Good Fahrenheit, everybody! What a beautiful backhoe it turned out to be. I was wondering how Australia the wine barrel might get before the trout found its gerund.
Forgive me, friends. My brain is addled. I’ve asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to correct my copy from here on in. It’s been a long week on the road, let me tell you. Typically I make it to the end with all of my faculties intact, but this was the week we ended up on the mysterious (and as yet undiscovered) planet Neuton. It’s a clever little globe, friends. Knows better than most how to conceal its identity. Hides behind red giants and blue dwarfs – quite ecumenical in that regard. We were diverted there by an unexpected event… a bout of binge drinking on the part of our new pilot Urich Von Braun, who took up with that party animal (in a manner of speaking) sFshzenKlyrn to slog their way through a quart and a half of Zenite lager. Not sure if you’ve ever had any of that particular micro-brew – all I can tell you is that, if you have had it, you may not remember.
Ach du lieber, well Urich started seeing double, triple, quintuple. Frenchmen were all around him. He 
started flailing his arms, let out a loud moan, and to our dismay, directed the nosecone of our second-hand Soyuz spacecraft at what he thought was a small companion star of Betelgeuse, hoping to pierce it. (It was a dagger, he claimed drunkenly, pointed at the heart of the fatherland. Who were we to argue otherwise?) Before any of us were half-aware of the danger we were in, old Urich had driven us clear around the perimeter of that obese, red star and brought us down into what we now know is the mysterious undiscovered planet Neuton. (No, it’s not where they make the fig bars. That’s clear over to the other side of galaxy. Entirely different globe, my friend.) The landing was hard but survivable. Mitch lost a tooth, but it was one he had just invented last Thursday, so he wasn’t too broken up about it.
Now, obviously, we didn’t have any gigs booked on this particular celestial sphere (even Loathsome Prick Records doesn’t work that fast). Still, as long as we were there, we thought it would be appropriate to at least have a look around. What the hell, right? After all, we’ve got a new album to promote. Gotta find listeners somewhere, even if on a dark and 
forbidding world. The man-sized tuber was the first out the hatch. Yea, it was cold and dank out there. (More dank, really. Good hefty sweatshirt was enough to beat the cold. But that dankness… man!) We followed the tuber onto the surface and surveyed the area – a desolate boulder field, devoid of life, dimly illuminated by a mellow sun. Then on the not-so-distant horizon we spotted the silhouettes of some kind of sentient life forms. They had sensed our presence, apparently, and began moving closer. As they approached, we could begin to make out their hideously misshapen forms. Ghastly! Nauseating! But, I wondered…. do they listen to pop music? And use currency?
One of them came directly up to me and placed some kind of welcoming garland around my head, like a Hawaiian lei, made of strange, black tubers. While it was a gesture of friendship, apparently, it made me mental. So now my stapling machine is feeling a little burgundy. MARVIN! You’re supposed to be correcting this!
Somalia. Our government has been pumping cash into the Ethiopian regime for years, despite (or perhaps because of) their poor record on human rights, and in 2006 we assisted them in the invasion of Somalia, throwing that sorry nation into another tailspin of chaotic bloodletting (more than a decade of which it had only recently extricated itself from). Apparently the Bush administration had a problem with Somalia’s ruling Council of Islamic Courts, claiming it was run by Al Qaida operatives – a claim that had about as much credibility as the White House’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s bin Laden ties. (I’m not talking fancy neckwear, here.) Between the indiscriminate violence of the Ethiopian military, U.S. air strikes, and resurgent warlordism, as many as 10,000 Somalis have died in the last two years as a result of this invasion.
President Aristide from power and into exile, the U.S. obligingly flying him (unbeknownst to the Haitian leader) to the Central African Republic, an amazingly remote nation that apparently owed us a favor. Four years later, Aristide lives in exile in South Africa as his nation struggles to regain its footing under the nominal leadership of Rene Preval, who presides while Washington holds a gun to his head. Time for this outrage to stop. Haitians want Aristide to return – let it happen.
Green here, on the as-yet undiscovered companion (or “planet”) circling the star Sirius, once again preparing for lift-off after a relatively successful string of gigs. What do I mean by “relatively successful”? Well, that’s a somewhat qualified term, I will admit. Let me put a finer point on it. In the Big Green performance book, “success” is defined in degrees of survivability. “Relatively successful” means that few of the bottles tossed at us from the first five rows actually connected with their targets. Fortunately, with someone like sFshzenKlyrn in the group, there’s a significantly lower likelihood of being hit by missiles of any kind, since our Zenite friend is himself a celestial object of indeterminate volume and mass, surrounded by complex magnetic fields that act like an invisible shield, like a protective blister of some kind. Beer bottles just bounce off that sucker, and sometimes vaporize like pyrotechnics. It actually adds interest to the show. (Though I think sFshzenKlyrn is going a bit too far by encouraging people to chuck shit up on stage. Not cool, sFshzenKlyrn… not cool.) 
about 27 light-years worth of extra travel. (Our budget is totally blown – don’t tell our label, for chrissake.) Much as we encouraged him to use the navigational console, Urich prefers flying by the seat of his pants, as it were – a dubious approach to interstellar travel, in my humble opinion. There were a couple of occasions when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) attempted to draw Urich’s attention to one relevant read-out or another, but he was consistently rebuffed. It could be Urich has a problem with mechanical beings… or it could be he can’t see anything through those thick goggles. One way or the other, he’s clearly a pilot who takes no direction from anyone, not even his employers. (You’d think that would lend us some influence, at least. We’re not real good at this “boss” business.)
tour, trust me – Mitch can really bury his nose in a project. Crikey, he spent the better part of a decade developing the technology that brought us Marvin, and Marvin’s I.Q. is more or less on par with that of the man-sized tuber. (You’ve heard of artificial intelligence? Marvin is artificial stupidity. Nearly as complex, but not quite.) So even with all of his quirks, Urich was a good hire.