What’s this I spy with my little eye? ‘Tis a man in a wee lifeboat. Soggy, nautical-looking gent with a captain’s hat on. Smoke rising lazily from the bowl of his pipe. Looks to have been out here a while…
Oh, yes… hello out there in cyberspace. It’s your old pal Bozo… I mean, Joe-zo. (Been at sea a little too long, me thinkst.) As you may have surmised from my previous utterance, we did manage to shove off last week, as the saying goes. Our dear friend Trevor James Constable cooked up a little nor’easter with that orgone generating device of his, and we were carried off to open water by a most congenial ocean breeze (12 knots, I believe — knot that that means anything to me). Around 1300 hours GMT, we crossed the tropic of Capricorn and headed into uncharted waters. Take it from someone who’s spent the better part of the last month on a desert island — if you’re going to be in uncharted waters, you’re better off keeping in motion rather than standing still. Word to the wise.
Now I don’t know how many of you have actually been to the Sargasso Sea or any of those other forgotten corners of the world that only seem to show up in naval lore, but let me tell you, friend — they exist. Oh, yes. Our nor’easter blew us into a fog-bound stretch of ocean. Aye, grim and foreboding it was, with the smell of decaying hulks hanging heavy in the air 
around us. Our pilot Marvin (my personal robot assistant) spotted an albatross — t’was then we knew we were in for a rough passage. Shiver me timbers, I’ll be a peg-legged polevaulter if we didn’t spy a small craft off the starboard side, its master a lone ship’s captain, his haggard features bearing a tale of many months at sea… or perhaps years. Aye, an eternity in the doldrums, perhaps. His pipe still lit, he gave a jaunty little dance… and I knew. T’was the captain of the Titanic. We had entered the dreaded Sea of the Weekly World News.
What lay ahead for us? Bat boy? Bigfoot? The space alien who plays presidential kingmaker? We had to get out of here fast. But nay, there was a strange dampening field at work, a peculiar miasma that kept 
the orgone generating machine from functioning as our weather-maker. If we wanted to avoid being trapped in supermarket checkout lines for all eternity, we needed to find an alternative source of power — one strong enough to push us clear through to the subcontinent. There was only one option: Big Zamboola. But would he do it? We formed an ad hoc delegation and brought the proposal to our beachball-sized planetoid companion. (He’s been hovering in the power core for the last week or two, pining for the Pleiades).
Well, it was more complicated than you might have imagined. Zamboola wasn’t hot on the idea. And as they say, you can lead a planet to water, but you can’t make him blow. (That didn’t come out the way I meant it to, but let it pass… let it pass….) See you in the checkout!
