. In fact, we don’t have any fans south of the Mason Dixon line. Not since Cowboy Scat, anyway. What? Oh, okay …. never mind.

Cheese and crackers, I thought we were going way on down south, but apparently we’re going in a very different direction. Out towards KIC 8462852 with a brief stop at the as yet undiscovered Dwarf Planet at the edge of our solar system, and perhaps the undiscovered mystery giant planet as well. So at least our destinations are clear. That’s the easy part. The not-so-easy part? Finding an agent who books that far out in the sticks, so to speak. (Actually, it’s beyond the sticks and into the rocks.) We usually book ourselves in instances such as these, but times being what they are, it’s helpful to have your interstellar ducks in a row before striking out into deep space.

Speaking of ducks, we need to line up reliable transport as well. And yes, I did use the qualifier “reliable” by intention: we tried the other kind of transportation and it didn’t work out so well. This time we’re going with a professional vendor, like SpaceX. Of course, we can’t AFFORD SpaceX because we’re a band full of broke-ass mo-fo’s, so we’ll have to opt for the next best thing. And that, my friends, is a company called SpaceY. (Pronounced “space why?”) It’s the cheap seat version, by an order of magnitude.

Getting there is the issue.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?

Well anyway. Our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is going to take me and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to the SpaceY showroom next week so that we can do a walk through and, perhaps, a test drive. He gave me a life insurance policy to sign as well. Such a thoughtful man!

Usual Rubbish

Last straw.

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Well, at least we have a week to pack. That’s something. What? Mitch sent himself back in time a week and is demanding that we leave now? For crying out loud, I hate when he does that.

Okay, so you know that we live with a mad scientist. And if you know that, you probably knows that he has a tendency to obsess about outer space matters. Whether you knew it or not, it’s happening again, this time over star KIC 8462852, which is flickering at odd interviews. Some have suggested that this is due to some undiscovered alien Megastructure, but I am skeptical. I cannot, however, say the same for Mitch, who is intrigued by this speculative feat of engineering know-how. He wants to see how they built THEIR megastructure so that he can build his OWN. The man has a competitive streak a parsec wide.

Of course, it’s not wise to ignore the entreaties of a mad scientist. And we’ve been collecting some dust in recent years, to be sure, so Big Green got its tiny heads together and decided to do some impromptu interstellar busking as a means of accommodating Mitch’s obsession. We thought we’d borrow a spacecraft, head out towards Zenon (home of our occasional sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn), and stop by KIC 8462852 (or ‘852 for short) along the way. If there turns out to be a Megastructure erected on the mysterious star, we will see if they take terrestrial bookings. Could be a decent venue there, you never know. No Megastructure? Well …. we try to cope with Mitch’s disappointment in some non-explosive fashion (hopefully).

Road trip!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.)

Hey … if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Just drop them in the comment field. And if you have a reliable map to ‘852, drop that in as well.