Well, I’ll be a positive particle in a negative universe. Is that really what deutronium costs these days? Outrageous! Don’t these mothers know there’s a recession going on down here?
Hi, friends. Just caught me going over the list of necessities for our upcoming interstellar tour de force. Here’s an item destined to cause trepidation. Radioactive deutronium fuel – $5,600.00 per pint bottle. Jesus H. Christmas. I guess prices on Aldebaran have been anything but stable over the past year. (The Aldebarans were heavy investors in Bear Stearns, rumor has it.) Not sure why they need to earn it back off of our asses, but there you have it. Anyway, it’s on the list because, as you may have surmised, Big Green has indeed secured transport for our tour. I’m glad to be the one to tell you that it will not be one of those Korean missiles. No sir, this is a proper space vehicle. Or so we’re told.
Fact is, we took Matt’s advice and called the guy in Jersey about that J-2 spacecraft old Irwin Allen dreamed up. He was more than happy to oblige – pretty broad minded of him, considering the mess we made of that vehicle when we leased it a few years back. Some of you remember –
crashing on a desert isle, modifying it for a seafaring voyage, etc., etc. It was a bit worse for wear when we got back, needless to say. I suppose if they had a rating system for spacecraft renters, we’d probably only get one star. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) felt a bit embarrassed by our rank carelessness with another person’s property. (This was all the more remarkable since embarrassment hadn’t been programmed into Marvin by that point – Mitch Macaphee had, in fact, programmed it out and replaced it with joy…. yes, unbridled JOY.)
Ahem. Of course, there are other things on this list. Things like guitars, amps, drums, etc. And some other little things we call songs. That’s right – we don’t merely perform our compositions, we carry them around in plastic tubs. Some of them – like the Quality Lincoln trilogy – are a bit heavier than the others. That’s just a question of relative mass, you see. More song = more mass. And by the transitive property of musical heaviness, the heaviest songs are most likely to have the biggest 
impact. It’s like throwing a hammer at a wall. If it’s one of those little featherweight rubber hammers that come in a child’s carpentry set, the wall won’t mind at all. But if it’s a big old drop-forge hammer of the kind that used to be made at the Cheney Hammer Mill, well…. that wall will duck if it’s got the sense the god of walls gave it. I mean, hell… wouldn’t you? Think about it.
Well… I’ve wandered a bit. Better get back to my listing. Hey, man-sized tuber! How many bags of those cedar chips do you need for eight weeks or so? How many? Cheese and onions…. this is going to cost the earth. Get back to loading those songs, hey will you?
