Hmmm… I know I left that lying around here somewhere. Ah, here it is. Not sure where I’m going without this little number.
No, it’s not my brain. It’s my list of songs. Sixty five songs and counting. Shoo-wee, right? That’s enough songs to fuel the enormous asbestos-clad boiler of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for a hundred years. (Well, that may be a slight exaggeration.) What was it I heard Lincoln (or anti-Lincoln) saying the other day? Oh, yeah. “A chicken’ll make you a meal… or it’ll lay enough eggs for a thousand breakfasts. A lamb – that’s about two weeks worth of mutton. Or you can have warm wool coats from now until doomsday…” That Lincoln- just brimming with frontier wisdom. (Actually, I think he borrowed that from Royal Dano in one of his more nefarious incarnations on The Big Valley, Lincoln’s favorite T.V. drama.)
Where was I again? Oh, right. The songs. Yeah, we have an enormous backlog of songs, some never recorded, many represented by the most rudimentary demos. Lot more Christmas material, true. Fact is, our first album – 2000 Years To Christmas – was just as selection of numbers from a vast body of ludicrous Christmas songs, mostly penned by that keee-razy brother of mine. Probably about fifty of those in total, though only about a dozen have made it onto our record/perform list as of yet. Intriguing, no? (No? Hmmmm. Is that your final answer? Want a life line?)
Sure, there’s that. Then there are the songs that are complete and yet still in the can, never released commercially. Mostly these are recordings that have no proper album to call home. They are made in the usual Big Green way – lay out a polymer disc, slather it full of mastic, add music and apply pressure… much pressure. Then toss. Well… we tossed them a little too far, perhaps, and no one has had the energy to go and pick them up. Those will likely see the light of day at some point, though I don’t know exactly when. (Let me consult with my fellow nut cases and get back to you.)
Speaking of nut cases and music, an old friend of mine shared a champion little number with us the other day. Enjoy, campers!
Oh well. While we’re trying to figure out what’s going on there… What’s been happening here at the mill? Usual stuff. Keeping the roof on, as they say, and the fridge stocked with lunchables. (Or, at least, snackables.) You have to be versatile to please the mix of tastes we have around this joint. Take Lincoln (please). Now, he’s a fan of chicken fricassee. Of course, being a vegetarian, I won’t have anything to do with the stuff, but that doesn’t stop him. He keeps putting it on the shoplifting… I mean, the shopping list. And I keep coming back with tofu. (He’s no happier now than he was in 1863.)
too heavy, we try making an alloy by blending it with some more light-hearted material. Failing that, we scrap the sucker. Perhaps the constituent parts will come in handy (they sometimes go into making a first-rate pedal bike). 
Oh, hi out there in TV land. Just attempting to plumb the depths of what has become a rather large rend in the garment of our adoptive home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill here in upstate New York. We’re just getting a preliminary read here, but I’d say this sucker goes down pretty far. Maybe to the center of the Earth (or, to use the term New York-based geoscientists commonly employ, the “oit”). In fact, I have some pretty good evidence that this crack goes straight through the nougat to the chewy center of our lively little planet. What evidence, you ask? The first-hand kind… as in robot hand… as in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who volunteered to, well, dive down there and take a look.
technician – Marvin’s creator, Mitch Macaphee – and asked him to program into Marvin the willingness to volunteer for such a dangerous task, which Mitch did in a trice. No problem for an experience mad scientist. There were a few glitches, of course – in essence, Marvin’s mouth was saying “I volunteer” but his legs were pedaling in the other direction. (Those magnetic-drive casters produce some torque, let me tell you.) That aside, we managed to get a rope around him, strap a flashlight to his forehead, put a cell phone in his claw, and lower him down into the abyss. Fortunately, Marvin’s eyes double as web cams, so we were able to see the underground landscape unfold before him – fascinating journey, as that Australian interior designer might say in a totally different context. Care for a Foster’s? (Product placement – hey, got to keep the lights on somehow, right?)
seventy-five, or even one hundred miles below us. But as far as I’m concerned, anything down there belongs to US. That’s right… a pie-slice shaped vector of earth stretching from the perimeter of the hammer mill down to the core of this planet – a colossal spike of mineral wealth – belongs to us, at least as far as our new legal advisor Anti-Lincoln can tell. Yes, I know what you’re going to say… why, WHY would we consult someone as untrustworthy and disreputable as anti-Lincoln, the literal antithesis of our most revered president? A man with no scruples, no ethics… what kind of a lawyer could he possibly be? OUR kind.
Yeah, that’s me… and yes, I’m doing a cover by The Contours, circa 1962. Got to keep the lights on somehow. If it takes encouraging a bunch of over-swilled woodchucks to do the “Mashed Potato”, so be it. And in case some of you feel as though I’m being less than charitable or disrespecting my fellow upstate New Yorkers, think (or feel) again – I am playing for actual woodchucks, and they’ve been drinking hard cider all night. Tell you something right now – if you think human beings have a corner on inebriation, you’ve never played the Chuck House (seven blocks south of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill). I sincerely encourage you not to. You know how human drunks have a tendency to throw bottles? Well, here at the Chuck House, hard cider is served in little wooden kegs. That’s probably all I need to tell you about that. (INCOMING!)
got to scrape a few semolians together somehow, right? And these days, between Big Green interstellar (or even terrestrial) tours, I’ll take what I can get. Can you blame me? I’m tired of eating out of discarded pizza boxes and running my finger around the inside of empty soup cans. No more fighting the mongooses for bits of breadfruit (those bits that they don’t want) or pulling the bark off of baobab trees to see if there are any tender grubs to be had. (Not that I would EAT them, you understand. No, no… I train them to hunt for vegetables. Painstaking work.)
hard, hard times. We’re all finding ways to make a little extra on the side. Matt, for instance, is giving bird and wildlife tours. How can he stand all those grandmothers and boy scouts, you ask? Well…. he doesn’t run into any. The fact is, he’s bringing wild birds and animals around on tours, showing them the local points of interest. They can’t pay very much, it’s true – a desiccated pine cone is all he made yesterday – but it’s a job, and someone has to do it. The two Lincolns are doing a mutt and jeff routine down in the village square in hopes of garnering a few tips. So far, no luck… though some passers-by have offered unsolicited advice to the two… valuable tips like “Get a life!” and “Where did you losers come from?” and, of course, “Come back here! You’re supposed to pay for those kaiser rolls!” (I get that last one a lot.)