Porpoise in life.

I told you what I saw, Mitch. What else can I say? If you choose not to believe me, well that's your affair. All I can tell you is that I know a primordial proto-whale when I see one, and I SAW one.

Oh, hi. As you can see, our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, and I are having a little scientific disagreement. I am making an empirical argument that primitive whale ancestors still roam the earth, whereas Mitch is advancing a kinetic argument of sorts. In other words, he threw a chair at me. Fortunately, my reflexes are still relatively sound for a man of my years and I was able to duck quickly enough to make it a near miss. Then came the brick bats. Let's just say that I lost the argument, not so much on the merits. More on the bruises. Ouch.

I never suspected Mitch would get so worked up about the field of paleontology. He's more of a physicist, chemist, bomb maker. You never know what he's going to cook up next. Last week he was muttering something about somebody named "Q" he met on the internets. I think he's been watching too many reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In any case, he's been building armaments for some event that's been on the horizon for some time. I know what you're going to say ... we should do something about him. Hey, look - when he shows up on the barricades with some kind of plastic bazooka, THEN call me.

There it is again. Hey, Mitch!While he's been busy with that and Matt's been busy with falcons, I've been woodshedding a bit, trying to teach my arms to play the piano again. (It's faster than teaching your legs.) The archiving project is nearly complete, at least the part about digitizing songs from analog tapes. I still need to clean them up, sort them, etc. Some of them are pretty spare; others come with a vest and a second pair of pants. The whole nine yards, as they say. (I don't know why they say these things.)

Oh, and we dropped an encore episode of Ned Trek at nedtrek.com. It's episode #27, Who Mourns For Science (originally aired in Feb. 2016), which features a giant Carl Sagan. Can't be bad, right? Give it a listen and let me know if it's improved with age. (I know I haven't. That's why I think I'm seeing proto whales.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Getting there.

Image
Well, anyway... why do we have to do the same thing every time? I mean, I know safety is important, but frankly we can't afford a spaceship at this point. Can't we just hitchhike to Neptune? Good god, man. Whatever happened to the spirit of adventure? We never used to be so risk averse. We used to bear to the left and take chances. Now look at us. (You can use a smoked glass lens, if you prefer.) We're worried about lack of gravity, lack of oxygen, exposure to radiation - what a bunch of wimps! The only one who's really not intimidated by any of this is the mansized tuber. (At least he hasn't said anything about it to me.) Fact is, we have to do these tours on the cheap, what with a recession on and all that. Money's tight, and our corporate label is even tighter. They don't even want to budget for us , let alone a ship to carry us in. Looks like we'll be relying on comped meals again. Ever try to get a free lunch on Uranus? Hah. Take it from me - it...
Read more

Rubbish in.

Image
Anybody seen my tuning fork? No, damn it, THAT'S not it. That's my tuning spoon. I said fork , you moron. This .... place ! Oh, yeah ... hi out there. I'm just attempting to replace a string on a second hand guitar that's been lying around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill since before we started squatting inside this big old drafty barn of a place. In as much as Big Green is a collectivist institution by nature, we make use of what resources avail themselves, utilizing only what we need to accomplish a mutually agreed-upon task, then replacing the surplus in such a way as to benefit all. Yes, we're all equal here. Except, of course, anti-Lincoln. Fuck that guy! Why am I restringing an old, abandoned guitar? Well, if it makes you feel any better, I'm doing it with used strings. We're scraping the bottom of the stewpot here, folks - I won't make any bones about it. (Typically, what you find at the bottom of the pot is not so much bones as sinew and fat...
Read more

Inside April.

Image
What's that rattling you hear? Could be the sound of Tomahawk missiles. Or maybe it's just a loose screen in the upstairs window. Those may be the same exact thing, in effect. But there is a third possibility, and that is the April THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. We've got another boatload of sound for you this month - here's a brief look inside the ship's hold (just to overextend that little metaphor) ... NED TREK 32: All Our Festeryears. A take-off on the "All Our Yesteryears" episode in the original Star Trek series (I believe their second or third to the last episode ever), Willard, Ned, Pearle, and Sulu pay a visit to a strangely deserted world, the entire population of which has retreated into old B movies on VHS tapes. The caretaker of the library (or Blockbuster Video) and his various doppelgangers are played by Ronald Reagan. Ned and Sulu have to deal with cheap-ass cinematic cowboys, whereas Willard and Pearle face-off against cave men. Kind of ...
Read more