Tag Archives: Ned Trek Live

Usual Rubbish

One man’s ceiling.

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Oh, Jesus … not again. If you don’t quiet down, I’m going to call the police! What? Of course they’ll come. The cops don’t hold a grudge. And besides, I doubt they even remember that little note l left on their cruiser last year. It was a joke, for chrissake.

Ah, hello out there. Back to domestic bliss here in the formerly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I say “formerly” because in our absence during our Ned Trek Live Springtime Tour Extravaganza 2019, not only did snapping turtles move into our basement studio, but some even more combative creatures took up residence on the third floor of the mill. I send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) upstairs to find out what the commotion was all about, and he came back with an upside-down pitcher on his head. We then sent him back up there with a bundt cake Anti-Lincoln’s aunt Mildred made, but they weren’t having it. They threw our peace offering into the courtyard! (It made a crater on impact. Auntie Mildred should have shelled those walnuts.)

Okay, now … let’s just try to keep our heads, shall we? After all, we don’t own this mill. We just squat here, and frankly it’s selfish of us to think that we can have this place all to ourselves. Still, those folks are noisy as hell. They party on until the wee hours of the morning, pulling together drum circles and howling at the moon. At one point we though we could out-gun them with our PA equipment, but that was a joke – our main speakers are about 40 years old and sound like freaking kazoos. And those people don’t seem to mind the sound of kazoos. In fact, they might enjoy Matt’s early composition, the theme from Destination Space, played by an orchestra of kazoos (all tracked by Matt himself). Then again … perhaps not. So let’s find it and crank it up to eleven! THIS IS WAR!

Better have another word with them, Marvin.

Damn. I lost my head in the span of a single paragraph. These are trying times indeed, my friends. On days such as this I rely on the sage counsel of Antimatter Lincoln, a man  who has seen his share of hardship and sorrow, who has navigated the treacherous shoals of total warfare, who held onto his vision for a better world through the worst of times. Well … I mean, his doppleganger did, anyway. Anti-Lincoln did the opposite of all that stuff; he basically watched the Twilight Zone and ate TV dinners for a living before he met us. (That’s when he moved on to beef jerky.)

Arrrgh. There they go again! Where are my headphones?

Usual Rubbish

Lights out.

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I thought I told you to pay the bill before we left. Well, if you did, why the hell is it sitting here on the counter? Riddle me that, Batman! WHAT? Well, of course you can’t see it. The lights aren’t on …  BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T PAY THE BILL.

Man god damn, now I have to give lessons on household finance. I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do one thing, ONE THING, before we set off on our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, and he screwed it up. I put the electric bill in front of him, hooked a pen into his prehensile claw, and told him to cut a check to National Grid, post haste. Nothing. And now we’ve come home from our less than triumphant interstellar tour to a dark hammer mill with a leaky roof and a family of turtles living in our studio. And no, they’re not subletting.

Yes, friends, we are back on terra firma, and none too soon. No, we didn’t get to the Small Magellanic Cloud. We kept flying towards it, hoping it would get a little bigger in our forward view screen, but no luck. Saturday came and went – that was the date of our gig – and so we chose to turn around. I asked Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist, to send off some kind of automated vehicle in our stead, with a letter of apology sealed in its nosecone. Well, he sent some kind of missile out towards the Small Magellanic Cloud, but I’m not certain what it was, exactly. I guess they’ll find out in a couple of hundred thousand years. (Sometimes surprises are pleasant … and sometimes … )

In the studio? Uh ... okay.

Back here on earth, everything went to hell, as you might expect. The hammer mill is in a shambles – exactly how we left it. Aside from the lack of electricity, the air seems a little thin in here, like it’s been on a hunger strike since we left. I was hoping the mansizedtuber would have looked after the place a bit in our absence, but damn it, you can’t get good help around here, even if you grow it in a planter. Speaking of planters, we almost went nuts cooped up in that tiny flying saucer. That SOB made the lunar module seem spacious. It also made the LEM’s computer system seem sophisticated. (It wasn’t.)

I would like to be able to say that we made a pile of quatloos on this tour and that we now have the means to make this place habitable. Yes, that would be a nice thing to be able to say … I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Usual Rubbish

Cloud nein.

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Okay, so what are you saying, Mitch? I thought you knew how to drive a space ship. This is a hell of a time to tell me you were just pulling my leg. No, I don‘t have any prayer cards on me. What a stupid question!

For crying out loud, why … why does this happen every time we go out on tour? We map out an itinerary, we hire a spacecraft, we commandeer a space commander of some description, we set off with confidence, and then BOOM – everything goes to hell. Before we know it, we’re bobbing around uselessly in intergalactic space, light years beyond the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt, hoping some alien freighter takes pity on us and trains a tractor beam on our pathetic, rusting hull. And I ask myself, is this why I got into this business?

Right, so … now that I got that out of my system. Someone (could be anybody … but probably was me) suggested that as part of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 we play this gig in the Small Magellanic Cloud, some 200,000 light years out yonder. Now, necessarily, such a journey would require the development of technologies previously unthought of by humankind. Recall the challenges NASA faced when JFK charged them with putting a white dude on the moon within the course of a single decade. Christ on a bike, they had to invent miniaturized computing, develop advanced rocketry, perfect the concept of staged spacecrafts, and the only help they got was untold billions of dollars in public funds and the advice of retired Nazi ballistic scientists.

At this rate, we should get there by the end of time.

They did it, though. And what have we got? Well …. one mad scientist. (Actually, right now I would describe him as just a little grumpy.) One supercomputer – Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a Pentium processor from 1995 humming away in his little brass noggin. And a second-hand flying saucer, salvaged from some boneyard on the outskirts of Roswell, NM. Pull all of those resources together, and nothing can stop you … from getting about three feet off the ground. We’re still working on that first light-year, so we’ve signaled ahead to the promoter on the Small Magellanic Cloud that we may be a little late. Unfortunately, our message is traveling a bit more slowly than us – I can just about see it through the rear window.

Did NASA say uncle when things went wrong? Hell no. But then … maybe they should have. UNCLE!

Usual Rubbish

Hot spot.

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What the hell kind of itinerary is this? I have never seen a more incompetent attempt at organizing a freaking interstellar tour. Who put this bullshit together, anyway? Me? Oh … oh dear.

Well, as usual, I spoke too soon.  Not the first time. Honestly, I don’t know why my bandmates don’t look over my shoulder when I volunteer to do shit like this. After all, I’m just connecting dots on a map. I’m not a rocket scientist or anything. Sure, I used to launch Estes rockets when I was 10 or 11, but that was kind of a long time ago, and I think technology has moved on a bit since those days of cardboard tubes, butyrate dope, and solid fuel engines. Oh, and ignition wires. Yeah …. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has moved beyond those texts. He of all people should have known that what I was suggesting was just plain impossible.

Let me explain. The third leg of our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 brought us to Sirius and then back to the great red spot on Saturn. All well and good, right? Trouble is, our next gig is on Saturday in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which I am now reliably told is nearly 200,000 light years away. Jesus. No wonder it looks small. Even pedal to the metal, it will probably take far longer than the rest of human history for us to get even halfway there.

Damn. Just imagine the size of the BIG one.

What’s worse, even if we were to make it the the Cloud by Saturday or several aeons after that, it’s a freaking galaxy that is itself about 7,000 light years wide, so it may take us a while to find exactly where we’re expected to perform. (My contact in the Cloud told me we couldn’t miss it, but then she or he is a transcendental being without form or persistent location in time-space, so everywhere is as close as it needs to be for that fucker.)

I hate to cancel a paid engagement, but unless we find a serious wormhole or radically rewrite the laws of physics in the next day or so, we may have no choice. Besides, that gig on Sirius was a serious pain in the butt, and the big Red Spot isn’t as hot as it used to be back in the day. Hell, the older it gets, the slower it turns, and well … there goes the electricity, my friends. So I’m for packing up and heading home. What about the rest of you? Show of hands? All in favor, say aye! Anyone for an aye? Don’t all speak at once.

Usual Rubbish

Cold comfort star.

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Oh, Jesus … turn that thing up, Mitch. I’m just starting to get the feeling back into my fingers. No, I don’t want to burn them off, but geez … there has to be a happy medium in there somewhere.

Well, hello, friends of Big Green. Time for another dispatch from our Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019, an interstellar romp across the indie club circuit from Neptune to … well … Epsilon Indie. Except we may not make it quite that far, given the limitations of our transport. Mitch Macaphee’s used saucer lot vehicle has very little living space and can’t carry a lot of fuel, so we’re doing short hops across the void of interstellar space, hoping to bring some down-home joy to the lonely denizens of the forgotten worlds scattered across our modest galactic neighborhood. We take turns watching the planets pass by through the one viewport our ship affords. This is plain clothes, my friends … nothing but the best.

Our gig on Barnard’s Star b (that’s not a typo … the planet is named “b”, for crying out loud) was okay, I guess. Kind of a chilly reception. The surface temperature on “b” is -238 degrees Fahrenheit, and the inhabitants of “b” …. the B-ings, if you will … are a bit like our Neptunian fans. Picture ice crystals with arms and legs. You might call them pseudopods instead of appendages, but that would make you a microbiologist. When we played Jesus Has A Known Mind, they swayed a bit. A few of them held lighters over their head-like projections. There was something that could be called dancing, but the B-ings movements are so subtle you probably need special instrumentation to detect it.

Looks inviting?

One thing I’ll say for the inhabitants of Barnard b …. they need to get themselves a new star. Barnard’s star is meek, man, really meek. I mean, I’ve had space heaters that radiated more warmth than that little beacon. It emits only 0.4 percent of our own sun’s radiant energy, it says here, so if you’re waiting for summer to get there, stop waiting … it ain’t coming. Anyway, we played our tunes, collected our quatloos, chipped our spacecraft out of an ice sheet, and got the hell out of there before they asked for an encore.

Next stop is Procyon, in Canis Minor. That’s a bit of a hike, especially in this dumb-ass heap. What’s more, our navigational computer failed two days out from Barnard, so we had to hook Marvin (my personal robot assistant) up to the control panel so that his 486 processor can tell our various rockets when to fire and when to stand ready. Ahem …. may be problematic. We’ll just see where we end up.

Usual Rubbish

Saint Barnard.

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Captain’s log, star date May 17, 2019 … which just happens to be the same as today’s “Earth” date. Strange that those two calendars would coincide on this of all days! But no matter.

Yes, Big Green is currently en route to Barnard’s star, coming off a successful string of performances on Neptune (5/12) and on the third planetoid in the Proxima system (5/15). Tickets were pretty hard to get, so if you’re reading this you probably didn’t see either of those shows. Our performances were live-streamed, but given the vast distances from Earth, the stream won’t get to terrestrial devices until sometime in late 2027. (That’s what passes for “live” on an interstellar tour.)

So … the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 is off to a barn burner of a start, at least according to our publicist. Frankly, between the two of us, I consider any Neptune show I can walk away from a success. When your audience is submerged in a lake of frozen methane, it’s a little hard to tell how you’re going over. I thought I saw some movement when we played “Two Lines”, but it may have been a trick of the light. There’s a strange electromagnetic pulse that zaps through the methane, causing a greenish shimmer. I like to think of it as applause, but …. critics may differ.

Next came the Proxima system. We played on Proxima Centauri b, popularly known as Alpha Centauri (AC), the fabled destination of the Space Family Robinson, who took a wrong turn at Pluto and ended up in the worst kind of trouble television has ever seen. It’s a consensus among the Big Green crew that the Robinsons weren’t missing much when they gave AC a miss. Sure, it’s a rocky world, 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, and sure, it is inhabited by little blue space creatures who snap their finger-like appendages in time with the music. Okay, and the accommodations were better than expected. So … maybe the Robinsons SHOULD have gone there before going back to Switzerland. Who am I to judge?

Proxima? That's close.

Right about now I’m sure someone’s asking, “How’s the ship?” Well …. it’s adequate. Mitch Macaphee is somehow keeping it all together, which is a good thing, because Barnard’s Star is six light years away and we need to be there on the 20th or we forfeit about 4,000 quatloos. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) thinks the place is inhabited by St. Bernard dogs. He doesn’t spell so good. Or think so good.

Spaceward, my friends! Into the breach!