What is this? Another one? And wait… there’s one more! Can’t you see it there, behind the gaseous cloud formation? Oh, right… that’s sFshzenKlyrn. Step aside, will you? I’m trying to make a point here…

Ah, yes… the blogosphere. Nearly forgot. Sorry, friends. I’ve taken to having Marvin (my personal robot assistant) take dictation on this page, so very often he’ll pick up stuff I don’t actually want him to transcribe. Sometimes he starts a little early and some times he just fails to exercise common sense. Okay, like now, Marvin. Stop typing for a moment… I’ve got to use the can. I said stop. Did you type that? Stop, damnit! STOP! Oh, Jesus… never mind. I’ll just continue – it’s simpler, really. Anyway… I suppose I should explain. I was just commenting to my colleagues on the hitherto undiscovered planet around star 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer. Damn, just wait until we get news of this back to planet Earth! People in the astronomical community will really sit up and take notice this time.

What’s that, Johnny? It’s been discovered? Bloody Yahoo headlines! You at least could have left me a few days to savor my imagined triumphant discovery. No matter.

Well, as some of you may already know, planetary pioneers or not, we did pretty well on planet Mars this past week, performing some tunes off of our upcoming album (plug, plug) as well as older numbers from the Big Green songbook. There were a couple of exciting moments, like when our oxygen began to run out. Luckily, we were able to innovate a solution to this most fundamental of dilemmas, even without the help of our too-clever-by-half science advisers, Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James Constable, both of whom remained on earth this time out. Indeed… as the air in our makeshift spacecraft began to grow quite thin, Matt had a flash of inspiration (comes from watching those fan-fiction Star Trek Web videos). He stuffed the man-sized tuber into his terrarium along with a sack of plant food and clicked on the grow lamps. Well, that sucker started pumping out oxygen as fast as we could catch it. WTF – that man-sized tuber has a practical use after all. (Aside from general likeability.)

Okay, so the gigs went okay, though I will admit… no cash changed hands at any time. I for one am chalking that down to our paymasters at Loathsome Prick Records, our corporate label. No doubt payment was made, just not to us. (After we finished playing, somewhere in an office building in New York a computer went “cha-ching!”) Someone got paid, that’s the important thing. Anyway, we left the red planet and started wandering in the general direction of Earth when one of the Lincolns (can’t remember which one, actually) took a particular interest in a small cluster of stars in the mid distance. So he took the controls. That was last night, while the sanest amongst us slept.

Now we’re in the general vicinity of Cancri 55, though I can’t say exactly how we got here. (I think sFshzenKlyrn knows, but he’s not saying.) Hey… what can I say? We’ll let you know if there’s a Starbucks there.

Antlers? Not antlers. That won’t work at all. You need something more simian looking. A chimp’s muzzle, perhaps, or lemur tail. Prehensile, yes… that’ll do the trick.

Oh, it’s you again, mister Spindle-legs. (A quote from Lost In Space, sorry to say.) Welcome back aboard the S. S. something sacred, where yours truly is coughing up copy for the commodore. Who’s the commodore? Well, that’s the guy in charge of Loathsome Prick records – the fellow who sent us off on this fool’s errand to planet Mars, where Big Green is slogging through some promotional performances to support the release of our next album… the one that ain’t done yet. Want a good time? Try careering 143 million miles through interplanetary space in a converted piece of playground equipment piloted by a crew of genetically modified, oversized root vegetables. You don’t know the meaning of the word “excitement” until you’ve done that once or twice. (Frankly, once is enough for me.)

As many of you will have surmised, we did eventually catch up with that speedy planet Mars, in spite of our poorly-planned trajectory. Man-sized tuber “A” (the original one) loaded a few more logs on the atomic propulsion fire and gave us enough additional thrust to reach Mars about 20 hours late (right about when we were scheduled to start playing our first gig, in an open-air stadium at the foot of Mount Olympus, the tallest peak in the known solar system already.) Luckily, time is not as precious on the red planet as it is on the green, so we were able to gather ourselves together, take a few quick belts of kilulu juice (official beverage of Big Green), and take our places on Mars’s most prestigious concert stages. Oh, yes, friends, this is the top of the world out here. No doubt about it – ask any Martian. (Note: This is what our Loathsome Prick publicist told us to say. Actually, it seems a hell of a lot like a graveyard to me, but…)

So anyway… we’ve played a bunch of numbers for a bunch of Martians and other unidentified space critters, pulling out archival tunes like “Special Kind of Blood” and “Don’t Give Up The Ship”, as well as tunes from our upcoming album (with tantalizing titles like “The Bishop” and “Do It Every Time”). Pretty soon, we started wondering about the crowd… could there be that broad a variety of head shapes, body sizes, and antennae styles? Seemed odd. Then John noticed an alien with a pirate hat on, and we realized what was up. Hallowe’en on Mars – guess it’s pretty big in these parts, or so Marvin (my personal assistant) tells me. (Don’t ask me how he knows. Like Tonto, he hangs out in those barrooms and hears things, I imagine.) And of course sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, had a thing or two to say about this imported tradition. (He tells me the bastardized Martian term for the holiday, literally translated, is “Hollow mo’on.” Doesn’t lose much, actually.) So when in Rome…. don a costume and join the festivities. (But no antlers, Marvin. They don’t suit you.)

So, I’d say the first Martian gigs went okay. No major upheavals or breakdowns. A good time was had by all and sundry. Sure, the spaceship won’t start and we’re stuck here until we can find a competent mad science mechanic, but that’s nothing. Nothing at all. (Until our oxygen runs dry…. oh, man….)

Trans-Martian insertion commence… four… three… two… one… one… ONE! Commence, damnit! What’s the matter with you clones? Geebus!

I’m telling you, my friends – you just can’t get good help these days, not anywhere. Not on Earth (our home planet). Not on Mars (our current place of business). Not in deep space (which separates Earth from Mars). As you may recall from our previous Web-based utterances (known as blog entries), we’re running a little short-handed here in Big Green-land, particularly owing to the recent “brain drain” at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. The more knowledgeable (and higher-paid) members of our contingent – mad scientist Mitch Macaphee and etheric energy specialist / inventor Trevor James Constable flew the coop, having grown tired of our slovenly ways, our peasant fare, our… general ripeness, if you will. Anyway, they lit off for Rio, Monaco, Paris, and pretty much anyplace better than the mill.

So what the hell, we thought, we don’t need them. We can manage our own interplanetary travel, right? I mean, it’s not rocket science. Well, the fact is, folks… funny story. Turns out, it is rocket science. And self-sufficient as we may be, we are not bloody NASA, okay? So yes, we did manage lift off (with some difficulty), but that was the end of the easy part. On Matt’s advice, I had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) point the nose of the ship towards our objective – planet Mars, where bookings awaited us. Right… now this is the complicated part. Turns out shooting for Mars is shooting at a moving target. That sucker’s speeding along at some ungodly speed. So by the time we’re what should have been half-way there, it’s way the fuck ahead of us! That meant making some kind of complicated course change that required more hands than we could muster. Oh, there was one other option. You know… being screwed. No one’s favorite, as it happens.

Well, luckily for us, our good ex-friend Mitch Macaphee left one of his travel trunks in the ship’s storage bay. In desperation, we cracked it open, looking for something… anything… that could get us out of this jam (even if it was just a rope to hang ourselves with). Buried under some novelty tee-shirts (“I’m with Frankenstein”??) and other throw away items was one of Mitch’s many inventions – a small device he had been obsessed with over the course of several weeks… something he called the clonolator. He was going to try and sell it to Clonaid (a movement run by space people called the Raelians, not a refreshing drink) but I suspect he was asking too fat a price. Anyway, we thought what the hell – let’s clone the help we need to get this sodding ship back on course. So we ran tubey through the clonolator and zip-bang, it created several replicas of our erstwhile little root vegetable. Just the extra hands we needed.

Well, quite nearly. Don’t ask me why we didn’t run someone competent through that thingy. I guess we thought the man-sized tuber could handle it better than we mere mammalian mortals. Whatever – these clone-tubers are almost as useless as tubey himself. And Mars is getting farther and farther ahead of us! Damn you, Mitch!!!