I hear rocks… rocks bubbling. Or is that something else. Wait a tick, wait a tick… could be… Yes, by god it is. It’s… the man-sized tuber cooking dinner. Again.
I suppose it probably comes as no surprise to those of you who have known Big Green for more than a week or two that an oversized vegetable does much of our cooking. Yeah, we’re vegetarians, and I think that particularly resonates with the man-sized tuber – my guess is that he thinks the safest place for a vegetable around here is on the handle-end of the ladle. Fact is, we don’t eat a lot of root vegetables, and the man-sized tuber is far too tough to roast, far to fibrous to fry, far too husky to boil. He’s just plain inedible, that’s what it comes down to. (Though with a handful of shallots and a splash of merlot, he might respond to an overnight marinade. Mmmmmm-boy.) Wait, tubey, wait…. just kidding, man! Aw, put the pot down. Put it DOWN. No. NO. NOOOOOOOO…
Oh, okay – he’s just moving it to the back burner. Can’t hear real well, our tubey. I keep forgetting. Well, what the hell else is new? Oh, yeah. We’re hurtling through space in our new ride. Yessir, the cobbed together playground equipment we’ve been using to traverse interstellar space finally proved 
itself unworthy of even terrestrial travel, so we broke down (quite literally) and scraped together enough scratch to rent ourselves a ship… a proper ship. Not the kind that comes in a bottle, mind you – a space vessel, with functioning navigational controls, living quarters, and a hull that will hold atmosphere. But where… where would we find such a conveyance out here in the void between Cancri 55 and Earth? Actually, not that much of a problem. Hey… every shit town has its commercial strip, with gas stations and used car lots, right? Well, this interstellar backwater is no different. We just followed the neon lights and pulled into Proxima Centaurii Motor Rentals and South Asian Grocery. (Take exit 452a, just past the companion star – can’t miss it.)
I’ve never been any good at haggling, so I left the negotiations to John, and he came away with a sharp looking little unit for a one-way rental back to Earth. All we had to do 
was, well, hand over the licensing proceeds to our recordings for a radius of three light-years around Proxima Centaurii for the next three years – not too shabby, since we’ve yet to sell a single disc out here. (Don’t say anything!) That and whatever else we had in our pockets, including the last of our Cancri 55 currency. Got to tell you, it’s a relief to stand on a solid deck once again, instead of monkey bars… particularly when you’re traveling at 65% light velocity. And crew cabins, for chrissake! Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was immediately tasked with setting up the galley for the man-sized tuber.
So here we are, cruising along towards home, rice on the boil. Why rice? It’s cheap, that’s why. We blew the bankroll on this ship. Sure, it would be nice if we had a few vegetables to sauté;…. nice… root…. vegetables…..
exception, even though we are bobbing here in space, directionless, our controls replaced by discarded vegetables, our navigation effectively disabled. No matter – the man-sized tuber donned his garish Christmas sweater and led a somewhat enfeebled rendition of “Oh, Holy Night” (which degenerated into “Oh, Holy Shit!” when the fire alarm went off). Due to limited shopping opportunities in deep space, we did a sort of round-robin gift exchange, a secret Santa type deal, drawing straws for gifts. 
delicate surface is virtually unprotected by cloud cover. (Sounds practical, eh? WTF – it was all I could think of, frankly.) My “secret Santa” was Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who handed me something that might have been a battleship or an enormous Chicklet, but was, in fact, a humble kitchen sponge. (Marvin went a little overboard on the wrapping this year. Could have knocked me over with a feather when I opened that sucker.) Our shipboard penury notwithstanding, it was a holiday celebration very much in the spirit of previous years. Lincoln made punch. (And that punch had a kick – thank you, great emancipator.)
spinning damage control for ex-general and president-for-as-long-as-he-likes Pervez Musharraf. Having invested so bullishly in this coup leader, Bush and company are reluctant to see his fortunes fall alongside the corpse of his chief political rival. In Pakistan as elsewhere, we build today’s disastrous policies on those of yesteryear, compounding tragedy with farce and playing with whole nations as if they were mere instruments of our global ambitions. For decades we’ve supported strongman military leaders in Pakistan because it served our purposes to do so (one-stop political shopping, in effect – less haggling with popular leaders). The rationale in the 1970s and 80s was the fight against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, an effort that amounted to a kind of Ford Foundation for jihadist groups, funded in part by the Saudis and facilitated by the CIA and Pakistan’s I.S.I. intelligence service.
For our great leaders, the issue doesn’t even arise. We are directed to keep our gaze on the surface – just accept the most simplistic explanation… mindless violence by nihilistic fanatics who hate us for our freedom, our love of democracy, and our chewy goodness. That may work for domestic consumption, since the crime is so heinous, but it seems unlikely that the Pakistani people would accept this explanation. Political assassination is nothing new in Pakistan – Bhutto herself has been accused of employing this tactic in the past. Whatever her shortcomings, she was admired by a substantial number of people, many of whom see Musharraf as the party responsible for her killing. Our government has seen Bhutto only as a means of propping up Musharraf, who counts Cheney among his strongest advocates in the U.S. We are very closely associated with the President/General, and if he is seen as the despoiler of Pakistani’s hopes for a more open society, they may start hating us even more than they do already.