Man, it’s hot on Aldebaran. (How hot is it, Joe?) Well… it’s hot enough to make the man-sized tuber 
sprout new branches. (W.t.f., Joe… that’s hot and a half!) Damn right.
Hi, there. Got a little sick of the monologue, so I thought I’d throw a call and response deal in the old blog. (Got to keep entertained somehow.) Big Green here, and I’m here to tell you that everything you learned about red giant stars is wrong. Sure, I know – they always told you that red giants are big, fat, overly cooled-down stars, right? Not so hot as those blue dwarfs, right? Well… looks like they was wrong, as they say in the old neighborhood (when somebody was wrong, that is). It’s hot as all get-out up here. It’s so freaking hot, Mitch Macaphee had to invent a sno-cone machine out of available materials… materials that included Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I regret to say. (Sorry, Marvin. I owe you one, man. Actually… I owe you a dozen, if memory serves.)
I don’t mind telling you, it took us ages to get here. That second-hand Soyuz we’re flying is 
nothing to write Moscow about. It’s cramped, leaky, and can’t get out of its own way, what with that four-cylinder ion drive Mitch cobbed together and wired up to Marvin’s internal power source (again, Marvin…. sorry… sorry…). Fact of the matter is, we had to fly through a hastily-contrived space/time warp in order to get there in less than a century or two. Luckily, our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has one or two tricks up his sleeve with respect to the space/time continuum. In as much as he is an etheric being of no fixed temporal location (or hairstyle), he can play with time like it’s a wad of Silly Putty, stretching it, flattening it, pressing it onto the Sunday comics and making Dagwood Bumsted look like he weighs 3,000 pounds. (Lots of laughs.) So, luckily for us, sFshzenKlyrn has served as our interstellar fixer, once again. (Helps to have friends in high places. Very high places.)
Well, by the time we got on stage on Aldebaran, we were all so dehydrated that we probably looked like the California Raisins up there… or those Fruit of the Loom guys doing the Coldplay knock-off. Matt launched into the first song 
off of our new album, International House – a little number called “Welcome To It.” I admit, the band sounded a bit raspy at first. No question but that the enormous bucket of Gatorade was a welcome site when Anti-Lincoln came peddling up with it near the end of the first set. Always thinking ahead, that anti-Lincoln (though he is such a contrary creature, when he thinks ahead he’s actually remembering). We plowed on through the set and a half of material on the new album, then took a well-deserved rest… on the tailgate of a vehicle owned by one of our Aldebaran patrons. Some kind of jitney, I believe. (Though an oddly misshapen blob of protoplasm, I think he’s in the motor coach trade. Who would have thunk it?)
Anyways… we got through our first performance, with only a minor rescue needed. Mitch has our Soyuz in parking orbit around the crust of rock our corporate label, Loathsome Prick, chose for our first venue. In fact, I’d better fly…. I think the meter’s running out in about five minutes.
