What the hell is this, Mitch? How could we be lost again? We’re using the freaking map. We’re following all the dotted lines. Is that not Rigel? It’s not? Mother of pearl….
Oh, yeah… hi, friends. Having another little 
problem here with the navigation. Nothing new. We were making the passage from Aldebaran to Orion and Mitch is getting a little confused on which star is which. I keep telling him, you need to follow the arrow back from Mintaka, not forward to Sirius! (I’m like, be serious, and he’s like, Sirius? Are you saying I’m a star? And I’m like…) So, of course, we overshoot Orion’s belt by about a light-year, so we have to double back. Then Mitch gets Betelgeuse confused with Rigel, like he’s looking at the whole freaking constellation upside-down. (Actually, the map was upside-down, so it wasn’t entirely his fault.) And we’re hunting in vain for the third companion (Rigel III) when, of course, there weren’t any orbiting Betelgeuse. (I told him the freaking star was too red, but did he believe me? Huh?)
See, the problem is, our first gig was on that third Rigel companion (also known as “planet” in common parlance). We were running late, owing to our antiquated second-hand transportation, and the Betelgeuse diversion (hmmm… sounds like a blockbuster film starring, I don’t know, Doug Woodstock) cost us precious hours of bobbing pointlessly in space, listening to tuneless whistling emanating from Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has taken to heart the acknowledgement we afforded him in the liner notes of our new album, International House, as recognition for the minor role he played 
in its creation. (Woof… what a sentence!) It seems Marvin fancies himself a jazz whistler now, on the order of Maine’s legendary Brad Terry, be-bop whistler and clarinetist (not in that order)… except that Marvin’s whistle sounds more like quitting time at the paper mill. (As I heard Taj Mahal say once in response to audience participation, “Strong… but wrong.”)
Okay, so we spent a couple of days cooped up with the interstellar version of Captain “Wrongway” Peachfuzz and a tone-deaf robot with delusions of grandeur. Kind of a morale-killer, frankly. So by the time we spotted the bleak horizon of Rigel III, we weren’t in much of a mood for performing. Still – we’re troopers, okay? Never let it be said that Big Green isn’t professional enough to overcome a little hardship and put on a good show. (Never let it be said… even if it IS true.) 
Lord, no… we slammed that crowd with rousing versions of cuts from the new album, as well as old favorites from 2000 Years To Christmas, such as Holiday, Pagan Christmas, and Merry Christmas, Tarzan. Damnedest thing – these folks have heard this stuff! They must get PaganFM! out here! Then we played singing saw solo, blew off some M80s, and set the atmosphere on fire. What fun.
Right, well… if we had done that last bit, we certainly wouldn’t be invited back. Even the M80s would get us in trouble on Rigel III. But it hardly matters – so long as Mitch is driving, we’ll never find our way back there anyway.
in modern presidential history. Just this past week Bush took the stage at the global economic summit in Washington and defended “free market” capitalism, “free” trade, and related virtues so dramatically discredited of late, warning his fellow national leaders not to depart too drastically from the neoliberal order concocted by Washington and implemented by the I.M.F. and World Bank. I was not in the room, but I imagine there were a few grimaces, maybe a laugh or two, and perhaps a lot of inattention during Bush’s remarks. Honestly, who is going to listen to the captain of the titanic as he lectures everyone on marine safety? How many of those people have one of those “Bush’s Last Day” countdown clocks on their desks? (Or wish they had one?)
questioning coming from the likes of Robert Siegel and Jim Lehrer, for chrissake. Paulson and his assistant secretary Neel Kashkari have both been grilled by Congress (again, in a somewhat less incisive fashion than in previous decades, but nevertheless). Everybody is taking swings at them because public faith in the administration is so abysmally low… and with good reason. It’s pretty easy to shoot holes in the $700 billion bailout plan(s), which seems to be evolving by the minute. What amazes me is that, with states facing something like $100 billion in red ink, they don’t seem to show any impetus towards sending some of that money back to state legislatures just to shore up essential services. I mean, if we’re spending like sailors to get the economy going again, shouldn’t we at least consider a state government bailout? I’ve yet to hear it suggested by anyone other than economist Robert Pollin. (Would that Obama would make him treasury secretary…)
our last performance in the Aldebaran system, on the big planet Mjumbo. Try to picture this in your head. (Are you trying? Good.) Imagine an enormous stadium – bigger than the astrodome, built along the rim of an enormous impact crater thousands of years old. Thousands of shapeless blobs of protoplasm in the seats, all holding lit matches. (This, we later learned, is something they do all the time on this planet – it burns off the bad air.) Now picture, if you will, the usual Big Green line-up of miscreants on the stage, plinking on keys, plucking at strings, banging on skins, and hollering into microphones. (Also adding mood, in a way that only the man-sized tuber can.) And swinging from the scaffolding, warning people about the “brown acid”? Marvin (my personal robot assistant). While in his magnetic lock pedestal during the trip over, he had occasion to watch Woodstock: The Movie.
this tour. No, sir… this was more like one of those primitive mid-sixties shows. Our speaker stacks are relatively primitive, our amps antiquated, my piano in excess of a dozen years old (i.e. relatively new). Don’t have to tell you that there was a bit of a buzz in the air that night, and I don’t mean the buzz of excitement. I’m talking bad patch cables, mostly. Still, it was fun for some of us, and the many thousands of blobs of extraterrestrial goo were nodding their pseudopods in time with “Enter the Mind” (a cut off of our new album, 
belt to do a string of gigs. Then sometime last week they changed their minds and decided that we should head over to the Pleiades cluster (the seven sisters). Of course, our initial reaction was, “What, all seven?” There was some grumbling over the phone, some muffled oaths, some veiled threats, and ultimately we agreed just to do three of the seven. Once in transit to that cluster, however, we received word from the overlords at LP that they wanted us to divert back to Orion again. Apparently there’s a bidding war going on for our presence. (Can you say “payola”?)