Tag Archives: Small Magellanic Cloud

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.