Witness protection.

Beard and glasses are no good. You've already got a beard and glasses, remember? Maybe you should just shave and squint more. Not sure anyone would recognize you anyway, but there's no point in taking chances.

Oh, hi. I was just attempting to help our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, with a little problem he's experiencing with law enforcement. No, he didn't get one of those threatening IRS calls demanding thousands of dollars in iTunes cards on pain of arrest. Nothing that exciting. Apparently, Mitch has been running a side-hustle. He built some kind of interstellar surveillance drone, and it's been spotted by NASA and disseminated to the press. Now he thinks the feds are after him for horning in on their game.

Yes, I know. He's got nothing to worry about. But Mitch's nerves have been kind of raw just lately, and he wants to go into hiding ... a kind of witness protection program, only the kind that shields you from the government. His probe - named "Oumuamua" by astronomers - collects call data from the planets it orbits, then transmits it down to Mitch's lab, where he puts it through a grey box with flashing Christmas lights and a kind of electrical arc that runs between two rods. (I told him he could use a standard toggle switch on the thing, but he insisted on the big-handled wall switch. It's no fun being a mad scientist without one of those.)

Hmmm... Doesn't look like a drone.I guess it's the downloading the data part that makes him think he might be in the crosshairs of law enforcement. Even Mitch, with his fevered astrophysicist brain, knows that that is a bozo no-no, so to speak, in the eyes of the intelligence services. I told him just to shut Oumuamua down for a couple of weeks or send it to another solar system ... preferably a slightly less repressive or litigious one. My guess is that he will eventually come around to doing something like that, though you would think the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might have worked that out for himself. No soap. So many difficult personalities to deal with in this business! So much freaking drama!

Okay, so Mitch is in a funk, and we're still inserting the funk into our latest raft of songs. Be patient, my friends ... they will drop one day soon, funk and all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

R.I.P., uber rich lady atop killer empire

Image
When the queen of England died last week, I felt bad for the 96-year-old human being that she was, a lady about the age of my late mother. I take no joy in the death of anyone, even people I’m not crazy about, so all due condolences to her family who, I hear, are planning a quiet little funeral. Did I say little? I meant large … in fact, six billion pounds worth of funeral. Such is the institution of the British monarchy – still crazy after all these years. No, I’m not a fan of “The Royals”. I watched The Crown on Netflix or whatever, and it was mildly entertaining in a slightly nuanced gossipy kind of way. (They went way too easy on Thatcher and made Robert Kennedy look like a cheap wing man for his wife-beating brother the President.) But generally I avoid T.V. dramas about royalty mostly because it bores the living piss out of me. Then there’s that small matter of imperialism , but let’s try to keep our thoughts positive, eh, what? They’re changing the guard at T
Read more

Pulling the plug is never as easy as it looks

Image
I don’t know. I’m effing sick of this. Are you effing sick of this, too? You are ? Wow … okay. For how many years? Damn …. why didn’t you say so? I was just doing this to keep YOU happy! Well, you learn something new every day. Or at least every week. Except last week – I was kind of too busy to learn anything. It gets like that sometimes. Anyway, let’s just agree to say that you learn something new every little once in a while. Maybe every time Sylvie brings you some water. Like in the Leadbelly Song . But I digress. What the this is The “this” we’re kvetching about is this thing called blogging. We’ve been doing it for twenty years, and somehow – seemingly unnoticed by us – the world has kind of moved on. Now everything is social media, social media, etc. A few still blog, outside of the corporate shills, but it’s not really a thing anymore, and well … that’s a shame. Still, blogging has its place. I just don’t know whether or not its place is here, exactly.
Read more

Stop hiding your light under that bushel.

Image
Well, Trump started channeling QAnon in a big way this week at an Ohio rally. I’m assuming anyone who reads this blog knows what QAnon is. It’s basically the blood libel, updated for the modern age. Some idiot posted some random shit on 4chan (which happens basically every second) claiming that s/he is a secret intelligence operative and was spilling tea on upcoming FBI raids on Trump’s political enemies. It was supposed to happen in 48 hours and, of course, it didn’t. That failure, however, didn’t stop the true believers. These people must be total knuckleheads. Who would earnestly believe this crap? Of course, people have a tendency to believe whatever places them in a positive light. Whatever the case may be, QAnon has a lot of followers , and they are apparently laser-focused on the conspiracy theory. Trump is their greasy, corpulent pope. It makes total sense that he would pull those people close – they are the scrum who never left him. What they think they’re
Read more