After all that baking, this is what you come up with? Doesn’t even look edible. I’m telling you, I’ve never heard of an artichoke pie. That’s just plain deees-gusting. (Last night it was artichoke sorbet. Uuuulllgghh….)
What the hell does a guy have to do to get a decent meal around here, eh? Christ, I sound like Robert Young on “Father Knows Best.” Can’t a guy get a little attention around this place? Geeeeezzzz. Next I’ll be going around in corduroy jackets with patches on the elbows. (If you see me like that, just shoot me, okay? Do me a kindness.) Honestly, though, the menu around this ludicrous hammer mill is almost too revolting to describe. No, we don’t have a proper chef… unless Boy-Ar-Dee counts. (And it doesn’t, Mitch, so settle down.) We can’t even afford the utensils these days. I’ve been reduced to spooning my dinner with creased slips of construction paper. Pretty soon we’ll be down to shirt cardboards. And then what? Unsold CD’s? Brick fragments? I shudder to think.
Never mind how I get the grub to my mandible. Who prepares our meals? I’ll give you one guess. Hint: His name starts with an “M” and ends with a “(my personal robot assistant)”. Those of you who guessed Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can help yourself to some artichoke pie. (Uuuuuulllgggh….) Sure, I know — wasn’t it me who said we’ve been leaning far too heavily 
on our mechanical friend? Wasn’t it me who said, let’s just be glad for our time together? (No, wait — that last one was Diana Ross. Sorry.) Right, right… but that was weeks ago. Marvin should be able to handle cooking. Mitch has programmed him with the latest recipes from Wolfgang Puck and Chef Guillame. Can we help it if the sauce gets ruined somewhere in the transcription process? Am I to be blamed for everything that goes wrong around here, huh? HUH?
Sorry again, friends. Just a bit on edge. It isn’t that I don’t like artichokes. It’s that, well, Marvin is a little confused about which part of the vegetable is edible. You see, being a mechanical creature without a soul or any identifiable animal needs, Marvin seems to think that the spiny, crunchy part that tastes like chicken feathers is some kind of delicacy. Fact is, it reminds me of something someone described as a “delicacy” whilst standing on a bridge over a pond just outside my girlfriend’s residence hall at SUNY New Paltz in 1980. (I won’t elaborate any further, just in case some of you are reading this over dinner.) 
It may well be true that Marvin can burn this coarse material in his ion reactor, but it certainly doesn’t constitute “food” to the rest of us. Christ in himmel, it’s not even a savory artichoke pie! It’s got brown freaking sugar in it. This robot is trying to make me spew in the worst way. (Though John White and Trevor James Constable seem to enjoy what they term the pie’s “delicate flavor.” I think it’s the result of food poisoning.) Oh, doctor!
Okay. Now I sound like Red Barber. That means it’s time to sign off, for sure. (I hate baseball… honest!) Put in a good word for us over at the cheap lunch counter. As soon as we can hock a few pipe fittings from the mill’s plumbing system, we should be getting some take out. Keep working that monkey wrench, boys — daddy’s hungry.
cavorted with the likes of Errol Flynn back in the day, for chrissake. Then Biden got caught cribbing British Labor party leader Neil Kinnock, and he was out. Would that work today? Not as well as Biden’s clumsily phrased comment that seemed to suggest Obama is cleaner and more palatable to, well, white people. The insufferable NPR Morning Edition team brought up Obama’s comment that he did not take the remark personally, about which one of them commented, well, why should he? It wasn’t about him. Ummm… well, yeah, it was about him, if the comment was a reference to “blackness” in general.
Yes indeed, you can see the outlines of a “knife in the back” explanation for our failure in Iraq when the war is finally over. Again, this is Vietnam redux. Those antiwar protesters, press critics, and wishy-washy liberals emboldened the enemy, undermined our troops, compromised the mission, stabbed the president in the back, etc. Hey, it worked great for Nixon… and for Hitler, come to think of it. Mark my words — this catastrophe will be blamed upon the very people who counseled most strongly against it in the first place. We will be lumped together with everyone from Osama and the crew to those French “surrender monkeys,” whose Gaullist president Jacques Chirac recently had the temerity to suggest that an Iranian nuclear weapon would not be the disaster the U.S. makes it out to be, since its use would result in Teheran’s utter and immediate annihilation by the enormous Israeli and U.S. nuclear arsenals. (The Morning Edition crew seemed utterly flabbergasted at this remark, as if they’d never heard anything so outlandish as the concept of nuclear deterrence that we’ve lived by since the start of the Cold War.)
Bad old movie fanatics will recall The Beast With Five Fingers, a moody horror flick featuring Peter Lorre and a one-handed piano player. Actually, my brother (and Big Green co-founder) Matt wrote one of his many Christmas songs on the theme of this ridiculous movie. I think he called it “Christmas Piece (written for one hand)”. I’ll post the file sometime, if he promises not to kill me for doing so. It’s an eight-track DTRS recording from about ten years ago, now in mothballs. Dig it up, fucker! Is that what I hear you saying? Very well, then… We’ve got a pretty deep grab bag over here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Lots of old masters (and I don’t mean Rembrandt), including 4 track cassette recordings, scary demos, and unreleased out-takes from our last album, 
My feeling is, since he’s a machine, he will feel some sympathy towards these fruits of modern technology (tapes, song files, etc.) and handle them with gentleness and sensitivity. I know he has a strong capacity for… for… what the hell was that noise? Sounded like tapes being dropped down a basement stairs. Excuse me… Marvin? Is that you? What the hell are you playing at, you tin-plated moron? Those reel-to-reel spools are irreplaceable! Get your head out of your ass! What the…? Put that torch away. I said PUT IT AWAY! No… NOOOOO!!!
Okay, that was just a bit of melodrama. Got to keep the kids entertained, know what I mean. Marvin is not one bit clumsy — he’s like a wolf on his feet. It’s the man-sized tuber who’s the clumsy clod around this joint. I warn you, never leave him with the cleaning up after dinner. Can’t tell you how many sets of second-hand china we went through because of that ham-fisted root vegetable. Nowadays we just eat on paper plates recovered from the local falafel vendor. And on those rare occasions when we do use actual dishes, I just ask Trevor James Constable to train his orgone generating device on them after dinner. (Just throw the switch and the bioplasmic etheric energy does its magic while you watch the Daily Show.) Hell, I know — it’s not tubey’s fault. His withered abdominal roots can barely hold a coffee cup, let alone a stack of stoneware platters, heavy with leavings from a four-course Mexican feast. (Clumsy fool.)