Good evening, Aldebaran! How is everybody out there? Thanks for coming out tonight! We love you, man… we love you!
Hi, folks. Thought I’d offer you a transcript of 
our last performance in the Aldebaran system, on the big planet Mjumbo. Try to picture this in your head. (Are you trying? Good.) Imagine an enormous stadium – bigger than the astrodome, built along the rim of an enormous impact crater thousands of years old. Thousands of shapeless blobs of protoplasm in the seats, all holding lit matches. (This, we later learned, is something they do all the time on this planet – it burns off the bad air.) Now picture, if you will, the usual Big Green line-up of miscreants on the stage, plinking on keys, plucking at strings, banging on skins, and hollering into microphones. (Also adding mood, in a way that only the man-sized tuber can.) And swinging from the scaffolding, warning people about the “brown acid”? Marvin (my personal robot assistant). While in his magnetic lock pedestal during the trip over, he had occasion to watch Woodstock: The Movie.
So what’s next – a cameo by Wavy Gravy? Not on 
this tour. No, sir… this was more like one of those primitive mid-sixties shows. Our speaker stacks are relatively primitive, our amps antiquated, my piano in excess of a dozen years old (i.e. relatively new). Don’t have to tell you that there was a bit of a buzz in the air that night, and I don’t mean the buzz of excitement. I’m talking bad patch cables, mostly. Still, it was fun for some of us, and the many thousands of blobs of extraterrestrial goo were nodding their pseudopods in time with “Enter the Mind” (a cut off of our new album, International House). Quite an amazing site to behold, actually. Stunning, I’d say. Or perhaps the word is, well… nauseating. Though our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, has been capturing images of this phenomenon, hoping to use it in one of his new graphic user interfaces.
Well, that was then, this is now. And right now, we’re cruising away from Aldebaran at 30% of light speed in our modified Soyuz spacecraft. Destination? Well, that’s a bit up in the air. Our corporate uber-label, Loathsome Prick Records, originally wanted to send us out to Orion’s 
belt to do a string of gigs. Then sometime last week they changed their minds and decided that we should head over to the Pleiades cluster (the seven sisters). Of course, our initial reaction was, “What, all seven?” There was some grumbling over the phone, some muffled oaths, some veiled threats, and ultimately we agreed just to do three of the seven. Once in transit to that cluster, however, we received word from the overlords at LP that they wanted us to divert back to Orion again. Apparently there’s a bidding war going on for our presence. (Can you say “payola”?)
I can certainly say payola. I just can’t pay payola. So I guess that means we go where they tell us to, even if that turns out to be somewhere where the sun don’t shine. And as you know, the sun don’t shine in space… except near the sun.
Carolina? Virginia? Florida? Astounding. Pretty solid victory for a Democrat, I must say. (It bears remembering that Bill Clinton never broke 50% of the popular vote.) I will admit to a certain divided sentiment going into this election. On the one hand, it felt inevitable that Obama would win – not so much because of the polling, but because he just seemed like the person for this moment. On the other, I just found it hard to believe that this country would elect an African American guy named Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States. Up until the last couple of years, I’d always assumed that the first black president – if ever there was to be one at all – would be a Republican/conservative hawkish type, like Colin Powell…. you know, offset the “otherness” with a healthy dose of jingoistic cultural hegemony. But hey, w.t.f., so much for that. I guess it’s true until it’s not, like sitting Vice Presidents never win. Now … there’s going to be a black liberal Democrat in the White House this January.
talk to me about the Illinois Senator was a neighbor, a retired school teacher named Lynn Beaton. He lent me Obama’s most recent book, actually, which I have yet to read (and yet to return). Sadly Lynn died of a heart attack last year, but since then it has almost seemed as though he were observing the race from afar, coaxing it along. Every time I thought Obama really didn’t stand a chance, he would pull it out somehow, and I’d think about Lynn. When my wife Karen and I went into the voting booth this past Tuesday, we both thought of him as we pulled that lever. How he must be smiling right now… and I don’t mean at all that stuff about Palin’s wardrobe (though he’d probably get a kick out of that, too). For all it means to so many people, I’ll always think of this election as Lynn’s. He was out ahead of most of them.
sprout new branches. (W.t.f., Joe… that’s hot and a half!) Damn right.
nothing to write Moscow about. It’s cramped, leaky, and can’t get out of its own way, what with that four-cylinder ion drive Mitch cobbed together and wired up to Marvin’s internal power source (again, Marvin…. sorry… sorry…). Fact of the matter is, we had to fly through a hastily-contrived space/time warp in order to get there in less than a century or two. Luckily, our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has one or two tricks up his sleeve with respect to the space/time continuum. In as much as he is an etheric being of no fixed temporal location (or hairstyle), he can play with time like it’s a wad of Silly Putty, stretching it, flattening it, pressing it onto the Sunday comics and making Dagwood Bumsted look like he weighs 3,000 pounds. (Lots of laughs.) So, luckily for us, sFshzenKlyrn has served as our interstellar fixer, once again. (Helps to have friends in high places. Very high places.)
off of our new album, 
course you’re voting for Admiral McCain – if so, please just stay home. There, that’s done it. Election over.
social programs, and glutting the war machine. In as much as that brain trust is likely to be headed up by UBS exec. Phil Gramm, former senator, and primary architect of the current financial meltdown. He would no doubt be joined by Joe the Right-Wing Talk Radio Wingnut (and unlicensed plumber), who is full of great ideas and is, in McCain’s words, a “national hero” and the Senator’s “role model.” (Honest.) Since presidencies are largely about the people the successful candidate drags with him to Washington, this does not augur well for a McCain administration. 
again, I like to keep the crew on their toes, if you know what I mean. Mitch Macaphee does much better mad science when you light a fire under him (I mean this literally – he responds to fire with greater productivity). So if you have any questions about our progress, I have answers… depending upon specifically which questions you are asking. Since you’re not saying anything, I will guess that they are as follows:
third) hand Soyuz space craft was built in a different century, you see. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the last century (not the next) that I’m referring to. So, yeah… you’ve seen those ultra-fast cigarette boats zipping along? Picture this thing as a bunch of old telephone poles lashed together into a raft.
today.) I have consulted my legal advisor (the man-sized tuber) and he has suggested that I should avoid answering that question.
talk about his new book on the NSA, The Shadow Factory, and it has really made me angry. Part of what is so irritating about this is that it isn’t even considered significant news – that people have become so inured to the notion of a government tapping their phones, reading their email, transcribing their private conversations, and archiving them for whatever future use they may want to put them to. For chrissake, these fuckers in the Bush White House directed the NSA to work with companies like AT&T and Verizon – companies that profit from our business – to sift through our correspondence without any limits, to the point where staffers at the NSA were actually passing around recordings of intimate phone calls between members of our military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and their spouses and partners back home. Hey, Charlie – get a load of this one! What the fuck.
involves a massive investment in the technology of death – sophisticated unmanned drones, orbital launch platforms, etc., all capable of reaching any point on the planet nearly instantaneously whenever our interests are threatened, in a manner so easy and safe that even Cheney could do it. Those “interests,” by the way, include economic considerations, obstruction of trade, disruption of shipping or energy supplies, and so on. So this is the 21st Century equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, executed with a simplicity once seen only in television dramas. “Find the enemy. Kill the enemy.” In what is often called the most important election of our lifetimes, I have yet to hear this issue addressed by the major party candidates. What will either of them do about this steady movement toward the establishment of a global police state for that less-fortunate 70% of humanity? 
sextant? Nah, no way. Never a sextant.
Okay, so how, you may ask, can we possibly use a 70s-80s vintage vehicle to travel light-years through interstellar space in anything less than millions of years? Good question. Real good question. (I’m thinking.) Quite simple, actually – our resident mad scientist Mitch Macaphee has been hard at work modifying the used Soyuz (or “Soyuzed”, if you will), hopping it up like he did with his ’57 Chevy Bel Aire back in the day. You should have seen old Mitch – he was throwing headers and chrome exhaust on the old Russian capsule like a madman, cranking up its horsepower to the point where it could make such a titanic journey in such a brief period of time. (I speak figuratively, of course. The “headers” are actually ion reactors and the “chrome exhaust” kinetic force generators. Those are, in fact, what Mitch added to his Bel Aire, as well.) Not sure if it’s going to be enough, but I guess we’ll know when we get there (or not). 
probably find a red giant star that is relatively close to our own solar system. In fact, it should be pretty hard to miss. It’s not like we’re looking for dark matter, or some remote galactic body, like that foreboding place where sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, comes from. (Zenon…. not a real good place if you like breathing oxygen.) I’ve always been a big fan of just pointing the ship at a random object and firing up the engines, but Mitch tells me that’s not the best method. It’s kind of like shooting skeet (not that I’ve ever done that, but…. it’s kind of like it) or like commanding a missile defense battery. Except that this might actually work. (Maybe.)
Someone in the McCain campaign must have given their man the word to look at Obama, not just once, but frequently. And for god’s sake, don’t look too angry… try to smile from time to time, even when you’re looking at the Muslimy Kenyan guy who hangs with terrorists. Well, McCain appeared to have taken all this advice a bit too literally. For long periods while Obama was speaking, the Republican nominee leered at his opponent with a strange, pasted-on smile, leaning back stiffly in his chair, his eyes glassy, almost zombie-like at times. I know I’ve commented on this before, but McCain looks for all the world like someone applying anger management techniques in the most exhausting way. He has that tendency to deliver a speech in that slow, sing-song fashion, like he’s talking to preschoolers just before nap time. It’s like somebody squeezed a wolverine into a rabbit suit – that’s the John McCain I saw Wednesday night.
the Justice Department, domestic spying, arbitrary detention, pre-emptive war, etc. What did get discussed, aside from the opinions of “Joe the plant”, was McCain’s idea of what constitutes a threat to the very “fabric of our democracy” – i.e. a volunteer organization like ACORN – and the fact that the “woman’s health” exception in anti-abortion legislation is some kind of extremist pro-abortion dodge. Sweet guy.
Is this the emergency alert button? No? Okay – the red one. Gotcha. Now… which one is the emergency telephone? No, I’m not an idiot! It’s goddamn dark in here! 
might have known better. But no, not us… we just read our comic books (most entertaining!) and traded our lunch money for second-hand smokes (cough!). In the meantime, geeky kids like Mitch were collecting the knowledge that would make them all-powerful later in life… if occasionally inept.
bobbing in orbit like an enormous yo-yo. (Look, ma… Earth’s walking the dog!) This doesn’t leave us with a lot of good options. I mean, we can’t carry news of our new album, 
the Republican party is playing their usual race-baiting, terror-scare election game (no surprise). It’s also because our two running wars are politically off the table, or – worse yet – are seen somehow as a stronger issue for that septuagenarian crank McCain, who was dead wrong on Iraq from the beginning and shows every indication of making the same type of error again and again.
registration center in Damascus – no one showed up. Bupkis. This will be a problem for some time to come, and I suspect these refugee populations will not only strain the resources of the host countries (one of which – Syria – is being scapegoated and strangled by us) but provide a rich breeding ground for future extremists. Perhaps some of Hosni Mubarak’s “1000 Bin Ladens” resulting from the Iraq war will be raised in these camps.