Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Flag the commissioner, Alfred, we’re ready to roll! Hope you fixed the sticky hinge on the bat cave door. You did, didn’t you…. ? DIDN’T YOU??

Wha-at? Oh, man… what an awful dream! Not that you asked me what it was about, but… I dreamt I was an MBA in the accounting department at Enron, and… Oh, no, wait. That was Thursday night’s. Last night’s was a bit more blood-curdling (if that can be imagined). But I won’t go into that in detail. Suffice to say that it resembled something from mid-sixties television, populated by big pointless-looking computer consoles covered with flashing, multi-colored pin-sized lights. (They made whirring sounds. It was terrifying!) Lucky to get out of that particular sojourn alive. Thank uncle Jebus our tours are nothing like that. When we do interstellar travel, we tend to avoid whirring sounds…. at least, the evil, low-pitched ones. Uuuhhhllll….

Enough about me. Glad to be able to say that we’ve finished provisioning our interstellar tour bus. By which I mean, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has finished loading the un-spaceworthy crate we’ll be taking to Jupiter and parts beyond.  Now I know what you’re going to say… and stop me if I’m wrong, but I think you were going to caution me on embarking on interstellar journeys in a forty-year-old rust bucket. (You weren’t going to say that? Bugger.) In any case, I’ve asked Marvin to work with the man-sized tuber in bondo-ing up all the panels that have rusted-through on the J-2 spacecraft since our last tour. About 4 dozen spots. More than I’d imagined, actually. (We put it up on blocks all winter, too. Go figure.)

Yeah, so our ship whistles when we fly…. so what? We’ve got that can-do spirit that put Armstrong, Aldrin, and… uh… that other guy on the moon forty years ago. (Actually, Collins had his own one-man party in lunar orbit, as I remember. Judging from the footage, that would have been the job for me.) What the hell…. we live in an abandoned hammer mill, for chrissake. We haven’t had anything beyond basic cable in, like, five years. Mitch Macaphee rides a bicycle that doesn’t even have fenders on it.  Seriously…. we can handle anything deep space can dish out. As long as it isn’t on fire. Or radioactive. I hate radioactive stuff. (It makes my fillings glow.) Besides, Mitch (our mad science advisor) has assured us that the J-2 replica is perfectly safe to fly, so long as we stay away from that massive swarm of comets circling menacingly just outside the orbit of Pluto.  We told our agent in no uncertain terms – by no means book anything within the deadly comet belt!

Ahh. Our tour itinerary has just been faxed from our good friends at Loathsome Prick records. And guess where we’re going on week 3. Just…. guess….

Well, great day in the morning… I was wondering where I left that freaking thing. Who might have thought it would turn up in the rock garden? What’s next, eh? (Well, the next thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire…)

I don’t have to tell you – when you start packing your bags for an extended trip beyond the bounds of our solar system, that is when things start turning up… things you haven’t seen for months, maybe years. Just yesterday I found a pair of sneakers I’d misplaced during last year’s election. The day before that, Matt stumbled across the remains of his first kazoo (the one he’d used to record the theme from our never-completed sci-fi epic, “Destination: Space”). John has been turning up all sorts of remnants of past lives, such as an ancient banjo labeled simply “The Gibson”. And I’d rather not get into what Mitch Macaphee has been dragging out of the depths of his makeshift studio in the old forge room of the Cheney Hammer Mill, our humble squat-house. Half-human cyborgian experiments. Beakers of nameless goo, glowing five colors at once. A bald unicycle tire. (How did that get in there?) What did the man-sized tuber find in his terrarium? Some old plant food… that’s about it.

It’s always hard to know what you’ll need on this kind of journey. Big Green’s last interstellar tour required a great deal of ingenuity on our parts, and that’s mostly because we didn’t have the proper supplies. This time, that’s not going to happen. In fact, we’ve given Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the responsibility of being our quartermaster. He has, as I’m sure you realize, a machine-like memory. (I don’t mean a computer kind of machine… more like a desk stapler or tape dispenser.) In addition, he has the strength of ten ordinary men (like the cartoon Hercules), so he can load whatever he requisitions. Now that is what I call efficient use of humanoid resources. Now if he could only convince the man-sized tuber to put his little push-cart to use loading the spacecraft. (Though that degree of efficiency might be considered borderline obsessive. Scratch that.)

How are the Lincolns helping us? Good question. Anti-Lincoln is still billeted in the hoosegow, the crowbar hotel, the pokey… whatever you call it where you come from.  Trust me – the biggest help he can be is by staying right there until launch date (or launch date plus one, even). Posi-Lincoln, for his own part, has been keeping to himself of late. I think he’s working on an address of some sort. He keeps poking his head out and asking Marvin to find him some used envelopes and a spare bottle of India ink, then he disappears again, scratching away. Another Gettysburg address in the works? No man can say. Not sure what the occasion would be. Maybe he’s working on his memoirs… though they are likely to make a very strange read at this juncture. (I’ll look with interest for the chapters describing his transit to the 21st Century via Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device.)  And then there’s Mitch, who… who…. Oh, bloody hell! He’s blown a hole in the side of Jupiter! Nice going, Mitch! They’re going to love us in the Big Red Spot! 

With all this going on, of course, we’ve had to… well… hold up the countdown. Or something close to that, anyway. (We’re counting sideways, in point of fact.)   

Sorry, Mitch. The batteries aren’t charged yet. No, sir… still got a few more hours to go. Hey, where’d you find those used fuel tanks? Clever man. Very clever.

Oh, hi folks. Just doing a few last-minute tasks before launch. Did I say “launch?” I meant lunch. How careless of me… and me, a man of words! No, launch won’t be for a few days yet. We’re moving the components into place, though – no doubt about it. It’s like a big, fat, dysfunctional chess board with pieces whittled from plastic explosives. A little on the touchy side, let’s say. That’s what we get for working with a mad scientist, especially one as mercurial as Mitch Macaphee. No matter… we’ll get off the ground, possibly before the Space Shuttle does. (Oh, that launched, finally? Well…. I guess maybe not.) There are other races to be won, however. We may well be the first band on the sun. Hmmm… good idea for a song. Maybe the chorus would go something like this:

Band on the sun!
Band on the sun!
The tuber-man, and uncle sam
will be toasting hot dog buns
when we land on the sun!

Well, it needs a little work. In any case, we’ve got other stuff we can play when we reach the outer rings of the Jovian system. There’s a little number called “Volcano Man” we can pull on the denizens of Titan. (It’s a tune off of our recent album International House that features a strange interlude eerily reminiscent of an afternoon we spent once on that dry alien moon.) It happens that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is particularly fond of that song. (I think it’s because he plays the singing saw in the middle 24. Listen carefully.)

Got a little extra rehearsal time in this evening. Actually, it’s kind of funny the way it worked out. We got the two Lincolns to run upstairs and bang pots and pans in the courtyard while we were playing. That’s just to throw the local constabulary off – we’re still behind about 28 months on the taxes and are technically squatters. Fact is, the boys in blue don’t know we’re in here… and so long as they don’t read this blog, they probably won’t catch on. I think the ruse worked, at least to the extent that it got Anti-Lincoln arrested for disturbing the peace. (While he’s in jail, we should get posi-Lincoln to do outrageous things and then deny responsibility, since Lincoln is obviously in jail. Clever, eh? No? Just checking. )

Okay, so anyway… back to work with us. Everybody’s got an instrument in hand, yes? Very good. And man-sized tuber…. you can use your tap root, there’s a good chap.

Well, I’ll be a positive particle in a negative universe. Is that really what deutronium costs these days? Outrageous! Don’t these mothers know there’s a recession going on down here?

Hi, friends. Just caught me going over the list of necessities for our upcoming interstellar tour de force. Here’s an item destined to cause trepidation. Radioactive deutronium fuel – $5,600.00 per pint bottle. Jesus H. Christmas. I guess prices on Aldebaran have been anything but stable over the past year. (The Aldebarans were heavy investors in Bear Stearns, rumor has it.) Not sure why they need to earn it back off of our asses, but there you have it. Anyway, it’s on the list because, as you may have surmised, Big Green has indeed secured transport for our tour. I’m glad to be the one to tell you that it will not be one of those Korean missiles. No sir, this is a proper space vehicle. Or so we’re told.

Fact is, we took Matt’s advice and called the guy in Jersey about that J-2 spacecraft old Irwin Allen dreamed up. He was more than happy to oblige – pretty broad minded of him, considering the mess we made of that vehicle when we leased it a few years back. Some of you remember – crashing on a desert isle, modifying it for a seafaring voyage, etc., etc. It was a bit worse for wear when we got back, needless to say. I suppose if they had a rating system for spacecraft renters, we’d probably only get one star. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) felt a bit embarrassed by our rank carelessness with another person’s property. (This was all the more remarkable since embarrassment hadn’t been programmed into Marvin by that point – Mitch Macaphee had, in fact, programmed it out and replaced it with joy…. yes, unbridled JOY.)

Ahem. Of course, there are other things on this list. Things like guitars, amps, drums, etc. And some other little things we call songs. That’s right – we don’t merely perform our compositions, we carry them around in plastic tubs. Some of them – like the Quality Lincoln trilogy – are a bit heavier than the others. That’s just a question of relative mass, you see. More song = more mass. And by the transitive property of musical heaviness, the heaviest songs are most likely to have the biggest impact. It’s like throwing a hammer at a wall. If it’s one of those little featherweight rubber hammers that come in a child’s carpentry set, the wall won’t mind at all. But if it’s a big old drop-forge hammer of the kind that used to be made at the Cheney Hammer Mill, well…. that wall will duck if it’s got the sense the god of walls gave it. I mean, hell… wouldn’t you? Think about it.

Well… I’ve wandered a bit. Better get back to my listing. Hey, man-sized tuber! How many bags of those cedar chips do you need for eight weeks or so? How many? Cheese and onions…. this is going to cost the earth. Get back to loading those songs, hey will you?

Well, anyway… why do we have to do the same thing every time? I mean, I know safety is important, but frankly we can’t afford a spaceship at this point. Can’t we just hitchhike to Neptune?

Good god, man. Whatever happened to the spirit of adventure? We never used to be so risk averse. We used to bear to the left and take chances. Now look at us. (You can use a smoked glass lens, if you prefer.) We’re worried about lack of gravity, lack of oxygen, exposure to radiation – what a bunch of wimps! The only one who’s really not intimidated by any of this is the mansized tuber. (At least he hasn’t said anything about it to me.) Fact is, we have to do these tours on the cheap, what with a recession on and all that. Money’s tight, and our corporate label is even tighter. They don’t even want to budget for us, let alone a ship to carry us in. Looks like we’ll be relying on comped meals again. Ever try to get a free lunch on Uranus? Hah. Take it from me – it’s even less appetizing than it sounds.

As always, our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had a suggestion. “We should use some kind of rocket ship,” he told us. “Perhaps a multi-stage space vehicle with sufficient kinetic power to propel us beyond the surly bonds of mother earth.” (Sometimes Mitch tries to wax poetic, though it usually comes out sounding more like someone waxing their car.) To translate from Pretentious Asshole-ish, our learned friend had a specific space vehicle in mind. It was based on the Korean design that Dear Leader is so very fond of. Mitch reasoned that, in as much as that type of rocket had successfully put a satellite in orbit just a few short weeks ago, it would probably serve us well. When I pointed out that the thing had actually, well, fallen apart and crashed into the ocean, he seemed a bit irked. It’s almost as if he wants us to crash and burn. Sometimes I wonder about Mitch. What kind of mad science advisor is he, anyway?

Okay… so the Kim Jong Il missile vehicle is not such a good idea. Well, you’ll be glad to know that others in our entourage piped up with suggestions. The quality of same? Well…. not so great. Matt though we should rehabilitate the Robinson’s Jupiter 2 spacecraft. I’m thinking this is a little unrealistic, since it was just a stage set and is now owned by some guy in New Jersey. Then there was that converted treehouse we took up a couple of tours ago. That thing was reduced to splinters over the winter. (I think the plows hit it – terrible thing.) So Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had little to add to this debate. Fact is, he’s thinking about joining the Marvin Depreciation Society, a facebook group devoted to “Marvin the Paranoid Android”, who is a character in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I think Marvin is having a slight identity crisis over the fact of the other robotic Marvin’s existence, and is hoping the depreciation society will devalue the other Marvin, thereby enhancing his own value. Yeah, it’s complicated. (In addition, he and Professor John Robinson had words the other day, so it could be the Jupiter 2 option is off the table.)

Anyway…. we’ll get to Neptune. I am sure of this. How, we don’t quite know. Details, details. Ah, for the simple life.

Yeah, we been workin’ on a song list, goin’ down, down, down, workin’ on a song list – whoop! – writin’ the set down.

Nah, Big Green’s not doing oldies – no sweat, man. Been there, done that. Besides, if you try to pull that off in the Crab Nebula, they’ll cook you for dinner. Literally. (Ask sFshzenKlyrn, he’ll tell you. That is one brutal venue, even for an etheric, transcendental creature with no fixed hairstyle.) Just making a point there, my friends. We’ve been slaving over this song list for the last week, in case you’re interested in what we’ve been up to (and haven’t been checking the mansizedtuber’s twitter feed). You may think that’s about the easiest job in the world, but I warn you…. I WARN YOU…. it’s not anything like easy. In fact, it’s a lot harder than … well, than that easy stuff. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why…. not least of which is the stark reality that we have to hole up in the Cheney Hammer Mill together with no distractions, no outside influences, no take-out or dial-a-pizza… just the band and our various minions. Insufferable is the word. In. Sufferable.

All right, so that’s not a very good reason. Here’s another one: we’ve got about a million songs. No, I mean it. Christmas songs alone, there are about four albums worth… not including any of the songs on 2000 Years To Christmas. So that means we have to yank out all of our demos, all of our notes, all of our old song lists, and pore through the lot, writing down the ones we want to do, crossing out the ones we don’t. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has his personal favorites, and his understanding of music is limited to a few lines from the 1956 World Book Encyclopedia, which his inventor Mitch Macaphee inserted into his memory banks as test data.  (Hey… he’s going to be traveling with us to the great beyond, so why not allow him a few requests, right? I said, am I right? Hel-looooo?)

All right, well… you can see how this process might lead to chaos. In fact, it already has. No one seems able to agree on what songs we should work on. What are the chances that we would each end up with a different set of 25 songs? I swear, this place is more dysfunctional than the New York State Senate. In fact, in the midst of our desperation, we’ve asked Mitch Macaphee for his assistance. (Sometimes a mad scientist can see his way out of a conundrum much more easily than, say, an unemployed musician or an oversized root vegetable.)  It took Mitch about three hours to come up with a solution of sorts. He walked in from his lab with a small, oblong metal box which he called the “Tune-o-matic.” He pressed a red button on the right side of the machine, and a slip of paper emerged from a small slot on the opposite side. The paper has some writing on it that appeared to be in Vietnamese. Mitch took one look at that and stormed out of the room with the tune-o-matic under one arm. There has since been some banging and swearing from behind the closed door of his lab… I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this wondrous device presently.

For the nonce, however, we have decided to take matters back into our own hands. Matt has been writing the names of all of our songs on one wall of the rec room. John dug up a box of darts. (If you’ve got a better method, let me know. )

Stage props? Never really thought much of them, frankly. What the hell are we, summer stock? We’re a bleedin’ band, man! Oh, all right, all right. But just the enormous styrofoam sphinx. No pyramid. I SAID, NO PYRAMID!

Oh, sorry, my friend. Hope that wasn’t too loud. I was just trying to get my point across to Anti-Lincoln… the idea that Big Green is not a flash band with a truckload of stage props, seven costume changes, makeup, extras, pyrotechnics, fog machines, etc. Never part of that movement, frankly. No, no…. our roots go back to a simpler time, when the earth was new and the sky was darkened by flocks of cawing pterodactyls. Not that roots have a lot to do with it. Actually, our musical influences are the more pared-down groups of the 60’s and early 70’s, and plain-clothes alternative types from much later.  Anti-Lincoln doesn’t think that’s visually interesting enough. He would sooner we change our names to, I don’t know, “Great Speckled Bird” or “Pilot and the Now Tones”, then don sequined capes and climb like apes on multicolored scaffolding while jumbotrons play a DVD of some Bergman movie.  I, for one, think that would be a bit much. And you?

Yeah, it’s hard to keep everyone happy around here, particularly now that we’re in the planning stages of our next interplanetary tour, tentatively titled: “Destination Space: Big Green’s Galactic Tour 2009″. What’s the itinerary? Glad you asked. Nothing is written in stone, as you might well imagine. All we’ve got around the mill is pencils and pens, no chisels. What we’ve got written on paper, however,  is perhaps worthy of mention. Can’t really share all the details, but what I can tell you is that, if you happen to be in the neighborhood of the planet Neptune sometime in mid-July, you may get the opportunity to see us bomb-out at yet another airless alien pub.  We’re determined to book better venues this time out, but if things go the way they usually go (and, well… they usually do), we’ll probably play those other places as well.  Part of the deal, friends.    

Now, to be fair to Anti-Lincoln, he’s not the only one who wants to add some kind of visual element to our performances. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) even went so far as to do a sketch of a Big Green stage set – one that has an enormous planet hanging down in the middle (either that or a cantaloupe, I’m not sure which).  I think he envisions some expanded performing role for himself and for the man-sized tuber. They used to be satisfied with grabbing a tuba or a banjo or a second-hand guitar and framming away on one side of the stage… now it has to be something more dramatic. I think for the tuber it’s all about that heady experience he had during his trip back to the 1860s. Or maybe it’s just aphids.  (He’s been looking a bit badgered lately.)

Well, stage set or now, we’ll need to work up some kind of show. Hey, Matt – got any more songs about Lincoln? How about Kublai Khan? Yes? Exxxxcellent.

Lights are off again. I thought I just bribed that guy last week. Didn’t I? What…. it was the wrong guy? His pushcart was decorated with a cardboard sign that had “electric company” written on it in crayon. Seemed legitimate to me.

It seems I’m too trusting. We all are here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s crap shack of distinction. Oh, we’ve had a lot of crap shacks through the years, from a tumbled-down house on Irving Avenue in Castleton-On-Hudson to the slightly less beat up place next door to it…. (and one or two others, if memory serves). Then of course there was the lean-to in Sri Lanka. (What happened to that? It leaned fro.) Anyway, next to all those joints, this abandoned hammer mill is the next best thing to being someplace decent. And yet, here we are… lights off, phone disconnected, water intermittent, gravity reversed (Mitch Macaphee’s been at it again)… It all comes down to one thing: frankincense. No, wait. It’s another word…. Money. Yeah, that’s it. Bleedin’ money.  

Now, Mitch… there’s a guy with frankincense… or, rather, Franken-sense (i.e. the sense of Dr. Frankenstein). He’s always inventing some kind of half human, have robot hybrid. That’s why he’s the only one with any cash around here. For chrissake, the government has dropped more than one grant on him for developing “hybrids”. The fools think Mitch is building cars; instead, he’s formulating a cyborg army in his spare time. I should have him pay the electric bill – he’s the bastard that’s using it all. One might suppose that Marvin (my personal robot assistant), built some years back by Mitch, was some kind of prototype, but not a bit of it. Marvin is pure robot; no organic components whatsoever. He’s clean, man. Ergo, he has no role in the coming reign of the cyborgs. (Not to worry, friends. This is just one of Mitch’s pipe dreams. All mad scientists must have them.)

Yeah, I’m putting Mitch on the hook for pizza tonight. The rest of us are completely tapped out. Typical. That’s what we get for, well…. lack of ambition, let’s call it. Though, to be fair, not all of us are lazy mo-fos. Take the man-sized tuber, for instance. Now, he’s willing to do anything the situation calls for, including standing out in the street and selling #3 pencils. Particularly when we specifically ask him to do this kind of thing… which, of course, we did, just as soon as he wheeled himself out of the time warp and back into the 21st century. And yes, I did say #3 pencils (we sold out of the #2’s last week). Truth be told, his take has been somewhat disappointing thus far. Perhaps he needs bigger pencils. Marvin! See if we’ve got any of the big number threes! 

I know, I know – we’ll only get so far abusing the help. Time to start planning an escape from this crap shack. Can you say, interstellar tour 2009?

Check the World Book. Not in there? Okay. Now check Britannica. No reference? Right, right. I guess we’ll have to resort to Compton’s. Pull out the 1963 edition, that ought to do it.

Oh, hi. Good god, y’all…. this is a grueling task. To what do I refer, you may ask? No, I’m not making gruel, at least not this evening. (Tomorrow’s menu, however, may include that dubious delicacy… who knows?) Lord, no… many of us here are engaged in finding evidence of the man-sized tuber in various historical accounts, including encyclopedias, history textbooks, comics, etc. After all, it is HE who saved the Republic from a fate worse than death. It is HE who rescued the honor of our most revered president and restored him to the exalted position he once held in the pantheon of the American story. And it is HE who introduced the chocolate cream pie to the post-civil war dinner table… and this BEFORE the invention of the refrigerator. Yes, this is one man-sized tuber that’s larger than life. 

And yet, does his name appear anywhere in the annals of U.S. history? I have yet to see a single jot about him, damn it. That’s gratitude for you.  Here this root vegetable, desicated within an inch of his life, erroneously teleported more than a continent away from his destination then zapped back to Washington, loaded for bear, laboriously wheeled his way up Capitol Hill with what would seem an impossible objective: wrest control of the nation away from that nefarious usurper, anti-matter Lincoln, who had inserted himself into the machinery of state like a log in the works. Some kind of conspiracy, you say? An evil effort to subvert the judgment of history and render meaningless the near-incalculable contribution of one man-sized tuber?

Well, neither. I just made it up, friends. Not a bit of it is true. Tubey never stopped nothin’ from happening. Fact is, even when we got him back to Washington, he couldn’t find his way to the White House or the Capitol. No, he spent most of his time looking for the Lincoln memorial which, of course, WAS NOT BUILT YET IN 1864! For chrissake, tubey! Anyway, the real story is that we got Mitch Macaphee to apply his massive brain to the problem. He actually very cleverly reached back in time to the instant anti-Lincoln arrived in the past and snatched him back to futureland before he could do all that damage. Near as we can tell, all is back as it was before. Except for one small detail. This will make you laugh. Remember president George H. W. Bush? Well, because of some insignificant act on the part of anti-Lincoln back in 1864, Bush’s son George W. became the 43rd president. Weirdest thing.

Sorry about that, man. Blame anti-Lincoln – it’s his bad.

Mill boy to tuber, mill boy to tuber! Do you read, tuber? What’s your position? Can’t read. Can you turn up your gain? Roger. How ’bout this…. try turning down your lose. Ah… much better.

Ah, you have returned. Good on you. Yes, as you may have surmised, the man-sized tuber… ahem, I mean the intrepid man-sized tuber has made his way into the remote past, fully 145 years ago or more, back to the time of Lincoln. His mission? Very simple… to apprehend the nefarious anti-matter Lincoln (one of our various hangers-on) who has somehow supplanted the actual president and begun to drive what’s left of a Civil War-plagued nation into the sewer. Shouldn’t be too difficult a task for a non-verbal overgrown root vegetable on a cart. At least, that’s what our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee had assured me. He said that security was not as tight in those days as it is now, so it shouldn’t be hard for the tuber to catch up with anti-Lincoln to deliver his ultimatum. Piece of cake, right?

Well, not so right. Believe it or not, the tuber has run into some difficulties. For one thing, even though he jumped through the same wormhole as anti-Lincoln, he somehow didn’t land in the same geographical area as anti-Lincoln. Hell, he wasn’t even on the same continent. Tubey and his little cart rolled out of the time warp in Santiago, Chile. Now I know what you’re going to say. Yes, it is a capital. And yes, it is an American capital. But that’s where the similarity ends, my friends. And in any case, similar isn’t enough. We’re talking about the man-sized tuber on a cart a continent away from where he needed to be, in a century when the fastest mode of travel was probably a not-so-fast train. This was not a good beginning. And while tubey bumped around from one end of the Avenue Francisco Bilbao to the other, we set ourselves to the task of working out what to do. (Which involved scratching our heads for a few minutes, then running off to get Mitch Macaphee, who has some semblance of a functional brain.)

Mitch’s suggestion came quickly. Commandeer Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating device and fire it directly at the image of tubey, who was just visible as a cloudy outline in the center of the spiraling shape within the time warp. (Whoa, that was a mouthful.) Mitch would then manipulate the controls in such a way as to transport the man-sized tuber thousands of miles across the 19th Century landscape to where he needed to be. Well, we tried it…. and when we next received word of the tuber (when I say “word”, I actually mean Morse code – we tied a clicker to one of tubey’s more dexterous roots) he did seem to be in a more congenial place vis-a-vis his mission. Which was a good thing… for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), because he has been sitting in the ready room for the last five hours anticipating some kind of back-up rescue mission… a prospect he has not been savoring, I can tell you. Hang in there, Marvin!

So, what the fuck. One thing leads to another, right? My guess is that by the time you check in on this ridiculous account again, something will have happened… somewhere….