Damn it. What the hell is up with this amp, Mitch? It’s ticking like a bomb. You didn’t, um … turn my amp into a bomb, did you? Did you?
Och, the challenges we face! And this hammer mill in the Winter, full as cold as a north wind blowing across Loch Lomond. What the … look at me! I’ve got foreign accent syndrome, the Scottish variety. How the hell did that happen? Where’s the justice, damn it? And I don’t mean the town justice. I know right where that dude is. Now … where was I … ?
Oh, right. Let me say up front – and this won’t be surprising to longtime followers of Big Green – that this band has always been technologically challenged. Back in the day (1980s and ’90s) it was because we had no money. Our PA was held together with duct tape. We used so much of the stuff that there was none left to plug the holes in our duct work. Pretty soon we had to start calling it gaffer tape so that the ducts wouldn’t feel left out. But then the gaffers started to complain. For chrissake, we didn’t even have any gaffers, and there they were, complaining about the freaking tape!
Fast forward to the 2000s. As many will remember, we were living in a five room lean-to in Sri Lanka back in those days. We had scratched together enough filthy lucre to buy some recording equipment, which we used to record our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, now a classic of the genre (the genre being poor-selling albums). But still, our technological infrastructure was lacking. I remember us clustered around a single mic, warming our hands over a moth-eaten tube head, and fashioning CD packages out of bits of cardboard. Working our fingers to the bone!
So yes … in comparison to those difficult days, our current challenges seem light indeed. Nonetheless, it’s hard to make music in the modern era with 20th century instrumentation. Sure, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can sit in on a couple of instruments from time to time, but it’s hard to think of him as true automation. And without automation, you need many iterations of each take. That’s why our recording process is so damn slow …. we do it nice because we do it twice. Even thrice. Or fice.
Then there’s the exploding amps. That slows things down a bit, too.
But really the greatest danger is having Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, pick your name out of the hat for Secret Santa. Christmas is his time to offload all of the failed experiments from the past year, and there are usually quite a few of them. You may end up unwrapping a package that contains a beaker of radioactive sludge or something that’s ticking like a bomb. (“Hey, Mack …” you’d say in your 1940s New York accent, “What the heck is this thing? It’s ticking like a bomb!”)
So we’re walking into the twentieth year of this phase of Big Green’s existence, and really … not much has changed since 1999 except that our releases aren’t typically on CD anymore and we’re driving smarter cars. Other than that, everything’s about the same around the Hammer Mill. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) still has a lot of his original vacuum tubes, and his various grease fittings haven’t been lubricated since those early days. The mansized tuber is still man-sized …. he hasn’t grown into some kind of gnarly behemoth. And our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is still off his meds … at least the ones his doctor advised him to take so many years ago.
But more than anything else, we are thankful to you, our listeners and readers. (That includes all you little Russian bots – I see you!) And that’s why we have chosen to express our gratitude by posting a warmed-over installment of Ned Trek entitled 
Not that we haven’t cultivated that particular field before, you understand. It’s just that we’re digging in a bit this year. It’s partly due to the specific Star Trek episode we’re mocking, but hey, let’s face it … there are a lot of neo-fascists taking power just lately, including the clownish variety we have here in the states (to say nothing of the right-wing brown shirt organizations we deal with at the street level these days), so these songs aren’t exactly historical documents, per se. We’re jamming on current affairs, people. Ripped from the headlines, as it were. It’s enough to make Marvin (my personal robot assistant) blow a fuse or two. Just so long as he doesn’t grow a little mustache.
There are a lot of things a grown man can do in his spare time, particularly someone with so many half-baked hobbies such as myself. Why I spend even five minutes with this hunk of junk is beyond me. And then there’s the radio. (Sorry Marvin – that was low hanging fruit.) I suppose I could become an inventor like Mitch Macaphee, or an antimatter president like Anti-Lincoln, or a large sweet potato like the mansized tuber, but there are individuals already filling those vital roles in society. Perhaps wisdom, in part, is recognizing your place in the world and trying to make the best of it. Or perhaps not … perhaps wisdom is something else entirely … in part. (And perhaps my favorite hobby is sophistry.)
Okay, so …. that guy’s crazy. And, as Mr. Spock once observed, madness has no reason … but it can have a goal. That’s what Mitch’s anti-gravity machine was all about. The device attracts gravitons like a bug zapper, apparently, though it doesn’t zap them … it just keeps them busy so that they can’t hold the rest of us down. (You always thought it was THE MAN that was holding you down, but no, says Mitch, it’s the gravitons!) Anyhow, it kind of worked for about a week, then something went bust. That happens a lot with mad science tinkerers like Mitch. Hell, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has dozens of glitches, but hell … he’s family.
Right, so … Mitch Macaphee has his own theories. And his theories usually lead to some nameless device that looks like a ham radio rig from the 1960s, with dials and meters and knobs and blinking lights. It makes a “woo-woo” sound. Sometimes he puts arms and legs on it and calls it Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Sometimes he throws a switch and things disappear … or appear. This time around, he adjusted the right combination of buttons, switches, lanyards, etc., to suspend gravity in the hammer mill. An anti-gravity machine, as it were. And that means more than floating hammers, my friends. Suffice to say, I haven’t had to use the stairs all week. If this keeps up, we may be battling obesity before long.
What was the results of my regression analysis? Well, it looks like I should have put more effort into eliminating relationships between variables. And I should have kept my focus on the relationship between a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. It’s all about co-dependency, you see? You don’t? Right. Neither do I. And apparently my rent-a-shrink is actually a statistician by trade. I don’t understand a word he says, mostly because he just talks so fast, but partly because his comments are so unbearably dull I just can’t keep my eyes open. And you’re not supposed to fall asleep on that stereotypical therapy couch, but I did. So maybe I’m on TV, now.
Well, I’ve wandered a bit. But the point I’m trying to get to is this: we tend to write happy little songs about big nasty things. This month we appear to be back on the fascist beat again. Next month, who knows? Some other grave subject matter that can be turned into a nursery rhyme or a mambo. That’s the way it works round these parts. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles. (Yes, I’m a Marxist. My favorite is Groucho, but it’s not a strong preference.)