No, Mitch. That’s not the point, man. Wait a minute, wait a minute…. I think somebody may be reading what I’m typing into my stupid blog. Hold on… Yeah, I posted it. Sorry, Mitch – I’ll call you back. Bye.
Hi, everybody… it’s your old pal Bozo. Did I say Bozo? I meant Joe. Beg your pardon, I’m all farmisht. Just spent the last half-hour on the phone to Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has taken up residence in a relatively comfy treehouse outside of Buenos Aires for the summer. (Just to be clear, Mitch is in the treehouse, not Marvin. Marvin is the one who fell out of a tree.) I hate to treat so distinguished a mad scientist as some kind of cheap tech support, but damn it, we’re desperate… desperate, I tell you! (Phew!) No, no… not life or death. Marvin’s on the fritz, that’s all, and it’s proving to be a bit of an inconvenience.
It happened just after we crashed back home last week. As you know, Big Green had taken a little trip out to Cancri 55 for a showcase gig that ended up lasting two freaking months. Long story short, we had a bit of a rough 
landing on our return (right into my m.f. bedroom) and in the process, Marvin seems to have shaken some key piece of electronic brainology loose. What’s the problem? Haven’t a clue. That’s why we dialed up the man who put him together… this in hopes of getting a step-by-step method for setting the tin man straight. Of course, Mitch being the typical mad scientist that he is (he’s living in a fucking tree, for christ’s sake!) has proven incapable of giving a coherent answer one way or the other. Three calls, and the best I could get out of him was a recipe for gazpacho. (Actually, it’s a pretty good recipe. But I digress…)
What is Marvin doing that’s so annoying? Well… first he donned some nautical headgear left behind by that mad man Admiral Gonutz. Then he installed himself on the rusting 
freight elevator and insisted that everyone call him “Admiral”. Admittedly, that was only mildly annoying. After a couple of days of that, he took it into his robotic skull to start swinging around on the rafters in hammer assembly room five. Now, Marvin was never much of an athlete, so this was actually a bit dangerous, as all 267 pounds of him (yes… he’s made of metal, friends) would come crashing down onto the work floor every ten minutes or so. What the hell – we thought that was pretty bad. But we hadn’t seen anything yet. Nope. Nothing. (Is this thing still on? Oh, right.)
Here’s the capper – one night last week, Marvin broke into my wall safe (unlocked, as it happens), took our squatter’s contract to the Cheney Hammer Mill, and sold it to Loathsome Prick Records, our label. Now they own our sorry asses, lock, stock and barrel. So Mitch… if you’re reading this… love the gazpacho, but… how do you fix this s.o.b.??
speculate on. More than mass murder and dictatorship united them; they also share the posthumous praise of pundits and political leaders the world over, some of whom have every reason to know better. One can only assume these apologists hold a cynical appreciate of the blood-soaked Indonesian general’s ability to provide wealthy westerners with favorable investment opportunities in what was once seen as the super-domino of U.S. southeast Asia policy. Whatever the truth may be, news articles about Suharto’s passing referred to him as a “modernizer” who brought his country into the global market, though with some level of brutality. His rule was “controversial” due in part to his having eliminated as many as 1 million “alleged communists” during his 35-year rule (not to mention the perhaps 200,000 killed in East Timor). This, according to new Australian Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, amid “a period of significant growth and expansion,” though Rudd admits, “many have disagreed with his approach.” Including, presumably, the 1.2 million dead and their families. Can you imagine Pol Pot being so eulogized? (At least the syndicated article in my hometown newspaper compared Indonesia’s mass killings with those of Cambodia – a comparison that once drew howls of derision.)
A simple twist of fate would have had the corporate media and world leaders praising “Saddam the modernizer” at his graveside as well, were it not for his fateful transgression in 1990 (i.e. invading a country we’re friendly with). Instead, he alone of the three is condemned unconditionally as a mass murderer, though perhaps his worst crimes – deadly attacks against the Iranians, whose county he invaded – typically go unmentioned, despite the extensive use of chemical weapons. Clearly, neither mass murder, nor unprovoked invasion, nor the use of non-conventional weapons, is a problem for our leaders, since they have committed (in our names) crimes just as serious over the past few decades. Not surprisingly, British researchers have completed 
Through the glass darkly. That was our trip home. Better believe it, my friend. (Jesus freaking Christ…. if I say “my friends” again, I’ll turn into John McCain. And we can’t have that… not with all these Lincolns around.) 
comes of driving someone else’s vehicle through one of the only unbroken windows in your squat house – namely, the one right over where I sleep. (Rather, slept.) Glass all over my best bedspread, glass in the water fountain, glass ground into the floor. Worse than that, high-explosive spacecraft fuel had spewed all over the walls (and my bedroom couch) and ignited, reducing my humble domicile to a somewhat more humble state. It was ugly… very ugly. (In fact, it still is ugly, as this catastrophe is compounded by the fact that I am not at all a good housekeeper.)
sized tuber scrambled off for his specially designed, climate-controlled, shock-mounted terrarium and strapped himself in. I’m not sure how my brother Matt or the Lincolns managed to emerge unscathed, but it could have something to do with their common interest in avian biology. Yes, they were bird watching in our moment of sheer terror. Callous and uncaring? You might think so. But anti-Lincoln’s lifetime list of birds is getting longer every day. (Between us, I’ve seen the list, and there are at least six or seven chickens on there, entered by name. I’m just saying.)