Well, tubey’s got a few holes in him. Little holes. A dab of plastic wood ought to do the trick. Where’s my spatula?
Greetings from the mythical Cheney Hammer Mill, home of Big Green and our new de-facto d.b.a., HammerMade music. That’s the ad-hoc publishing imprint for our upcoming album, International House, due sometime in September… on somebody’s doorstep (possibly yours). More about that later. Fact is, the man-sized tuber has run into a couple of problems in his day, but getting shot by a family member (extended family member, I should say) is not the kind of thing you expect in his kind of family. After all, few root vegetables have access to fire arms. God only knows what would happen if they did! They might share them with the trees, and THEN what would happen? Vengeance would be theirs! SWEET VENGEANCE!!! HELP US, JEEBUS!
Shoo-whee. My apologies – I do get carried away from time to time. What I was trying to say was, in keeping with the theory of six degrees of separation, tubey’s extended family includes everyone in this band, from Matt, to Johnny White, to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), to Mitch Macaphee, and (of course) my sorry ass. That extended family member I mentioned earlier was old Mitch, blowing off some steam with a pellet gun. He wasn’t real careful about where he did his shooting, and tubey caught a few. Nothing serious, you understand, but it did effect tubey’s morale, which had been on a decided upswing since the departure of his cousins from the potato field. Now he’s back down in the dumps… so we’ve decided to come up with a new little job for him to do. Just so he feels needed, wanted, etc.
What kind of job can an oversized sweet potato handle? You may well ask. Actually, we were thinking something 
along the lines of customer service. Let’s face it – it’s been nine years since our last full length commercial release. We’re a little more than rusty when it comes to glad-handing the potential buyers of our wares, if you know what I mean. (Fact is, we’re actually quite a bit nastier than last time around… the bitterness of broken promises and unfulfilled aspirations… gnaws at you like a wolverine…. rrrrrrrrr…). Yeah, so anyway… we could use someone on the other end of the phone… or the IM chat box. Someone like tubey – he’s got an open, honest face that anyone could trust. And even though he can’t talk so good, he can at least type with his root filaments. (Pretty good trick for someone who’s been out of the ground for more than a few years.)
Once we get the plastic wood into tubey’s various pellet wounds, I’m sure he’ll agree to handle our communications. Then we can pile into whatever kind of oversized tin can Mitch Macaphee devises for us and head off to Aldebaran without a care in the world (aside from the fear of perishing in the icy cold of space…. ooohhh.)
political theatre? The DNC nominating convention in Denver had some odd moments, to be sure, at least from the television viewer’s perspective. I’m still trying to work our, for instance, why they were playing the ’70s disco number “Rollercoaster of Love” when Dennis Kucinich was walking up to the podium. (Coincidence? I think not!) 
Now, if Obama really wants things to change in this country, there is something he could do about it. If he really thinks this election is, as he says, about all of us and not just him, he could look us in the eyes and say that he needs our vote, but not just that. He could say that he needs us to be there with him when he goes back to Washington. He could tell us that when he pushes for, say, national health care, he needs us to push for it, too…. because if we don’t, it’s never going to happen. Same with ending the occupation of Iraq. Same with closing Gitmo. Same with everything. Yeah, I know how unlikely this is. Politicians don’t like it so much when people get engaged – they don’t tend to encourage movements they can’t control. But those are the only ones that bring about meaningful change.
Who said an elevator has to go up? It could go down, even sideways, if the spirit moves it. Just ask any mad scientist.
project, and like a temperamental post-impressionist painter, he sometimes suffers through every second of the creative process. Why, he’s out in the courtyard right now with an airgun, popping holes in our wooden outbuilding. And in the man-sized tuber, I suspect, since that’s where he sleeps. (We call it the “Root Cellar.”)
gallon… though if John McCain gets Exxon to drill just under where he’s standing, it will be A LOT CHEAPER!!). My sense is that Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and discoverer of the space warp (no, it wasn’t Zephram Cochrane, damn it), is opting for some kind of virtual cable for his space elevator – a laser or particle beam solution that he can just aim in a given direction. That means we need only confine ourselves to destinations that can be reached by following a straight-line trajectory. Piece of cake!