No baby on that. I’m off pop songs this week, friends. Had it. Mention one and it’s with me all day, like those little transmitters they plant in your head when you’re in the mental institution. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? No? Where did I hear that? Well…. let’s just say a little voice told me.
Okinawa! (Another island entirely.) We are getting closer to the goal of launching our ad hoc interplanetary tour. How much closer? Well… I’ve got a hat, a baseball hat, and it says Big Green Tour ’06 on it. And we’ve got suitcases. Hey, it’s closer than we were LAST week, okay? What am I, a machine? That’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s role, not mine. For those of you who have been wondering (particularly you fans in the greater cyborg community), we have relented on the topic of bringing Marvin along on the tour. We simply can’t do it without him and expect the kinds of flies… um… crowds we’ve been drawing the last few times out. Looks like the task of running interference back on old terra firma will have to fall to someone else. Man sized tuber, perhaps? Hmmmmm….
No, seriously – we have made progress. For one thing, we’ve settled on a name for our tour. It’s going to be called BIG GREEN’S GET OUT OF TOWN FAST! SUMMER TOUR 2006… for obvious reasons. There are also some less than obvious reasons, like our perpetual need for additional cash. Can’t beat the revenue of an interplanetary tour, especially when – like us – you remain unhappily obscure on your home planet. (Just barely moving the needle down here on Earth, friends – I’ll be frank with you. And don’t call me Frank.) And with all these (ahem) unexpected rebuilding costs, damn it, man! That scaffolding is going to be up for months on end. Do you have any idea how much masons charge in our neck of the woods? They have to import all the bricks from Madagascar, for 
chrissake. We need to make hay, gentlemen, make hay. Cause as we’ve learned from Edward G. Robinson during Israel’s captivity in Egypt… can’t make bricks without straw. Nyeaah. Where’s your Moses now….?
So there you have it. Don’t delude yourself that we are only in this for the sake of “art”, or that we make music for reasons of “peace” and “love” and “pastrami”. No, look… the utilities don’t take crystal necklaces in lieu of a check every month, no matter how hard we try to polish them up and make them look nice. No dice! Money makes the world go round. (Pop music again!) Anyway, like anyone else who wears pants and eats sandwiches, we gotta have it, and if we can’t find it here on the good oit, we’ve got to go out in space and rake it up. Necessity breeds invention – we have posi-Lincoln inventing the tour for us right now, working the phones, sending interstellar e-mails to 
the usual venues, mailing out contracts. He’s actually pretty good at it, though he does tend to write everything down on ancient pieces of paper that have already been written on. One of them had his old address on it – guess he lived in Gettysburg once. Who knew? Damn his habits of thrift! Not the most efficient filing system, but hell… it’s better than mine. (Mine was bombed out with the mill, thankfully.)
We’ll be setting dates real soon and making them public, so if you’re planning to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Ursa Major in the next six or seven weeks, leave some space in your calendar. And bring an appetite! Mitch Macaphee plans to handle the catering this time out. He’s supposedly a really solid cook, as most chemists are. (I hear he has over 100 recipes. He calls them “elements.” Funny guy.)
with the new Iraqi Prime Minister. A little theater for the folks back home, whose attention need not be drawn to the fact that Baghdad remains so dangerous after 3 years of “nation building” that the President of the United States still has to scurry in and out of there like a rat. That’s progress.
Israeli prime minister Olmert says Israel will not go back to its 1967 borders because they are “indefensible.” Funny – that’s just the word I would use to describe almost forty years of denying an entire people national rights, basic dignity, and in many cases, life itself.
Guess we’ve got that old travelin’ blues. Ain’t that how the song goes? (There seem to be a lot of old songs on my mind these days, I must admit. Please forgive me.) Anyway, you’d have them too if somebody blew a big hole in YOUR squat-house. Crikey, the whole place smells like charcoal and old hammer-stock splinters. Old anti-Lincoln can’t even make himself a plate of anti-matter toaster waffles without nearly yakking all over his stew. Intolerable, I tell you. Just the sort of situation that would drive normally reasonable derelicts such as ourselves to thoughts of the road… of performing before throngs of adoring fans (many of which have two or even THREE heads)… of visiting exotic ports of call in undiscovered galaxies. Of… of…. of escape, damn it, escape!
Robots of Marvin’s general classification don’t frown, exactly, but they do have subtle ways of letting you know that they are not too pleased with what you’re demanding of them. Lookit — when professor Mitch Macaphee builds a robot, it’s bound to be more than just a soulless servo-mechanism. Our Marvin has feelings, you know? And opinions, lots of opinions. Only thing is, he’s programmed to be somewhat reticent, in an automatonic sort of way. (I keep thinking one of these days he’s just going to EXPLODE. Or join “
musician, as such, though he does pick up an instrument every once in a while – banjos, guitars, drums, the occasional bagpipes, etc. As you might imagine, out in the great beyond there isn’t always a whole lot of difference between holding an instrument and actually doing something with it. (Yeah, that’s right. It’s a lot like planet Earth.)
genius it was, but one Congressional Republican was so worked up in a lather about the Chinese menace that he fulminated over Clinton state department nominee Bill Lan Lee for some time without realizing he had the wrong Chinese guy. 
As remarkable as this East Asia performance may have been, never has irony been so sorely missed as in the wake of Zarqawi’s death. There was Rumsfeld at the podium, earnestly commenting on how, in all the world, no man had been responsible for the deaths of more innocent civilians than the late Jordanian jihadist. I could only ask myself, how many people watching this are thinking the same thing I’m thinking? That, in terms of lives extinguished, no jihadist on Earth holds a candle to the rap sheet of mssrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and partners. That’s another league entirely. A member of Rumsfeld’s press entourage described the defense secretary’s mood on the plane as ebullient and optimistic about the future of the Iraq enterprise. No surprise there – visions of sweets and flowers still dancing in his tiny head. Back in the real world, it seems to me this execution will have two effects on the insurgency. For the foreign jihadists, it will provide a new martyr – a rank far higher than that of regional commander, to be sure. And for the vast majority (85%-90%) that comprise the native Iraqi resistance, it removes what can only be described as a major obstacle to their success – a mad dog bent on killing civilians, one they themselves would ultimately have had to put down. 
Manson rampage than Helter Skelter (which is just a raucous song about a carnival ride). I’ve mentioned this before — think about it. “Crimson”… blood! “Clover”…. on the graves of the dead! “Over and over”… many dead
What about the album? Well, we’re close to finished with that sucker. Just doing some backing vocals, incidental instrumental parts… then it’s mixing time. So I think we can afford to take the old mastering deck on the road with us. Only trouble is, Mixmaster Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will probably be staying behind on this trip to oversee the reconstruction work at the Cheney Hammer Mill (and to soak up all the love from the local constabulary as they arrive with torches, hoping to put our heads on pikes). Don’t know how that’s going to work, exactly. We may need to have the man-sized tuber sit in for some of the mixing. He can actually push those faders pretty well with his larger roots. (It’s the ears I’m a little worried about. Namely, he ain’t got any.)
vegetables and a hard roll. For John, a carton of cottage cheese (or “cowboy food” as it’s known in this manor). For Mitch Macaphee, a bottle of Riesling and a live circuit board, or one of those Frankenstein-era arc generators with a big spark flying off the end. See? It’s a little different for everyone.
committing the larger crime of invading Iraq and compounding that crime with the evils that have proceeded from the occupation. I say “unwilling” because we are free to make our voices heard. If we demanded an end to this war, it would be over. 
And when the inevitable happens — when it becomes clear that our soldiers are cracking under the stress of multiple tours of duty and shooting civilians like Cheney shoots caged quail — how do we react? Well, the military begins by blaming the messengers, calling the journalists who follow the stories traitors and dupes of al Qaeda, etc. After about 3 or 4 months of that, when they’re forced by mounting evidence to admit to some portion of the ugly truth, it becomes the individual soldiers’ fault. They then apply the dubious remedies of courts martial and sensitivity training slide shows, while the administration and its various flacks encourage us to look at the bigger picture (it took an endless war to get conservatives talking about “context”). But there’s one thing Bush’s cousin Tony Snow won’t tell us at the daily briefing — we are more responsible for those deaths than the soldiers who pull the trigger. This is the result of a criminal foreign policy, and because we enjoy the unparalleled freedoms of American democracy, we must also accept the responsibility for what our elected officials get us into. 
Fair warning to all: Be careful what you ask for! Yes, friends, in an effort to restore our squatter’s status at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we have managed to blow a big hole in our beloved squat house – a major breach in the street-side wall, courtesy of neighbor Gung-Ho and his squadron of bombers-for-hire. Of course, we had asked the good fellow to drop a few intimidating shells on the offices of the developer-bloodsuckers that turned us out onto the streets. This he did – actually, a bit more emphatically than we had expected. In fact, much of the town is in ruins, including the local magistrate’s courthouse. (Our plea for leniency was vacated, as was the courthouse itself… just ahead of a wall of fire. But as is his wont, he got a little carried away and… well…. ka-boom. That’s right — ka. boom.
fires before secondary explosions ensue), I took it upon myself to walk through the front door ahead of him. What happened then? Well… I can only tell you in the form of a popular song:
generating device down the bomb crater, grabbing me like a science fiction tractor beam and pulling me back from the very jaws of oblivion. Close shave, big mister.
that time. Bush’s reservation about the disengagement plan is really just a diplomatic chimera — he would like to see the same result achieved with some level of participation by the Palestinians. What they term being a “partner in peace” is really just taking part in your own oppression. 
unspeakable squalor that was Palestinian society, while the superimposition of the Israeli settlement infrastructure continued unabated by this sham peace accord, through both Labor and Likud administrations. Though virtually unknown to the American public (which has underwritten much of this construction), Israel’s project in East Jerusalem and the West Bank has been an inescapable reality for Palestinians, its trajectory very clearly discernable. They see the Fatah-dominated PA as an accomplice in this, at worst, or as an institution too ineffective and self-serving to stop the land grab, at best. Recall, too, that Abbas (Abu Mazen) was chosen by Sharon, and that more popular Fatah figures were kept from competing (some by remaining in Israeli jails). That’s largely why Hamas won the legislative elections — because they are obviously not in the pocket of Israel.
Hola, you blog browsers out there. Welcome to the land of unintended consequences. Yes, that’s right, my friends… 
have gotten significantly garbled somehow. (My vote is on Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, which should never be confused with a telegraph.) Gung-Ho apparently got the impression that he should mount a full-scale, sustained bombing campaign against the real estate firm in question. Or maybe he just thought that would be a more fun way to do the job — he’s never been real big on the subtle approach, quite frankly. Either way, he and his A-Team came screaming into town in their surplus F-15’s, shooting up everything within seven square blocks of the real estate office. To make matters worse, he chose the very moment when we were making another appeal for leniency to the local magistrate… on the basis of our good will towards the community.
damage. The basement looked as though it might still be useable, once rubble from the five floors above it could be steam shoveled out. Ouch.