Here in the situation room, no one speaks in muted tones. Everything is shouting, all the time, shouting. Oh, the noise! Can’t we all just get along?
Oh, hi, you-all. Hope everything is well back on Earth. We will see you there soon, I trust, as we appear to be heading in that general direction, assuming Mitch Macaphee’s navigational skills have not gone seriously downhill in the last month or so. (We walk by faith, not sight.) Rolling to the end of another outer-limits tour – this one a bit more ad hoc than previous outings, apropos of the severe economic recession back home. Couldn’t even afford to brand this tour, and that typically doesn’t cost much more than a couple of beers at the local pub. (We quaff them until somebody emits a decent idea… or something a bit less savory.) As you know, Big Green always operates on the cheap, but this time was the worst yet. As someone who’s used to dry Soy Slice sandwiches, it took some time getting used to sandwiches made with the empty plastic wrappers Soy Slices come in. And water, nothing but water to drink between gigs. That’s better than no water, but still…. water for six weeks? What would my bartender say? (Between sobs…?)
But never mind our petty privations. How have YOU been feeling? These are rough times for everyone, as I’m sure you’re aware. That’s one of the things that have kept in interstellar space for such a long stretch this fall. We even neglected to exercise our franchise in the recent off-year 
election. I understand the man-sized tuber was going to be on the ballot for town councilman back in our small upstate New York community of [INSERT NAME OF TOWN HERE]. His opponent, a member of the [INSERT PARTY HERE] party, was running on a “no vegetables in council” kind of platform, which seem kind of small minded to me. The man-sized tuber, on the other hand, was running as a representative of the [GENERIC] party. (No, that’s not an editor’s note. The party’s name is [GENERIC] in all-caps and brackets.) The [GENERIC] party’s position is that anything you say, do, or write needs to be adaptable to every imaginable set of circumstances. It’s the ultimate in egalitarianism, if you ask me. And it’s the reason that all of the [GENERIC] party’s position papers read like the preceding few lines. After winning that bi-election in [INSERT CITY HERE], the party chairman [INSERT NAME HERE] feels a lot more confident about that strange convention of writing.
Well, anyway… I guess we’ll find out if the man-sized tuber is king of the 
town council when we get home. For the nonce, we can only speculate. (Though Lincoln has taken it upon himself to offer advice to tubey, having had a political career himself at one point in his trans-temporal existence.) Besides, there’s plenty to think about. After all, our album 2000 Years to Christmas is approaching its tenth year on Earth, and we’re trying to work out an appropriate way of marking the occasion. Maybe it’s sending up a fireworks display – Mitch Macaphee says that this spacecraft is equipped with some kind of rockets that, when fired, will spell out his name in flaming letters. (Not sure this is appropriate.) Then there are other, more practical approaches, like a special Christmas performance on terra firma highlighting the numbers that made us un-famous. It’s a tough decision, and we’ve been mulling it over in the situation room for hours now over bowls of mulled cider and mulligatawny soup.
Hey… you got suggestions? We got ears. (Most of us do, anyway.) Send them our way… or your way, whichever way you prefer.
changing the terms of my credit agreement. In essence, they said they were raising the interest rate on my card to 23%. Yes, that’s right – 23% on a balance well below my credit limit, on a card I’ve had for at least a decade without missing a payment. You don’t seem surprised. Perhaps they’ve done the same to you… and, in fact, they are doing the same to everyone, as far as I know. It seems CitiGroup, the recipient of $45 billion in publicly funded bailout dollars, has settled on a business model that empties the pockets of American taxpayers a second time. Charging 23% and more on credit in an economic environment such as this, when people are losing their jobs, their homes, their shoes, for chrissake… and when institutions like Citi are drawing money from the Federal Reserve lending window at 0% to 0.25% interest. So… I guess when they’re earning less than 20% on your ass, you’re considered a non-performing asset.
Of course, it goes beyond that. The banking sector is making life impossible for people’s employers, as well. It’s making it hard to get credit for capital expansion. It’s tightening up on educational loans, scrutinizing the financial profile of colleges and universities to a more stringent degree than even the Department of Education uses. It’s lobbying hard against its own regulation, particularly the proposed Consumer Protection agency. So it seems like we need to severely limit these people’s ambitions, instead of acting as though everything is still the way it was three or four years ago when nothing could ever go wrong, ever. Meanwhile, there seems to be no limit on the amount of money we can borrow to burn pointlessly (and, in fact, profoundly counterproductively) in Iraq and Afghanistan, year after year. It almost seems as though Obama is beginning to see the handwriting on the wall with respect to the latter war. I wonder when he’ll see it with respect to these rapacious financial institutions.
Oh, hi, Web-based readers, listeners, and curiosity seekers. It’s your old pal Big Green, out here in deep space, fresh off a thrashing series of gigs on Kaztropharius 137b – one of the few places in the known universe where our music gets played, bought, and reviewed – and headed in the general direction of home. Yes, we’ve had it for the time being. After all, the holidays are coming, daylight savings time has ended (spend all that saved-up daylight yet?), and darkness is falling across the northern hemisphere of our tattered planet. It’s at this time of year, more than any other, that the sojourner’s thoughts turn to hearth and home, and certainly we of Big Green are no exceptions. Many’s the time I’ve repaired backstage (what the hell, you can hardly repair onstage – it’s distracting to the audience!) and, in the privacy of my own musings, longed for the dank closeness of my squathouse bedroom back in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Mildew, dear mildew….
space. The other day I saw him looking at photos of the Coke machine at the corner drug store. (You know, they really hit it off.) And then there’s the holidays or, as we call them, the FREAKING holidays, with which our group has been more than tangentially associated. What the hell, I mean…. how many alt-indie rock bands do you know whose first album was a collection of original songs written around the idea of Christmas? More than one… really? There was that Boston band called “Christmas” back in the 1980s, but that doesn’t count. (Neither does the L.A. bar band called “Big Green”. Coincidence, I tell you!) Anywho, we’ve been putting our best minds on how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the release of our album 
scrambled planet Earth on the other side of a time-space wormhole (look back a few columns, you’ll see it). “Fynde thee a performance venue, and render your music within!” he said, which, roughly translated, works out to be … book a gig somewhere and play a bunch of music from our now 10-year-old first album. Yeah, not bad for a founding father. Still… that would require some effort on our parts, and looking around this crew cabin, I don’t see a lot of motivation. Matt, you in for this? How about you, Johnny?