Hot enough for you? 450 degrees Kelvin, Mitch tells me. (That’s about 350 for all you Fahrenheit fiends.) Urich, you got your eye on that splash-down point? That’s it? Are you sure? Looks like freaking solid ground to me…
Well, as you may have surmised, Big Green is just now 
wrapping up its launch tour for our new album, International House, and is headed back home through that ever-thickening blanket of atmosphere that surrounds planet Earth (our seasonal home). And as the more discerning amongst you may have noted, our re-entry method leaves a bit to be desired. You see, Big Green’s pilot on this outing – a certain Urich Von Braun, reputedly the last surviving member of a little-known German kamikaze squadron – is a “driver” (as George W. Bush would put it) of airplanes. Spacecraft? Well, not so much. Anyway… this re-entry phenomenon is kind of a new thing for him, and while he’s a quick learner, it’s the sort of situation that doesn’t allow for a whole lot of trial and error. We’ve been supporting him in every way we can think of – bringing him drinks, digging up the circa-1975 instructions on how to land a Soyuz, giving him pep talks, etc., but I must admit… I don’t have a real good feeling about this landing.
Take the instructions (please). Urich has read them and he seems to be pointing the ship towards solid ground. I always thought the idea was for a splash-down 
type landing. But now I’m told by Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that the Russians always landed somewhere out in Kazakhstan, hopefully in an open field. So now… I don’t know if that means we’re going to Kazakhstan or someplace slightly closer to our actual home in upstate New York – namely, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (right now, abandoned even by the gaggle of squatters it usually houses). On John’s suggestion, Matt devised a kind of bomb-sight device for him with crosshairs hastily scratched into it using a pen knife. (Best we could manage.) I keep trying to get him to point the sucker towards water of some kind, but Urich is a pilot who pretty much follows his own counsel. (The result of Kamikaze training, I suspect.) If he wants to point at a slag heap outside a stone quarry, that’s where we’re going, concussions be damned.
That being the case, the only one likely to come out of this without any serious bruises is the man-sized tuber (AIM screenname ManSizedTuber… just so you know). He is, as you know, a large root vegetable and, as such, an extremely gnarly character who doesn’t bruise easily. This is just as well, since he is the one who put together that video for our new song “High Horse” – our mock-
country satirical contribution to the George W. Bush legacy project. It’s been up on YouTube for a week now, and it’s got maybe 250 hits thus far… not exactly a screaming viral hit, but not bad for something submitted by a root vegetable. Reviews so far have been good, but I’m trying to keep him real on his expectations. Not sure it’s necessary. As I said, he’s got a pretty thick skin. You might even call it a husk or rind, perhaps. Not easy to get through to that boy, no sir.
So anyway… I can see my house from space, and it’s getting bigger and bigger with every passing minute. And as much as that sounds like a good thing, it’s… really… not….
