Greetings from the soundstage of terusdanorf girundolph huzzah. Can you hear me out there? Are you sure? Testing, testing…
Oh, the trials and tribulations of interstellar tours! And who knows them better than Big Green, right? We know them all, like the backs of our hands. (Hmmmm…. never noticed that mole before. Better get that looked at. And when did I bark that knuckle?) We’ve grappled with irate, drunken crowds, ill-tempered club owners with six (or even seven) heads, venues that had no air or gravity (had to write those into our contracts – live and learn!), Frankenstein-like bouncers, galaxy collisions in the middle of the second set – we’ve been there, damnit. And if you include sFshzenKlyrn‘s experiences, we’re talking about every bad gig back to the big bang (which, I believe, was the name of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 tour, wasn’t it?) or even further. The big crunch, even. One of those. Anyway… what was I saying?
Oh, yeah. Difficult interstellar gigs. That’s how it went off on Proxima Centauri. They didn’t get our new song “High Horse” at all – again, a question of cultural references. And since we were on their equivalent of network television – a live performance 
show they call terusdanorf girundolph huzzah, it was a bit embarrassing to say the least. You see, they are more into our darker numbers. I think that’s because their companion star is so dim. (27 hours of night to every five hours of daylight. W.T.F., right?) So they reacted pretty well to stuff like Vital Signs and so on. Trouble is, when they DON’T like something you play, they start throwing stuff. Kind of a tradition on Proxima. (In fact, it’s a tradition on Earth as well, as it happens. Down there, the more they like you, the bigger the projectiles…. or so I’m told.) That gets to be a problem, frankly.
Well, yeah… so they chucked handfuls of finkonium (a mildly radioactive isotope native to Proxima) at us during High Horse. (Fans of neither country nor irony, they.) Then our mics crapped out in the middle of the set, and they started hurling that finkonium again – this time in big chunks. One of them hit Marvin (my 
personal robot assistant) upside the head as he attempted to scope out the problem with the mics. Apparently the radioactive properties in the finkonium interacted with those inside Marvin’s brass cranium in such a way as to turn him temporarily into a Frenchman. It’s kind of like foreign accent syndrome – you know, when you get into a fender bender and suddenly you’re talking like Victor Borge. That’s what happened with Marvin, except it’s the full monty – Francophone speech, stereotypical getup… you can even hear faint accordion music in the background when he enters a room. Most peculiar.
Not to worry. Mitch Macaphee, Marvin’s erstwhile inventor, tells me this should not last. Besides, anti-Lincoln finds it vaguely entertaining for some reason. (I think it’s because posi-Lincoln hates it.) Those two!
