Half a league, half a league, half a league on. Man, this sucker is going slower than I would have expected. You call that an ion drive? I call it junk. Do you hear me? JUNK!
Oh, hi. Didn’t know anybody was within shouting distance. Don’t pay too much attention to what I just said – 
again, I like to keep the crew on their toes, if you know what I mean. Mitch Macaphee does much better mad science when you light a fire under him (I mean this literally – he responds to fire with greater productivity). So if you have any questions about our progress, I have answers… depending upon specifically which questions you are asking. Since you’re not saying anything, I will guess that they are as follows:
Q: Are you making progress towards your goal, Aldebaran?
A: First of all, don’t call me Aldebaran… at least not while there are other people in the room. The answer, quite simply, is yes. However, I’d prefer if you not ask me how much progress we have made in the time elapsed since my last posting.
Q: How much progress have you made?
A: DAMN! I was afraid you’d ask me that. Well, the fact is, we’ve been chugging along at a very tepid speed. Our second (or 
third) hand Soyuz space craft was built in a different century, you see. That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the last century (not the next) that I’m referring to. So, yeah… you’ve seen those ultra-fast cigarette boats zipping along? Picture this thing as a bunch of old telephone poles lashed together into a raft.
Q: You’ve said a lot of things here. How can I be sure you are who you say you are?
A: STOP IT! Not sure why I said that. (I’m not quite myself 
today.) I have consulted my legal advisor (the man-sized tuber) and he has suggested that I should avoid answering that question.
I hate to raise this issue when there are others present, but Mitch has suggested that we utilize some of the technology he built into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who apparently has an ion-pulse generator locked away in his bread basket somewhere. Mitch says that if we could run a line from that sucker, we’d have all the power we need. Not sure how Marvin will feel about this, but….
Whoops. He heard me. Oh, Maaaaarrrvinnnn…… Got a little job for you.
talk about his new book on the NSA, The Shadow Factory, and it has really made me angry. Part of what is so irritating about this is that it isn’t even considered significant news – that people have become so inured to the notion of a government tapping their phones, reading their email, transcribing their private conversations, and archiving them for whatever future use they may want to put them to. For chrissake, these fuckers in the Bush White House directed the NSA to work with companies like AT&T and Verizon – companies that profit from our business – to sift through our correspondence without any limits, to the point where staffers at the NSA were actually passing around recordings of intimate phone calls between members of our military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and their spouses and partners back home. Hey, Charlie – get a load of this one! What the fuck.
involves a massive investment in the technology of death – sophisticated unmanned drones, orbital launch platforms, etc., all capable of reaching any point on the planet nearly instantaneously whenever our interests are threatened, in a manner so easy and safe that even Cheney could do it. Those “interests,” by the way, include economic considerations, obstruction of trade, disruption of shipping or energy supplies, and so on. So this is the 21st Century equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, executed with a simplicity once seen only in television dramas. “Find the enemy. Kill the enemy.” In what is often called the most important election of our lifetimes, I have yet to hear this issue addressed by the major party candidates. What will either of them do about this steady movement toward the establishment of a global police state for that less-fortunate 70% of humanity? 
sextant? Nah, no way. Never a sextant.
Okay, so how, you may ask, can we possibly use a 70s-80s vintage vehicle to travel light-years through interstellar space in anything less than millions of years? Good question. Real good question. (I’m thinking.) Quite simple, actually – our resident mad scientist Mitch Macaphee has been hard at work modifying the used Soyuz (or “Soyuzed”, if you will), hopping it up like he did with his ’57 Chevy Bel Aire back in the day. You should have seen old Mitch – he was throwing headers and chrome exhaust on the old Russian capsule like a madman, cranking up its horsepower to the point where it could make such a titanic journey in such a brief period of time. (I speak figuratively, of course. The “headers” are actually ion reactors and the “chrome exhaust” kinetic force generators. Those are, in fact, what Mitch added to his Bel Aire, as well.) Not sure if it’s going to be enough, but I guess we’ll know when we get there (or not). 
probably find a red giant star that is relatively close to our own solar system. In fact, it should be pretty hard to miss. It’s not like we’re looking for dark matter, or some remote galactic body, like that foreboding place where sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, comes from. (Zenon…. not a real good place if you like breathing oxygen.) I’ve always been a big fan of just pointing the ship at a random object and firing up the engines, but Mitch tells me that’s not the best method. It’s kind of like shooting skeet (not that I’ve ever done that, but…. it’s kind of like it) or like commanding a missile defense battery. Except that this might actually work. (Maybe.)