No baby on that. I’m off pop songs this week, friends. Had it. Mention one and it’s with me all day, like those little transmitters they plant in your head when you’re in the mental institution. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? No? Where did I hear that? Well…. let’s just say a little voice told me.

Okinawa! (Another island entirely.) We are getting closer to the goal of launching our ad hoc interplanetary tour. How much closer? Well… I’ve got a hat, a baseball hat, and it says Big Green Tour ’06 on it. And we’ve got suitcases. Hey, it’s closer than we were LAST week, okay? What am I, a machine? That’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s role, not mine. For those of you who have been wondering (particularly you fans in the greater cyborg community), we have relented on the topic of bringing Marvin along on the tour. We simply can’t do it without him and expect the kinds of flies… um… crowds we’ve been drawing the last few times out. Looks like the task of running interference back on old terra firma will have to fall to someone else. Man sized tuber, perhaps? Hmmmmm….

No, seriously – we have made progress. For one thing, we’ve settled on a name for our tour. It’s going to be called BIG GREEN’S GET OUT OF TOWN FAST! SUMMER TOUR 2006… for obvious reasons. There are also some less than obvious reasons, like our perpetual need for additional cash. Can’t beat the revenue of an interplanetary tour, especially when – like us – you remain unhappily obscure on your home planet. (Just barely moving the needle down here on Earth, friends – I’ll be frank with you. And don’t call me Frank.) And with all these (ahem) unexpected rebuilding costs, damn it, man! That scaffolding is going to be up for months on end. Do you have any idea how much masons charge in our neck of the woods? They have to import all the bricks from Madagascar, for chrissake. We need to make hay, gentlemen, make hay. Cause as we’ve learned from Edward G. Robinson during Israel’s captivity in Egypt… can’t make bricks without straw. Nyeaah. Where’s your Moses now….? 

So there you have it. Don’t delude yourself that we are only in this for the sake of “art”, or that we make music for reasons of “peace” and “love” and “pastrami”. No, look… the utilities don’t take crystal necklaces in lieu of a check every month, no matter how hard we try to polish them up and make them look nice. No dice! Money makes the world go round. (Pop music again!) Anyway, like anyone else who wears pants and eats sandwiches, we gotta have it, and if we can’t find it here on the good oit, we’ve got to go out in space and rake it up. Necessity breeds invention – we have posi-Lincoln inventing the tour for us right now, working the phones, sending interstellar e-mails to the usual venues, mailing out contracts. He’s actually pretty good at it, though he does tend to write everything down on ancient pieces of paper that have already been written on. One of them had his old address on it – guess he lived in Gettysburg once. Who knew? Damn his habits of thrift! Not the most efficient filing system, but hell… it’s better than mine. (Mine was bombed out with the mill, thankfully.)

We’ll be setting dates real soon and making them public, so if you’re planning to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Ursa Major in the next six or seven weeks, leave some space in your calendar. And bring an appetite! Mitch Macaphee plans to handle the catering this time out. He’s supposedly a really solid cook, as most chemists are. (I hear he has over 100 recipes. He calls them “elements.” Funny guy.)