All right, all right, I’m coming. Keep your shirt on. Not wearing a shirt? Fine – keep your pants on. Wait, wait…. don’t tell me… don’t leave me with that image…
Oh, yeah… Hello, friends. Back at the mill again. We survived our little rumble at the rustic local tavern. Hate to tell you how. Suffice to say that it took guile and skill… and a willingness to give in, just a little. Okay… more than a little. Some might call it a total climb-down. We handed back to the bartender the overalls, straw hat, and flannel shirt we’d stolen off of his scarecrow to make Marvin (my personal robot assistant) more presentable. It was a humbling moment, to be sure, but w.t.f., friends, they had pitch forks and broken bottles! We had to think of something, and while ordinarily I’d be the last one to raise the white flag in a fight (reason: I’m usually the first one out the door), I had to think of our fans, 
our mastering project (still underway!), our corporate overlords, expecting product. Hey – they can’t get it from a corpse, right?
So, back to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill we went. Back to our comfortable… well, meanly comfortable retreat from a brutish world. Back to the serial responsibilities of a virtual pop group, first amongst which is getting down to some serious virtual work. How much time did we lose on distractions? Too much, damnit. And while we were out carousing, we missed a somewhat important message from Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin, creator of the holographic siege pump (among other things). Seems like he’s had enough of Buenos Aires, had his fill of Rio by the sea-o, and he’s ready to come back and lend us a hand. Lord know we could use it, what with this daunting mastering project looming down upon us. Hour after hour of grueling work. (And that’s just the part when we’re making the gruel. Making the record is even harder!)
Yeah, well… between you and me, Mitch isn’t coming back a moment too soon. As you know, Marvin has been acting a bit strangely, on and off. (I think Matt noticed it first, when he saw Marvin using the man-sized tuber as a coffee table…. I mean… he doesn’t even like coffee!) I just may be possible that, in the midst of that rumble, Marvin might 
have had a diode or a circuit board knocked loose. No, he’s not doing the same weird stuff as before. He’s actually developed a morbid obsession about that new Canadian robot they’ve hung out on a pole from the International Space Station. Marvin keeps watching YouTube videos of the “Dextre” critter, trying to figure out how fitting him out with “hands” would bring him power. (Perhaps those hands might give him the power to manipulate the space station, then use its power to, dare I say it? Rule…. the world!) This is the kind of thinking that’s going down here at the hammer mill. And frankly, it worries me.
So Mitch, god damn it, get your sorry Ph.D. back here and start working on this wacked-out invention of yours before he rips YouTube a new one. We’ve got an album to finish here… still….
