Hey, Lincoln… you seen my water jug? Didn’t 
think so. How about anti-Lincoln? Drank it? What the hell… how thirsty is that guy, anyway?
Hiya, folks. Big Green here. Just working our way through tour preparations; pulling together all our gear and provisions, packing them onto the space elevator, and writing our wills (not a lot of confidence in the space elevator, frankly). Have we started the countdown yet? Nah. Getting close, though. I’m guessing we’ll probably hit the starry trail around September 30 or so, just as we’re scheduled to release our new album, International House – 16 tracks of pure Big Green pleasure, just in case you’re interested. Anyways… our CD release party will be held in the star system of Aldebaran. Not that we want to diss our terrestrial listeners – we just got to go where the money is, friends. And that money…. is in outer space. (At least that’s what our corporate uber-label Loathsome Prick has assured us.) You heard it here first.
As I imagine you’ve guessed by now, it’s going to take a while for us to load the ship. So while Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man-sized tuber toil away, I’ll 
tell you just what goes into releasing a new Big Green album. First, there’s that bit about making the music. I’ve talked about this before. Oh, it’s a painstaking process of cultivation and assembly. You start with good topsoil – rich Mississippi delta loam is the best. Turn it over a few times to get some air in there, then start planting random musical notes. If the weather is with you and you have a reliable robot (or root vegetable) to do the tilling and the watering, you will yield probably twice as much raw music as you plant. Then you start picking and sorting, then assembling them into DNA-like strings… and eventually whole songs.
The manufacturing process is a bit more complicated. I suppose you think we go to a CD replication house for that, eh? Not a bit of it… not when we’ve got all this factory space and lots of empty hands (not to mention root tendrils). Really, the hardest part is getting the songs into those discs. We get Marvin to get a big crock on the 
boil. We cook the songs down to a thick paste-like consistency (takes about five hours). Marvin and the man-sized tuber then apply the paste to the bottom of each disc with a wooden spatula, like frosting Christmas cookies. The coated discs are then placed face down on an anvil made of pure anti-proton material (absolutely pure!), and Big Zamboola sits on them one at a time, fusing the music right into the disc. Works like glass mastering, only cheaper. (We just have to keep feeding them pizzas. They’re like interns, you know.) The album art is then handpainted on by anti-Lincoln. (He’s better at it than his posi-doppelganger.)
Okay, well… now you know. Go and tell the world how Big Green makes their albums and, lord knows, maybe in a century or two, everybody will be doing it that way.
casino we call Wall Street, are now no more. This is a meltdown of epic proportions – something on the scale of what had been predicted in “activist” literature over the past few years. Such a large portion of the world economy rests on a foundation of speculative investment, much of which is driven by impossibly complex financial instruments that effectively obscure the very concept of ownership and liability. The problem was a long time in the making, but it gained considerable steam after Congress voted in 2000 to gut the Glass Steagall act, eliminating the fire wall that existed between commercial and investment banking and essentially deregulating large swaths of the financial services industry. This action made possible the vast market growth of mortgage-backed securities and abstruse devices like credit default swaps that proliferated in the free-for-all atmosphere legislated by the likes of Phil Gramm, former Texas Senator, now a senior economics adviser to the McCain Campaign and quite possibly the next Treasury Secretary.
This couldn’t have worked out better if they’d planned it. The entire mission of the Bush Administration appears to have been one of crashing the U.S. government and making severe cutbacks on social programs inevitable. Because programs like Social Security and Medicare are popular, there’s no other politically feasible way to derail them than to empty the treasury of funds, then shrug and turn your pockets inside-out. Fortunately, Bush’s friends in the high-rolling investment community (fellow MBAs, many of them) have seen to it quite nicely. Now we will all underwrite their bad investment decisions, secure their bad loans, and take the hit on the defaults. And if profit is to be made in any of these enterprises, you can be sure that it will not accrue to the benefit of ordinary citizens. This is something like what used to be called “lemon socialism” – essentially privatize the profits and socialize the losses. And you can be sure Bush will be serving it up like lemonade.
the personal touch around here. Customer service, that’s what Big Green is all about. Have a seat. Anything I can get for you? Drink, perhaps? Something a little stronger?
our space elevator (built from spare submarine parts), Mitch has got a lot of time on his hands. And let’s face it, the Large Hadron Collider has been very much in the news just lately. I mean, every time the guy watches the evening news, smoke starts coming out of his ears. So for a couple of days, he holed himself up in his lab, hammering away at something, ultimately to reveal a diabolical-looking device which he claims has the power to inhibit the Collider experiment, even though it is halfway around the world from here. How it is supposed to do this, I don’t know…. but before I could ask him, he pulled the lever.