No, I haven’t seen your fork. What do I look like, the lost and found? Okay, don’t answer that. Anyway, why the hell do you NEED a personal fork? Are you some kind of FREAK?
Oh, hi. Jesus, the shit you have to deal with around this stupid hammer mill! Crikey… we’ve got songs to record, albums to hawk, hawks to feed, feed to store, stores to shop, shops to… store… just a whole lot of things to do, okay? The last thing I want to be stuck doing is hunting down lost silverware. But, of course, you’ve got to try to keep people happy, and Mitch Macaphee is one of those people. Believe me, it’s not easy to find a really dedicated mad scientist who’s willing to work with a hardly-working rock band. Most of them expect to be paid. (We always assume that to be evidence that they’re just not “mad” enough for our purposes.) Some expect honorific titles and assorted baubles of scientific status. Still others will just as soon vaporize you for even talking to them (perhaps unintentionally). Next to those guys, Mitch Macaphee is downright affable. Even if he does have a private fork. (He’s been using the man-sized tuber as a taster, too… I’ve seen him!)
Oh, sure… time was in the history of Big Green that mad scientists were relatively thick on the ground. We had your Dr. Hump, your Trevor James Constable, your Admiral Gonutz (though not technically a mad scientist, he was, indeed, mad). Indeed, they populated our early interstellar tours like heavy metals in a 
neutron star. (Not sure if that makes sense, exactly…. someone ask Mitch.) But they’ve all gone, now. Moved on to richer pastures and more rewarding career choices. Let’s face it…. Big Green was unable to offer them the kind of glory every mad scientist craves. We couldn’t even deliver the basics – a few sparking electrodes, banks of oversized v.u. meters, a gothic castle on a hill, the right little gnome. No, sir… all we could offer is a near total lack of monetary compensation and squatting rights in this drafty old abandoned hammer mill. Just try to hang on to a first-rate psycho-genius with nothing more than THAT as an incentive. Just try!
Okay, anyway. Mitch must be kept amused. He’s the last one we’ve got. Even Matt has decided he’s too big to fail, and has started carving driftwood sculptures to amuse him. (Matt’s good at a lot of things, but I don’t think one of them is carving. Most of his attempts were offered to the beavers, who made damn good use of them… no pun intended.) I even convinced posi Lincoln and anti Lincoln to put aside their differences and try their hand at convincing Mitch not to accept that attractive offer he’d received from the International Association of Mad Scientists Board of Governors, whose convention will be held in 
Buenos Aires this year. (Hot ticket, you best believe.) Since bribery is out of the question (lack of funds), we thought the Lincolns might use inescapable logic and persuasion. Not that either one of them possesses those capabilities, but someone has to try it on the rat bastard…. and it’s not going to be me. I’ve got work to do, damn it! There’s an album to finish, and it’s not going to freaking finish itself. As it is, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is doing some of my parts. It’s almost like I’m becoming HIS personal robot assistant.
Okay, I’m a little off just now. Come back in a couple of hours and take another look. If I keep making that noise, take me into the shop and have them look at my bearings. (Could cost a bit.)
budget. Through it all, and the concurrent crises unfolding in banking, unemployment, and investments, I keep hearing the specter of socialism raised by nervous acolytes of the imaginary purist free enterprise system we supposedly have now. Nationalize the banks? We can’t go there – that would be socialism! Single payer health coverage? Forget it, comrade – no socialized medicine here in the good old U.S. of A. Even though the Obama administration is nowhere near either of these propositions (alas), it seems as though the prospect of government doing anything remotely useful to the population it’s supposed to serve always brings on this overblown rhetoric about sacrificing our principles, destroying our way of life, etc. Though I hate to use his name (because MSNBC and others have been doing so incessantly for the last week), Rush Limbaugh (that great hulking hippo of hate) represents the rightward bookend of this tendency, calling for the president to fail in his quest to bring about the new International right here in America.
fool! He’s going to save your freaking bacon. Leave us face it – you drove the bus into a ditch, pure and simple, just as surely as your boy Bush crashed and burned on Iraq. This is not the time to complain about how much the tow truck is going to cost. Just sit there, play with your freaking PDAs, and maybe people will forget that you’re the fuckers who got us into this mess in the first place. Personally, I think it’s a mistake to let people off the hook this easily. Our banks may be falling to pieces, but there seems to be an awful lot of rich bankers around still. We should consider relieving them of some of the wealth they garnered over the last 20-30 years, when most of us were losing ground. We should make it a little more uncomfortable for the extremely wealthy, and a little harder to carry their ill-gotten gains someplace more congenial.
Hello again. Yes, we’re planning a little day trip. Nothing to get too excited about – just a brief opportunity to get our butts out of this place. Plenty of incentives to do just that, now that the gravity at the Cheney Hammer Mill is out of control Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has become a walking, talking, pop-up ad machine. Oh, yes… you heard me right. Ever since he opened that noxious email and got himself taken over by a pernicious computer virus, strange things have been happening to our mechanical friend. First, B-movies started playing on his video terminal. (He was like a walking drive-in for a few days.) Next came the pop-up ads…. kind of like what you get online, except these are little signs and banners that literally pop-up out of his head at unpredictable intervals. Some of them are accompanied by soft hits from the 70s. It’s pretty terrifying.
a few hours, he thought he was a chicken. But the ads kept coming, so we ditched that.) Next came the arcane mad scientist methods – you know, magnetic fields, big glass tubs of boiling liquids, banks of v.u. meters and flashing lights, the whole bit. Nothing. He even resorted to pantomime… and while that did have some effect (it made the ads change faster, in fact), it wasn’t the solution we were looking for. Now I know this is going to sound like a total cop-out, utterly lame, etc., but it was my idea, actually, to just take a little day trip and sort of let Marvin’s problem sort itself out. These things have a way of taking care of themselves, you know. (Actually, not true, but as empty nostrums go, it will serve.) So into the car we go.
new, grim, presidential expressions, etc. When you’ve got two of them in the back seat, Christ almighty! They never agree on anything! They’ll start trying to out-speechify each other. Then anti-Lincoln calls the other one “Maharba” (“Abraham” backwards) just to annoy him. So it’s, “Nice speech, Maharba!” Then you’ll hear posi-Lincoln start with the raspberries, and anti-Lincoln will say “Quit it!” That’s when somebody (not me) has to climb back there and put a stop to it. We usually threaten them with no major addresses for a week, or forbid them from sending the Army of the Potomac into northern Virginia. Sometimes I have to get the man-sized tuber to shake a stick at them. It makes for a pretty uncomfortable ride all around, suffice to say.