Ow! Bloody roofing beams! Are bicycle helmets always made of styrofoam? I thought they employed something slightly harder in their construction. No? Gotcha. Anyway…. ow!
Oh, hi out there in cyberland. No, we haven’t elected to return to interstellar space after only one full week 
back on Earth. Lawd, no. I’m cracking my skull on the roof beams of our beloved abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, here on terra firma. I and my Big Green colleagues are being subjected to yet another one of Mitch Macaphee’s haywire mad-science experiments involving gravity, sunlight, air thickness, blah-blah-blah. I don’t know what all else, as they say. In any case, he’s got the gravity component of it right… in as much as we ain’t got any. Somehow Mitch has stumbled upon a formula (or process) for selectively negating gravity without the aid of, say, a jet pack or motorized propeller beanie. I think he does it with dominos… stacks them end-to-end. (Don’t ask me how it works, ’cause I just don’t know.)
All right, so what this means is that instead of walking around on the floor, we’re all bumping around on the ceiling. And it’s annoying, frankly. Though I think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has probably adapted himself to the situation more effectively than anyone. He’s got those retractable foot-wheels, you see, so he just flips himself upside-down and rolls about like a ski-lift gondola. Very efficient 
little s.o.b., I must admit. I guess after a few years you get used to these little experiments. This one’s irritating, but not as bad as some of the other things Mitch has tried over the years. There was that one time he worked on turning standard bricks into uranium 235. (Note: this whole freaking building is made out of bricks.) Then there was that time he found a way to turn air into fire. (Though that may have been a natural gas leak – we’ve never been quite sure.)
Under the best of circumstances, it’s difficult to get work done around here. It’s a little harder without gravity, I should say. Nevertheless, we’ve managed to put our noses to the grindstone once again, working on our next release. This will be a strange one, mark my words. Now… I know a lot of you thought the last two were strange. And let’s face it, International House is just plain peculiar. (I’ll tell you, I’ve listened to that sucker over and 
over again, and I still don’t know what those crazy mo-fo’s are talking about.) Nonetheless, selections from International House and from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, are being played on several suitably bizarre podcasts, including Bloodthirsty Vegetarians (thanks, Rich!) and PaganFM. So, strange notwithstanding, we’re moving ahead with yet another charred offering of audio madness. Gravity or no gravity – this mother is in production!
One favor, though. Can someone hand me my guitar tuner? I can’t reach it from the ceiling.
democracy under our protective and nurturing (right) wing. Though the official results may not be in for some time, the winner appears to be Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa party, at the expense of the more religious Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an exile group formed in Iran during the Iran/Iraq war, now enjoying close ties to both Washington and Tehran). Probably the most interesting thing about these provincial elections – something underreported in the U.S. press – is the degree to which this was a vote for an end to the U.S. occupation. The status of forces agreement that Maliki negotiated with Bush late last year pretty strongly rejects any enduring U.S. presence on Iraqi soil – no permanent bases, etc. If that agreement is acted on as drafted, we’ll be out in a matter of months. Bush essentially signed what he termed a “cut and run” pact, and Maliki is seeing some of the benefit of that. He’s also benefiting from the reduction in violence and his preference for maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity. But it can be seen as yet another referendum on Bush. Good grief.
Israel’s right to exist, and 3) abide by all past agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian authority. Sounds great… except that we consistently fail to ask the same of Israel. They have never renounced violence – quite the opposite, to the point where it has eroded their national character in a very sorry fashion. They have never recognized the Palestinian’s right to exist within any reasonable borders – like the 22% of historic Palestine that is not in Israel proper. Not satisfied with nearly 4/5 of a loaf, they have continued to build settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank in violation of all agreements with the Palestinians, through good times and bad. When will they abide by those agreements?
Hammer Mill, just one week after our triumphant return from the great beyond (where we do nearly all of our performances). Did I say triumphant? Wrong word. Ignominious is a better fit to the circumstances. What can I tell you? Broken down spacecraft (nothing new there). Problematic re-entry (nearly a burn-up, as it happened). Crash landing on solid ground (ouch!). Limping home in disgrace (with the exception of the man-sized tuber, who had to be wheeled in a cart… being a vegetable and all…). Being met at the Hammer Mill door by virtually an entire police department (investigating an abandoned space vehicle complaint… and yes, it was down to us). So that thing about “triumphant?” Yeah…. just forget it.
get the human contingent out of there – that left Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the tuber, and Big Zamboola behind bars for a few hours while we called the local bail bondsman. As it happened, they set a pretty stiff bail for Zamboola, mainly because of the impracticality of keeping a celestial body (with its own gravity) in a holding cell. Marvin they let go on his own recognizance. (He was talking to them while they worked and, well… it got kind of annoying, I think. He started telling them about his anvil collection. Sheesh.)
either pirates or space creatures, nor by denizens of middle earth…. nor cavemen. (Did someone say mimes? No, no mimetic infestation as of yet.) No, it was more in the way of general dilapidation. Frankly, the place is falling to pieces. No great surprise, right? I mean, the foundation is literally crumbling beneath our feet. (Especially Mitch Macaphee’s feet. He’s been putting on a little weight lately… not from good eating, you understand, but from some arcane experiment he’s running on himself… something to do with increasing his specific gravity to nearly five times its original value. We now call him “titanic man” behind his back.)