August03

NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(August '03)

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8/3/03

Oh yay, oh yay...

Great Scott! I believe I've overslept yet again. *yawn* Is it early morning or early afternoon? Deep in the bowels of the Cheney Hammer Mill, it's difficult to tell the difference. Once I can make the two ghostly images of my alarm clock converge and become one, I will know more. C'mon eyes...settle down....

I was up a bit late last night trying to map out some parts with Matt. Yeah, though our songs sound somewhat unplanned, we do spend a fair amount of time arranging them, using our semi-literate shorthand method to write out the score. (It's heavily dependent on pictograms, actually. If there's, say, a banjo part, we draw little banjos all over the page with a blunt crayon, then scratch in the names of the notes and time values in pencil. It at least gives us something to scratch our heads over the next morning.) Of course, the second album is always a greater challenge than the first, typically because a.) the first one had all your good songs on it, or b.) you're still broke from buying all those discs. It's a bit like Vincent Price's "The Fly" movies. The first one had a budget and was shot in full, living color. The sequel was a cheap knock-off that looked like it was made in somebody's garage. Not to worry, though. That can't happen to Big Green. We don't have a garage.

Luckily, we've got Mitch Macaphee back amongst us to help work out these and other complex problems in logic (like, why honeydew melons don't have their own gravity...or why Rosey Grier shows up on '60s and '70s TV shows just before they get cancelled.) Mitch seems fascinated with the man-sized tuber...there's something about that giant root vegetable that has sparked his scientific curiosity. From the moment his instruments and lab assistants were uncrated and assembled, he started running tests on "tubey," blanching him with hydrochloric acid, scraping bits of husk and squeezing them between glass microscope slides, comparing his specific gravity with that of feldspar, and bombarding him with Baratold rays. It seemed the more attempts Mitch made at determining the precise essence of the man-sized tuber, the more perplexed and agitated he became. Several days into his research, the good professor locked himself into Marvin's (my personal robot assistant's) cedar closet and started emitting a strange "bleeping" sound at regular intervals.

Matt became concerned and put a call through to our old friend and mentor Dr. Hump at his villa in Bologna. "Does he wear a pager?" Dr. Hump asked, and Matt told him yes. "Then find the number, buzz him, and punch in 7734. That should make him stop." We did as the doctor said, and almost immediately the bleeping sound ceased. It was still about 6 hours before we saw Mitch out and about again (John spotted him riding his unicycle back to his quarters). I'm glad to say he returned to his closer-to-normal mad scientist activities in preparation for our August tour lift-off date, and seemed quite self possessed at dinner that evening. All the same, he gave the man-sized tuber a wide birth, regarding it suspiciously from time to time. How this tour is going to work with the two of them on board a relatively cramped spacecraft I don't know. (We'll have to confiscate weapons before boarding.)

Our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn also pulled in this week, fresh from a string of personal appearances over in the Great Magellanic Cloud. He and Marvin have been doing some catching up -- I believe Marvin might take on the added responsibility of being sFshzenKlyrn's guitar technician. It seems part of Marvin's programming covers stringed instrument maintenance -- I guess Mitch Macaphee impressed those skills on his memory n-grams, knowing they might prove useful one day. Fact is, I'm thinking of setting up a little one-robot guitar repair shop, manned by Marvin on his off-time from the constabulary. Hell, I could even send him off tuning pianos at $75 a pop (he has a handy laser tuning device built into his right index finger). This could ring up even more cash than his exercise class. Less work for mother!

You may wonder when we find time to rehearse amid all this frenetic activity. For this, we make time. Hey -- Tiny Montgomery (our new tour promoter) insists upon it. Next thing you know, he'll be bucking for a manager job....not a lot of competition for that seat, I can tell you. I just hope Tiny doesn't take exception to my new battle hymn for Dubya. (I think he might be a Republican....Tiny, that is. Well...and Dubya too, of course.) We shall see.

Casino Royale. Well (heh-heh) I was tempted to pull a Bill Bennett this week a la "Where's the outrage?" but it seemed a bit inappropriate to commandeer the words of "conservative" America's patron saint of blackjack to criticize the Pentagon's wacky terrorist futures trading scheme. Is it me...I mean, is it me, or is this the most ludicrously over-the-top bonehead idea you've ever heard of? They were actually just days away from launching a system that would allow "investors" to put money on whether or not, say, a terror attack will hit the Brooklyn Bridge next year, or if three Americans will be killed on Christmas week...I mean, are these guys on drugs? (Could explain those budget irregularities...)

Good old admiral Poindexter has once again been driven from the corridors of power (how long his exile will last this time is anyone's guess), and it appears we are expected to be satisfied with this outcome and put this little episode right out of our minds. My favorite reaction was from Wolfowitz (Mr. Homefront Warrior himself), who claimed to have first heard about the DARPA terrorist futures trading plan in last week's newspapers. So...he's either massively incompetent as a manager, or he's a liar (which we know to be the case already). How many second chances do these high-powered managerial types get, anyway? Shouldn't Wolfowitz and, yes, Rumsfeld, lose their jobs over what is so obviously a Pentagon system that's way out of control...one that can't account for over $1 trillion in appropriated spending? (Maybe they lost it all on Iraqi WMD futures.)

It's not just the Pentagon's top pirates who perpetually duck responsibility, of course, it's this whole administration. Dubya's performance at his hastily-called noontime press conference was emblematic of their overall attitude -- pugnacious, remarkably insular in their thinking (to the point of incoherence), and insistent that we take everything on faith. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being lectured by a part-time president who lied his way into Iraq and is now groping for ways to lie himself out again. Much as this all-CEO government wants us to think the only "mis-statement" they made on the road to war was the Niger/uranium story, they can't run away from the fact that they've provided no convincing evidence to support any of their core claims about Iraq being a threat to our very survival. Now they want us to "move on" while even the British Parliament is reporting that Al Qaida recruitment is up around 17,000 conservatively, and that we're no safer now than we were 2 years ago -- perhaps less so.

So while Dubya yuks it up with old uncle Ariel, the rest of us suckers wait for the other shoe to drop -- that seemingly inevitable explosion that they will use to justify another round of profitable war making. Time to let them know that this won't do. Take care out there.

luv u,

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8/10/03

Y'ello...

There goes another week into history's dustbin...right where it belongs. In the name of the father, and the son, and into the hole he goes. That's the best my sleep-deprived brain can come up with so far.

Yes, I'm becoming a regular garden-variety insomniac, driven from my bed, as it were, by the pervasive buzz of anticipation that has turned the usually sleepy Cheney Hammer Mill into a hotbed of pre-tour activity. As you know from your newspaper and your internet start page, Mars will make its closest pass in 60,000 years on August 27th, and our tour promoter Tiny Montgomery wants to make the most of this happy circumstance. But in order to keep to our lift-off schedule, we've really needed to knuckle down. (And here in Big Green land, our knuckles could hardly get any lower.)

For me personally, this has meant getting Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to take over even more of my day-to-day tasks. He is now handling my one item per hour packing chore, and making good progress at it (though it took him all day yesterday to pack half a bottle of multi-vitamins, one at a time). I've even had Marvin take over some of my rehearsal schedule, tickling the ivories with automatonic aplomb while I catch up on my...my...well, whatever it is I do all day. Appalled by this display of lethargy? Hey, lookit...John gets the man-sized tuber to sit in for him once in a while, so get off my neck!

Tiny has really taken to the idea of just raising a really long ladder up towards Mars and sending us across with backpacks, thereby forgoing the expense of a spacecraft altogether. I think he's taking the fiscal management aspect of his job to something of an extreme. After all, even if he manages the ladder to Mars hat trick, what about our itinerary after that? I mean, there are Venus, Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter....er....Uranus....and all those other planets to consider. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, tried to explain to Tiny that this was one of those instances when the quickness of the mind has deceived the eye. I think this may have been a bit too subtle an intervention to benefit our tour promoter. Tiny likes things cut up into bite-sized pieces, and jagged explanations like Mitch's get stuck in his throat. You're really better off with a gingerly, "Nah, that's fucking stupid!" This Tiny can handle.

Speaking of handles, our Zenite guitarist sFshzenKlyrn appears particularly well-fed after a string of sweetheart gigs on some of the richest planets in his patch of the galactic neighborhood. I'm not certain that his "head" isn't fatter than the rest of him after that successful "Hubble-stumping" coup he and his siblings pulled off last week. When they made the front page of NPR Morning Edition for August 1, I knew old sFshzenKlyrn would be insufferable for a time...but I didn't know how insufferable. Who would guess that he'd start wearing an ascot and insisting that "his name must never be spoken"? If it keeps up like this, we may have to offer him money for his services just to keep him on board. Wait...what was that? Oh, Christ. He's told Marvin to "hold all calls" again. Just a minute, Mr. Nebula! Marvin's my personal robot assistant!

It won't last. We've got far too much to occupy us, what with lift-off just two short weeks away. Will the J-2 coffee maker brew 12 cups at a time? Will Trevor James Constable track us from his ground station with his patented orgone generating device as we streak through the heavens? Do my tennis shoes look like they can handle 35 million miles on an aluminum ladder in zero gravity? The answers to these and other vital questions await our departure.

They'll Be Back. Now, I don't usually rant about state politics, but this is just too bizarre. Does California really stand a chance of getting a good governor out of the food fight that's taking shape around Gray Davis' recall? Sure, Davis is a hack and a republicrat who has governed less than poorly, but hey...that was obvious in 2002 when they re-elected him. What governor wouldn't be vulnerable to recall under California's rule, particularly now that Dubya and the congressional inquisitors have chosen to let the states pound salt in hopes that at least one of them will make anti-tax mullah Grover Norquist's dreams come true and default. (He sounds nice...don't you wish he were your neighbor?)

Of course, California's troubles smack of the long-knife, slash-and-burn political strategy of Karl Rove. Like other "Gore 2000" states, California is being made to pay for its insolence of three years ago...and for rejecting the ridiculous Bill Simon in 2002 when Herr Rove so wanted him to win. Typically for them, they would love to see the results of that election overturned, just as the Bush administration would love to see a minority of Venezuelans (backed by their media) turn Chavez out of office early. California's laws make this a relatively easy matter for people with deep pockets -- just get a million signatures (in a state of 36 million residents) and you've got your recall election. That sounds to me like democracy with a capital Dubya.

Now, of course, everyone except the Michelin man (last I checked, at least) is running for governor in a first-past-the-post election that appears to require from prospective candidates only sixty-five signatures and a $3,500 registration fee. That's lunch money for political wannabe Arnold Schwartzenegger (though perhaps a bit of a stretch for Gary Coleman). I'm certain that, at the end of this 17-car soapbox derby, California will have a governor whose statewide support is at least as flimsy as Davis'. I suspect there hasn't been this much chortling heard around the White House since Wellstone's plane went down and took the Senate with it. As for California, it's a safe bet that they'll be running this election again before too long...though this wouldn't be the first time the state was run by a bonehead actor who gets major media attention every time he changes his tiny mind about something.

Mystery Solved. The Weekly World News had a great scoop this week. Headline: Saddam's WMD's: Killer Dinosaurs! No wonder Bush didn't find anything....he was looking for microbes. That mad man was playing with giants.

Take care. Watch out for T-Rex.

luv u,

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8/17/03

How-dee...

Woke up to the sound of plaster cracking. There appears to be something going on just above my bedroom ceiling -- a leak, perhaps. A spider web of fine cracks have spread out from a nasty-looking yellow stain next to the bare bulb fixture. Pretty soon, I'll be wearing that ceiling -- that'll be a nice way to greet the new day.

Many are the maintenance woes of those who occupy the abandoned hammer mill, I believe it is said in the scriptures somewhere. Those prophets of old might have been talking about Big Green, had they been prepared at that early stage to accept the possibility of our existence and that of our extralegal residency at the Cheney Hammer Mill in old Sri Lanka. Prescient as they may have been, that would be asking too much of them. In any case -- scripture or no -- this place is falling down around our ears, and I for one can hardly wait to climb aboard that rented split-level space craft and sail off to a string of glorious (if somewhat uncertain) engagements on other planets.

That is, if our tour promoter Tiny Montgomery gets his shit together and rents the bloody thing. The goofy notion of raising a free-standing ladder to Mars so consumed Tiny that he neglected many of the basic operational preparations he is charged with carrying out. Stuff like hiring a caterer or ordering enough O-2 for several weeks in space. Now the boy is playing catch-up, and time is running out, quite frankly. I have no idea what kind of heap we'll be traveling in as a result of this delay. After all, it is vacation season...and Mars is going to be just a stone's throw away later this month. Spaceships are in particularly high demand -- I've got to think the Jupiter 2 replica has already been snapped up by the "Family Circus" family, ready to assault the planets after their nauseating tour of Philadelphia. Which means Tiny will be wandering aimlessly through the rocket rental lots, looking for a winner (or, more likely at this juncture, an eminently available loser).

Would that this were the only obstacle we face on the road to interplanetary glory. Far from it. There is also the small matter of advance money to cover our travel expenses. Because this tour is not being arranged through our corporate label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., none of our costs will be picked up in anticipation of performance receipts and increased interstellar disc sales. (Tiny certainly doesn't have the resources to handle that, his financial empire limited to the passbook savings account he's been nursing along since age seven.) That means we have to raise the cash before our kick off...and that means solid triple shifts for Marvin (my personal robot assistant) over at the constabulary. It also means finding gainful employment for Matt's man-sized tuber.

Now I know what you're thinking -- that root vegetable is virtually unemployable. That's what a lot of people say, and it's not too far from wrong. As you know, we've opportunistically pressed tubey into service on more than one occasion -- as Marvin's assistant, as road manager, as message carrier, as hot dog vendor -- with mixed success. However, none of these have proven sufficiently remunerative to make a dent in our expense ledger. So now I look at tubey and think professional...a stock broker, perhaps. Maybe something in banking, on the vice presidential level, so he won't need arms and legs. It occurred to me we might be able to get him Admiral Poindexter's old job, since that thick husk of tubey's would be more than sufficient to protect him from the highly charged political atmosphere that proved so troublesome for the busy little Iran-Contra felon. (I'm sure tubey could come up with suggestions for DARPA at least as wacky as that terror futures trading scheme.)

One thing the man-sized tuber could do is help sFshzenKlyrn carry his ego around for a couple of weeks, until it deflates to more normal size. Man...you'd think the guy had gotten his mug on the cover of Rolling Stone or Dagger rather than the NPR Morning Edition web site! I guess sFshzenKlyrn was used to occasional mentions in obscure astronomical journals, white papers, and web postings as reward for his persistent Hubble-stumping efforts. This was his first brush with the mass market media. Even so, I'm getting a little tired of calling him "admiral" and having to apologize for stepping on his shadow. I mean, it gets irritating after a few days.

Perhaps the profound existential isolation and inky darkness of interstellar space will put us all in a better state of mind. As it is, I can barely paste together my little poke of demos for our ongoing new album project. How is the remix of President's Brain going? I'll let you know in a week or two. If it sounds stupid enough, we'll post it somewhere you can find it. Details at eleven.

Mystery Solved. With all the major news media still squeezing the last stories out of the great northeastern blackout of 2003 (goodbye slow news day!), little mention was made of a major WMD revelation. It seems the residue of massive chemical attacks against civilians was demonstrated to be remarkably potent many years after its application, according to an international study released last week. These deadly weaponized substances, used in heinous disregard for the lives of a defenseless population, retain a frighteningly high level of toxicity, showing up in food sources throughout the targeted area.

Iraqi Kurdistan? Nope. Southern Vietnam, where more than 72 million liters of deadly Agent Orange was deployed by our armed forces between 1962 and 1971, with hideous health consequences that persist to this day (my uncle, a medic in the early days of the war, died of what was probably an A.O.-related cancer). The study, published by the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, also reports on the continuing impact of a 5,000+ gallon leak of the herbicide near Bien Hoa air base more than thirty years ago. That's the second news story I've seen this year on this major case of chemical warfare, conducted in the context of a US attack that left millions dead and three countries devastated. No big news.

That's part of our chemical weapons heritage. What about nuclear weapons? Well, last week saw the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings -- that's the biggie, of course. Then there's the decaying infrastructure of nuclear weapons production in the United States that includes facilities like Washington State's Hanford reservation, where 440 billion gallons of contaminated fluid made its way into the ground -- more than 200 million times the amount of carcinogenic material it would take to give every person on the planet cancer. That's just one of 169 highly contaminated facilities in 28 states. (Is there one near you? Check www.scorecard.org) Bio-weapons? Check Fort Greely's sordid history up in Alaska, among others.

So...why are Bush and Sharon smiling like two top bananas in a cheap vaudeville act? Perhaps because the nations they lead are the worst offenders in the WMD game, and yet they remain free to expand their own programs while attacking those of weaker states...much like the thief who cries "thief!" When it comes to weapons programs, Saddam was a piker next to these guys.

Another Brick. Speaking of WMD's, the excellent website www.ElectronicIntifada.net has posted a well-illustrated article on Israel's apartheid barrier (what Sharon likes to call a "security fence"), which, when complete, will likely be four times as long and, in some places, twice as tall as the Berlin Wall. It will also slice the West Bank into isolated cantons -- essentially an enormous prison camp for Palestinians. Check it out at: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1775.shtml

We in the U.S. are paying for this. We can stop it. Call Junior at the White House and tell him so. And call your congressional reps, too. They'd love to hear from you.

luv u,

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8/24/03

Greetings...

Just slicing into a plate of day old flannel cakes. If my words seem mumbled, I do beg your pardon. This may be the last decent meal I get before the advent of road food, so I'm making the best of it. Anyone seen the hogshead of marmalade? Christ almighty...I bought the largest container available specifically so it would be hard to misplace...and somebody's rolled it off somewhere. What's the point of trying, right?

We're just days away from lift off on Big Green's Interplanetary Tour 2003, and I'm relieved (somewhat) to be able to tell you that our new tour manager Tiny Montgomery managed to procure a space vehicle for us. No, it's not the Jupiter two replica we took up yonder last time (the Keane family grabbed that baby) but it is a ship, I'm told, and we've got a piece of it, just in the nick of time. Tiny's quite proud of himself, dancing and woofing, grasping fistfuls of air and shouting "Yes!" I'm happy for the boy, particularly since he accomplished this task without knowing one end of a rocket from the other. (Mitch Macaphee has advised him that the pointy end goes up.) Way to go, Tiny!

In light of this remarkable personal victory, it hardly seems to matter that the craft we have rented is of a somewhat early vintage and offers little quarter for passengers, equipment, or provisions. No, I haven't actually examined it for myself, but we sent Mitch Macaphee over to the used rocket lot for a little impromptu inspection. The result? He hasn't said anything about the vehicle yet, but Matt tells me Mitch came back after about an hour, his face a bloodless mask of unalloyed horror...then the good man of mad science staggered into his suite muttering something unintelligible about certain doom. I imagine right now he's having his lab assistant type up a glowing report on the mighty spaceship Tiny has chosen to carry us through some of the galaxy's most inhospitable regions. {Editor's note: SATIRE...SATIRE....}

Acting on this expectation of good news, I've asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to dig deep into our cash reserves and purchase a crate of champagne for use at a special bon voyage ceremony we have planned for Tuesday night...the night before our planned lift-off. Marvin's been invaluable as an all-around dog's body during this last week, using his time away from work to run errands for pretty much everyone in our entourage. Even Trevor James Constable (who will be staying in California this tour to work on the Gary Coleman gubernatorial campaign) has our mechanical friend running from pillar to post, gathering soil samples and chasing down leads on those elusive flying critters that he writes about in his books. (Yeah, I know...we should set limits. It's just hard to say no to Trevor James after all the support he's given us over the years. Besides, I'm convinced that our listenership wouldn't be half as large without those liberal applications of M rays on an unsuspecting public from his orgone generating device.)

For those of you who are curious, we did find a paying gig for that man-sized tuber. Matt called a head-hunter and put them on the case, but actually it was "tubey" himself who stumbled onto this job. We sent the giant root vegetable out to the local supermarket to pick up a few things, and somebody at one of those sampling stations talked him into standing in for a few minutes. Well, with tubey behind the counter, they went through an enormous number of samples...I guess folks were intrigued by his vegetable magnetism. In any case, the sample supervisor sent him home with a W-4 form and a standard employment application. I called the woman and asked her if he really needed to be "bonded" to hand out samples of carrot and celery sticks (in light of his natural ability, she happily waived the requirement). Naturally, they love the fact that the man-sized tuber never leaves his post, not even for bathroom breaks, until someone wheels him away on a dolly. The ideal worker!

As the countdown has commenced (at this early stage, that consists of John counting backwards under his breath), we've been struggling to make some progress on our various recording/mastering projects, with some success. We now have 20 songs demo'd, and a serviceable mix of one new number...a solemn battle hymn for Dubya entitled The President's Brain Is Missing or simply, President's Brain (since everybody already knows it's missing). Matt and I are working on remixing older unreleased material -- hopefully we'll have something before lift off...either that or I'll chuck it out the porthole as we fly over. Keep your fingers crossed...and your skylights open.

Internal Aggression. History may not precisely repeat itself, but you do see certain patterns over and over again, it seems. The bombing of the U.N. compound in Baghdad certainly underlined this principle in a number of ways. It's hard not to think of Vietnam as the administration gropes for ways to blame outside "insurgents" and "Saddam loyalists" for the deteriorating occupation regime. It was a sickening act of violence, to be sure...and this war is full of them, mostly perpetrated by us. There is grim humor in hearing the Bush team's lamentations about a purported influx of foreigners into Iraq -- invaders, set on destruction and regime change. To think anyone should do such a heinous thing! We're shocked! Shocked!

This was a pretty dramatic attack, and I have to think it may be followed by worse -- something like the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, since that is widely seen as the incident that prompted U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon. The poor suckers stationed there for a year's hitch must be gritting their teeth right now (check out www.bringthemhomenow.org). Meanwhile, their commander-in-cheese hangs tough, taking up his forward position at Crawford, and vowing to defend non-existent Iraqi "democracy" while quietly signing an executive order (#13303) that declares any legal action against U.S. oil companies in Iraq "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security" -- in effect saying that a lawsuit by, say, Russia, to claim compensation from U.S. firms for lost Iraqi oil concessions constitutes a "national emergency," putting it under the jurisdiction of the armed forces. (See the article at commondreams.org.) Now there's a morale booster for you. Then there's this little gem, uttered by Dubya on July 14th:

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is: Did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is: absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.

Now, is this how he remembers the events leading up to his splendid little war, or is he just the biggest bonehead who ever took the presidential podium? Interestingly enough, what he's describing is about exactly what they'd hoped would happen last fall, before Hussein frustrated them with serial acts of exasperating cooperativeness. (Pretty imperious reasoning -- first the "reasonable request," then the seemingly somewhat-less-than-reasonable "decision" to attack another country.) I guess the mainstream press was too focused on Kobe or Alabama's Ten Commandments plaque to waste too much time considering this...um...misstatement(?)

You'd think that now, during a slow news month, they might start putting together the fact that this joker has two failed occupations on his resume, and is funding a third that's on the brink of going completely septic (now that Sharon can get back to all-out war again). But no month is slow enough for real reporting, here in god's country.

Take care out there.

luv u,

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8/31/03

Gad-zooks....

One small step for one bald man, as Matt's lyric goes. Except that the first "step" of our tour turned out to be a giant leap of faith. Let me 'splain you...

That "good" transport ship Tiny Montgomery booked for us? It turned out to be reject Titan booster # A-14S...the rocket Grissom and White refused to ride to their Gemini triumph because it was so obviously flawed even then. For most of the past 37 years it has stood in a forgotten silo in Kansas with an antiquated H-bomb shackled to its head, until about 2 months ago, when the Pentagon sold it for scrap and our local rocket dealer slapped a coat of paint on it and parked it on his lot. It wasn't until we were boarding her that Matt noticed the clumsily-concealed "DISCARD" advisories stamped up and down the fuselage. Mitch Macaphee refused to board...and I dimly sensed that trouble may lay ahead.

First there was the obligatory customer photo. Apparently the used rocket dealer had started his career at a Saturn dealership, and had gotten into the habit of taking a happy photo of his suckers...um...patrons before they drive off. (We commandeered it as a tour photo...I kind of like the way the man-sized tuber looks in that space suit...) Then it was time to strap into the couches -- the three of us, plus Tiny and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Our road manager, the man-sized tuber (who likes to be called manager-sized tuber now) had to be lashed to a pole. sFshzenKlyrn, still full of himself over the NPR web site coup, refused to travel "coach," as it were, and arranged to meet us on Mars. When John finished his sotto voce countdown, it was my job (in Mitch's absence) to throw the main engine switch, and the great titan booster roared beneath us, lifting our capsule up on a pillar of flame. We cleared the makeshift gantry our neighbor Gung-Ho had lent us for the occasion and careered into the deep blue heavens above. Next stop...a planet we call "Mars."

Or so we believed, in any case. When we reached an altitude of 150 nautical miles, the colossal A-14S Titan II Booster began to rattle like a rented PA system. Then we heard a long, drawn-out sputter and wheeze like Mel Blanc's dying jalopy imitation. After that, nothing. No power, no thrust, no lights....nada. We were just drifting along in high orbit like all the other abandoned space junk. Out the porthole, I could see chunks of the last five Mars probes floating by -- a cynical thought crossed my mind. Could it be that the space alien from the Weekly World News wanted to keep us away from the red planet at this crucial juncture? That was when it first dawned on me that we had a small problem.

Following the principle of "first things first" drilled into us through our many hours of intensive flight training, we took a moment to panic -- not a lot of arm-flailing, you understand, just a sober, orderly panic with recorded moans of "We're done for!" provided by Marvin's internal sound bank. After about half an hour of that, we started trying to work out what had happened...and it was pretty plain from the graffiti on the interior of the capsule that the owner of this aging ICBM had not only neglected routine maintenance, but had also failed to pay the electric bill for three months in a row. Some bean counter at the electric company with a telemetry set-up must have chosen that moment to shut off the Titan II's power supply. Bad luck!

Of course, this meant postponing our Mars gigs until the end of the tour, since we can hardly fulfill our obligations bobbing uselessly in orbit. Marvin used his auxiliary battery to run the radio set so we could call for help. We got hold of Mitch Macaphee, who's now pulling all the strings a mad scientist can pull to get us alternative transportation. Through all of this, Tiny's been pretty quiet, sheepishly examining his tour itinerary folder with a flashlight. His first big fuck-up...every manager goes through this. "Don't worry," Matt told him consolingly. "Pretty soon you'll know this job inside and out, and you'll be fucking up all the time, just like all the other managers." That brother of mine...always ready with a kind word.

So here we sit -- the Sputnik band, waiting for a space-tow. At least we managed to remix the ludicrous Dino song before we left the Cheney Hammer Mill. And if the lights ever come back on again up here, I'll try to post the sucker somewhere where you can hear it. Just the kind of dedication and quality service you expect from your friends in Big Green. And if one of you could email us a carafe of hot coffee, we'd appreciate it.

Next Year's Model. Now that September is nigh, I've been wondering what Dubya's next new "product" will be. Last year it was the war on Iraq -- they pulled out the heavy PR artillery after Labor Day, timing their "national emergency" with the precision of a Patton Boggs. And what a successful launch! Thousands dead, oil development contracts firmly in the hands of crony U.S. companies, and the whole world on pins and needles over "who's next?"...not to mention a dramatic photo-op finish with Dubya in military uniform landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln with a (hot dog!) jet fighter. (Brash move, considering the boy's military record.) No skimping on the merchandising end, either, from decks of "most-wanted Iraqis" cards to Bush-in-flight-suit action figures (Brain not included. Squeeze his belly and he'll cut your retirement benefits. Also available with "cocktail grip").

Of course, there have been a few snags along the way...a few too many dead soldiers (no old-boy-network connections to keep them out of harm's way) ...a few too many demonstrable lies (what product launch isn't driven by falsehood?) ...and a bit too messy on the ground over in that Ay-rab country out there, the one with all the easy-to-extract oil. The bombing of the month has become the bombing of the week, yesterday's attack killing the most prominent Shi'ite cleric along with more than 100 other people (since Dubya only recently discovered the existence of Shi'ite Muslims, this probably won't weigh too heavily on his troubled presidential brow). And increasingly people seem to be holding him responsible for the billion-dollar-a-week mess he's gotten us into...not that it's a problem for him yet, or at least not one of the magnitude Tony Blair faces over in Britain, where people still get a little displeased when their leaders lie their way into a war. Like Blair, Dubya may have to keep in "mind" who to sacrifice if things get too hot. ("She/he made me do it!")

One thing that can't be making brand manager Karl Rove too happy is the fact that, according to a recent Newsweek poll, only 44% of Americans want to see Brand W re-elected, while 49% can't wait to see the back of him. (John Zogby's latest poll shows the same trend.) This indicates that the fear factor is cooling off and people are slowly returning to the knowledge that their president is a corporate hack who bungles everything he touches (though from the point of view of his multinational patrons, he's good as gold...or better). And while Dubya "won" last time with little more than that 44% (and a bit less than the other guy), I think we can expect a new product launch sometime this fall. Maybe not another war quite yet...but a well-timed scare campaign would be just the thing to goose those poll numbers back up again. Maybe former CIA asset Osama Bin Laden will helpfully intervene once again, since his bush-league network of cut-throats is still obviously very much a going thing, its ranks swelled by Bush's club-footed crusades in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This deadly symbiosis between the Dubya cabal and Al Qaeda can only condemn us to live (or die) in interesting times, as the saying goes, for the foreseeable future. That is, unless we chuck the bastards out (the ones we can chuck, at least.)

Be safe. Don't be sorry.

luv u,

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