None so far, anyway. Fear? I laugh in its face. Danger? Mere amusement. Calamity? She and I are old friends. (I call her Jane.) Certain doom? I spit in your face, you flimsy cardboard sideshow attraction…. What was that? Did you hear a noise?
Welcome back to the traveling sideshow that is Big Green‘s GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE SUMMER TOUR 2006 – a welcome departure from the trials of a tiresome planet Earth, to say the least. I can only speak for our tiny corner of that accursed globe, but even so, there are troubles-a-plenty down there. If you are reading from some extraterrestrial locale, heed this piece of advice – stay away from the one called Earth! Stay AWAY!!! Misfortune awaits you there – just ask Big Zamboola, who was once a planet himself and found it necessary to abandon his own personal gravitational field in order to accommodate the demands of the demonic planet Earth. Christ, you can’t even get a decent egg salad on rye down there without someone shorting you on the half-sour pickle. (Last time, I got a freaking dill spear… out of a jar! Barbarians!)
Okay… enough of my tirade. You’ve come to hear happy news, and I shall not disappoint you. For those of you who were wondering (and I’m sure there are at least one or two), I did ultimately relent and allow Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to take the helm of our J2 space RV and guide us to the mysterious planet Kaztropharius 137b where the vast majority of our records are sold. Good thing, too. It turned out that our witless wandering was being remotely guided by nefarious critters from a nearby dead star (the one known as “Dead Star 14”), who were attempting to steer us into a black hole (or what sFshzenKlyrn would call, “a fun, fun carnival ride!”) I guess until you’ve been crushed to a wafer-thin singularity, you can never know how purely FUN it is. (Try this at home, kids.) Luckily, trusty (or is it “rusty”?) Marvin took the reins and pulled us away from the icy grip of fate just in time. Man-o-man, what a ride.
We were greeted on Kaztropharius 137b with the usual enthusiasm. All the denizens of that mysterious, murky world were flashing their little blue lights at us. This is what passes for applause here, and it can be a bit disconcerting from the prospect of a climate-controlled stage. In fact, the flashing became so furious at one point that Matt nearly dropped his bass guitar and the man-sized tuber (who was doubling as a conga stand) started breaking out in strange blisters. There may 
be radiological factor involved here, I’m not certain. (Note to self: schedule visit to health clinic upon return home…. assuming they’re still accepting no-pays.) The only one who was unaffected was — of course – sFshzenKlyrn, to whom the laws of physics do not in any serious way apply. (Some of you may remember the time, a few years back, when he grew to be ten stories tall. Now there’s a guy who refuses to obey the laws of physics.)
Things went pretty well, though, I must confess. Only headache is the lack of confirmation on our upcoming jobs in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Kind of want to have a signed contract before we cross the void, know what I mean? Poor old Lincoln has been sitting by that FAX machine for the last two weeks, waiting, waiting, waiting for word to come buzzing through. A man of great patience, our man Abe. (My guess is that anti-Lincoln pulled the plug on the FAX machine, but don’t quote me on that.
of U.S. newspapers – a safe distance from the fighting, to be sure – Chuck Krauthammer fulminated about how Israel is fighting for its life… though how a resistance organization of maybe 1,000 full-time fighters with second hand munitions can pose an existential threat to the world’s 4th most powerful military state (one with perhaps 300 nuclear weapons) is a bit of a mystery, frankly. 
non-combatants so far. Not the first time, either. Furthermore, Hezbollah is anything but a foreign occupier of southern Lebanon, much as it may serve the neo-con paradigm to paint them as terror legions under orders from Tehran and Damascus. Hezbollah is an indigenous political organization deeply rooted in Lebanon’s Shi’a community, the nation’s single largest religious group comprising 40 percent of Lebanon’s population. Like Hamas, they are an Islamist group that has both political and military wings, and provides some level of basic services to a population that has been neglected by its own government and battered by the Israelis. It is Israel that is the invader, and it is they who will ultimately be driven out — now or ten years from now. 
So much for twenty questions. (Always hated that game!) Well, here we are in deep, deep shit… I mean, space, trying to feel our way from solar system to solar system without the benefit of anything even resembling a trained spacecraft pilot. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) keeps insisting that he knows how to drive this thing, but quite honestly… I can’t understand a word he’s saying, and unless he makes himself a bit clearer, I simply cannot risk putting all of our lives in his “hands” (actually claws, but you get me). Mitch Macaphee, our chief science advisor, claims to have a master’s license, and he has actually piloted us through this “middle passage” between solar systems before, but…. well…. he’s having a bit of a bender this week. Got his hands on some Neptunian schnapps during our showcase on Uranus and, well… the rest is history (or should I say nausea). Anyway, not a chance of letting him have the tiller. 
on him. The last time we let our Zenite guitarist take the reins, he took us on a scrape ’round the galaxy none of us are likely to forget. (As a pan-dimensional being of no fixed shoe size,
written into our standard contract that magma-based performance surfaces are not acceptable – John White insisted on that, and with good reason!) To top it all off, it turned out that the representative from Loathsome Prick Records was a real… well… loathsome prick. Who woulda thunk it? (You woulda? Hmmmmm….) 
what a great congressman Ray Meier would make is just the kind of free advertising the opposition needs. 
Speaking of the empire, things are really going septic just lately. If some kind of imperial order does exist, there is currently no one at the helm. Israel is pounding the living hell out of Gaza and Lebanon at the same time, while Hizbullah (in Lebanon) is vowing all out war on Israel in retaliation. They are, of course, a Shi’ite organization, and attacks on them will ripple through the majority population of Iraq, as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Probably 100-150 million Shi’ia Muslims in the world, and I can’t think that very many of them are happy to see clerics’ homes being flattened and their children beheaded by Israeli munitions. Our official response? Israel has the right to offend itself. Did I get that right? Oh, yeah… a good offense is the best defense, right? So our way of helping is by lecturing the victims. That’s the stuff, Bolton. You tell ’em. 
Okay, so anyway. 
suggested, any more than Dick Nixon ran on cottage cheese and ketchup (beyond a certain point). Thanks to the efforts of our chief science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, the phony J-2 is propelled by an eludium positron star-drive with a maximum range of 7500 light years between refuelings. Now that’s economy. Don’t know how it works exactly, but when it’s idling it sounds like this:
without pegging a single dial. (That’s how a robot spells comfort, my friend.) The man-sized tuber has his customized terrarium on the lower deck, and even Big Zamboola finds plenty of room to bounce around in the engine room / power core area. What the hell, we’ve got a crew that defies simple definition, if you catch my meaning. Not just any interstellar craft will accommodate them all. 
Even if that long-range missile worked, they couldn’t put their nukes on it… and even if they could, firing one at us or our allies would be like firing a pistol at a machine gun nest — a “suicide weapon” in the truest sense of the phrase. It is strange that we tend to behave as though we are threatened by these impoverished societies when, in fact, it is we who pose an existential threat to them. And we’ve demonstrated our willingness to attack without provocation.
Trouble is, she really believes that trash she’s talking, aging Goldwater girl that she is. 
Whoops. Didn’t know you were copying all that. Just practicing my ship-board jargon. Getting a little bit rusty, what with having spent the last year on solid ground. My pirate words are getting all tangled up with one another. (Hard enough to understand those scurvy fuckers to begin with without putting their ravings through a scrambler.) We’re getting awfully close to launch time (it’s about noon right now, and I’m getting peckish) … launch time, and if I’m going to be scuffling around in zero gravity environments, I want to talk the talk as well as walk the walk, you follow me? Arrrgghh.
large swaths of the language they have appropriated to their own dark purposes… just TRY. Okay, I’m a bit on edge – I admit. This trip is looming, and I’m just not ready. Not packed, not rehearsed, no house-sitter. I haven’t even gotten Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to agree to sign an appearance contract so that he can join us on stage without charging extra money later on. (Oh, he learns QUICKLY.)
I’m not sure where they found out about 
effectively cutting off electricity and water to entire communities. No small matter in such a place. Civilian casualties have been reported to be minimal, even non-existent, up to this writing, but are they checking the hospitals? People on respirators? Old folks who need meds, heart monitors, etc.? 
This is all about keeping the conflict in the military sphere, where the Israelis have an insurmountable advantage, as opposed to the diplomatic/political sphere, where they haven’t a legitimate leg to stand on. If nothing else, the events of this week illustrate what a sham this Gaza “disengagement” policy has been. The place is completely under the control of the Israelis. They control all the exits and entrances. Their massive air force flies over at will, and they lob tank shells and fire missiles into the strip at every opportunity. This is the kind of sovereignty Palestinians on the West Bank can look forward to as well. It is the fulfillment of the vision articulated by an Israeli politician some years back, that the Palestinians should be made to exist like “drugged roaches in a bottle.” An apt description of the quality of life in Gaza, to be sure. 
I’m sitting on the landing gear of our rent-a-spacecraft, killing time as my cohorts continue their preparations for the upcoming 
base out yonder. (So if you’re listening out there… he’s coming, damn it! Stop e-mailing me, you obsessive cyborgs!) Yes, we will have the full complement on board the imitation J-2 space cruiser; a regular who’s who of Notes From Sri Lanka lore. We got your man sized tuber, your 
Not sure. Fact is, we set them up before really thinking through what the effect of doing so would be. So rather than let all that good work go to waste…. we left them there. And we mounted one outside the front viewing port of our space craft. Call it a hood ornament… or a baby monitor.
them there so we don’t have to fight them here. It’s America or Al Qaida. When the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down. The ludicrous John McCain was on a morning show, using words like “frustratingly slow” and “painful”, and claiming “No one said this was going to be easy.” (Uh… yeah, they did. And you agreed. 
Then there was the dreaded North Koreans and their mighty missile of death. The way the administration talks, you’d think it was the only ICBM on the planet. Jesus, how many times have we test-launched missiles capable of reaching North Korea? And while you’re working on that one, think about the likelihood that more than a few of our thousands of nuclear tipped ICBMs (all on launch-ready status) are targeted on Pyongyang. This is not idle speculation or paranoia — this is a very real danger from their perspective, made worse by 1.) our general bellicosity 2.) our deployment of “missile defense” batteries around the Pacific rim, and 3.) the fact that we flattened North Korea entirely once before within living memory. Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal, on the other hand, consists of maybe one or more bombs (and maybe none at all), plus a missile the last version of which failed during a test in 1998.