Posts Tagged ‘Weird’

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Cast of Wonders 224: Welcome to Willoughby’s

Cast of Wonders 224: Welcome to Willoughby’s is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:58 — 39.6MB)

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Welcome to Willoughby’s

by Michael Reid

You ever been to Upsilon Orionis? As far as asteroid belts go, that one’s pretty weird. Someone dragged every last asteroid in that system right up close to the star then built a temple to a different sun god on each one. How about Beta Pictoris? That solar system isn’t even properly formed yet and there’s already a golf course in its asteroid belt. It has fairways and sand traps and everything, with each and every hole on a different rock. So you could say I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff in asteroid belts. But the taxidermist was definitely the weirdest of them all.

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Cast of Wonders 152: Captain Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret vs. The Goblins of Vishnu 6 (Staff Pick 2014)

Cast of Wonders 152: Captain Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret vs. The Goblins of Vishnu 6 (Staff Pick 2014) is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:37 — 22.5MB)

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Show Notes

Every year in January Cast of Wonders takes a break to catch our breath, plan out the year ahead, and highlight some of our favourite episodes from the year just passed.

We hope you enjoy Barry’s favorite story from 2014, Captain Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret vs. The Goblins of Vishnu 6 by Jamieson Ridenhour, which originally aired November 17, 2013 as Cast of Wonders 104.

Captain Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret vs.The Goblins of Vishnu 6

By Jamieson Ridenhour

Load-in is always a bitch on a gas giant gig, but the moisture off the methane sea on Vamana really played havoc with my drum heads. The city, Upendra, was a big, domed thing with old-school terra-forming and flora-powered atmos that amounted to a human-made jungle in the midst of the rocky moon. We were playing the Municipal Amphitheatre, a screamingly Corporate name that was typically boring and grandiose all at once. That we got booked at all is probably due more to the backwater status of Vishnu 6’s fifth moon than any real thought about whether we’d be a good fit—we were a hell of a lot cheaper than the big CorpMuses who played closer to Earth.

Not that any of this mattered, mind you. A gig’s a gig, and this one was if anything a little bigger than we usually pulled. I’m just saying that for the all the “professionalism” of the local staff and the “modern ease” with which the intra-dome transfer was supposed to run, we might as well have been playing a dive bar in the Pleiades. But we did get the equipment set up, ‘cause you always do, and we did get what could technically be called a sound-check before we were hustled off the stage so the other two bands on the roster could do the same.
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Cast of Wonders 104: Captain Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret vs. The Goblins of Vishnu 6

Cast of Wonders 104: Captain Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret vs. The Goblins of Vishnu 6 is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:45 — 24.6MB)

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Show Notes

As you’ll hear in the outro, Jamieson’s inspiration for this story is the episode art for this week, a fair-haired young girl piloting a large mechanical fish. This arresting image was created by the exceptional artist Jasmine Becket-Griffith. You can find her work online here. Please go check it out! It’s well worth your time, and she has our thanks for allowing us to use the piece as this week’s episode art.

Captain Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret vs. The Goblins of Vishnu 6

By Jamieson Ridenhour

Load-in is always a bitch on a gas giant gig, but the moisture off the methane sea on Vamana really played havoc with my drum heads. The city, Upendra, was a big, domed thing with old-school terra-forming and flora-powered atmos that amounted to a human-made jungle in the midst of the rocky moon. We were playing the Municipal Amphitheatre, a screamingly Corporate name that was typically boring and grandiose all at once. That we got booked at all is probably due more to the backwater status of Vishnu 6’s fifth moon than any real thought about whether we’d be a good fit—we were a hell of a lot cheaper than the big CorpMuses who played closer to Earth.

Not that any of this mattered, mind you. A gig’s a gig, and this one was if anything a little bigger than we usually pulled. I’m just saying that for the all the “professionalism” of the local staff and the “modern ease” with which the intra-dome transfer was supposed to run, we might as well have been playing a dive bar in the Pleiades. But we did get the equipment set up, ‘cause you always do, and we did get what could technically be called a sound-check before we were hustled off the stage so the other two bands on the roster could do the same.

I’m telling the story like I’m a veteran, but truth be told that gig was only my third or fourth with Cleveland Grackle’s Galactic Cabaret, even though the Neverending Tour was a full decade old by that point. This is right after they started using the mechanical fish during “Nearer to Land,” the one Kimmy would pilot out of the wings on invisible filaments when Peter began his guitar solo.
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Cast of Wonders 98: Daphne’s Daughter

Cast of Wonders 98: Daphne’s Daughter is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:39 — 16.3MB)

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Daphne’s Daughter

by Jennifer Tiemann

When the man came into her sphere of perception, she had almost not realized he was there, concentrating as she was on the new nest of cardinal chicks that rested high on her south side. So occupied was she on shifting her branches just so to protect the nestlings, it wasn’t until the male cardinal reacted with alarm that she turned her awareness down from her branches to her roots.

At first, she thought he was a sapling – he was so very small. Then she remembered that no, that was the size men generally came in. What was startling to her, though, is that she perceived that he was colored much as she was; his body was a rich green and there was a tuft of bright red at his top end, almost exactly the color that she herself became when the cold winds began at the end of the Summer.

She understood that this was a male man, and not a female man, because deep inside still lived the memory of the part of her that had once been human.  She and all her siblings were female; there were no males in her family- except for her father, whom she saw but seldom.

The man put his hand out and touched her body lightly. She shivered – this had never happened before.  She had perceived men near her in the past, mostly their small ones, (children, she suddenly remembered they were called) but none had actually touched her. She wondered if he saw what some other men had seen when he looked at her. Much had been sung and written of her kind, particularly her mother.

All of her sisters were slightly different, but they had this in common; tall, straight trunks with heavy crowns of leaves; the crowns representing their sovereignty in the sight of the gods. Their gently curving trunks and twin upraised branches hinted at the womanly spirit hidden within.  She doubted that this man saw anything but a birch tree. Most didn’t.
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Cast of Wonders 94: The Drove of Maris-Charlottes

Cast of Wonders 94: The Drove of Maris-Charlottes is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:38 — 27.2MB)

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The Drove of Maris-Charlottes

by David Turnbull

Ida spat dirt from her mouth as she rode her weevil through the dust cloud churned up by the drove. These were healthy potatoes, Maris-Charlotte cross breeds, not a hint of blight on their creamy brown skins, none of them with a circumference less than three feet. Good rolling stock too, each one amply rounded so that their tumble was sufficiently smooth and uninterrupted, allowing them to gather a swift forward momentum.

There had to be at least four hundred head. They were feral and stubborn – not used to human contact. Managing them was going to be a challenging prospect, however, with Ida’s father and most the more experienced drovers felled by influenza it was imperative that she tried. A drove this size could make all the difference. If the potatoes could be enticed to settle in the three-acre field that had been cultivated in anticipation of their arrival there would be sufficient food to see her community through the winter.

Astride the speckled shell of her weevil, Ida maintained her position centre back of the rolling, tumbling drove, eyes constantly peering through the dust for signs of any attempted break away by rogue potatoes. She could see that her crew, most of them inexperienced teenagers like herself, were tired, but she knew she couldn’t afford to slow the pace – at least not until they were within sight of the settlement.

This expedition had originally been her father’s idea.
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Cast of Wonders 77: The Long Cut

Cast of Wonders 77: The Long Cut is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:04 — 12.0MB)

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The Long Cut

by Tom Howard

“Do you want me to drive for a while?” my mother asked from the front passenger seat. It was the middle of the night but, unlike my older sister, I couldn’t sleep. The desert streaked by just out of sight of the headlights. Off in the distance I could occasionally see a cluster of lights. I often wondered if there were kids like me asleep in their beds in little houses. Kids who didn’t have crazy fathers who insisted on driving everywhere because planes and trains were too expensive and buses were too slow.

“I’m good until Tucson,” said my dad. He and Mom traded off driving since we never stopped at a hotel because Dad said he’d never pay hard-earned money just for sleeping. “I could use another cup of that coffee if there’s any left.”

Mom unscrewed the lid from a battered aluminum thermos in a ritual that I’d seen her perform a hundred times.  She’d pour the dark, steaming liquid – rarely spilling a drop – into Dad’s big travel mug. He’d complain about how bad restaurant coffee was.  I didn’t wait for Dad’s expected comment. I just looked out the window. Where the heck were we?
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