Skin temperature 500 degrees Kelvin. 550 Kelvin. 600 Kelvin. Damage report! Skin temperature 750 Kelvin. Pilot to co-pilot – what the hell is “Kelvin” and why is it so damn hot?

Oh, yes… hello, blogospheric visitor. You’re catching your friends in Big Green at kind of a bad time, actually. I would ask you to come back in about half an hour, but we just may have all been burned to a cinder by that time. So… now’s better. You may ask yourself, why is this band always chin-deep in some kind of unlikely peril, rather than wired to a mixing console, turning the pots and making the record you’ve been promised for the last four years? I have an answer to that, I’m fairly sure, only it’s back on the surface of the Earth, where we are headed at approximately 575 miles per hour, through ever-thickening layers of atmosphere, like riding a matchhead over an enormous striker. Hot, baby, hot!

Not that you need a lot of back story (just look below, or click the “Usual Rubbish” link), but last week we rocketed into orbit in one of Gizmandiar’s abandoned space vehicles in order to escape the mindless wrath of our oversized Zenite friend sFshzenKlyrn on his flapjack-fueled rampage through the heart of our little city. Mind you, Gizmandiar and his crew are from a whole ‘nuther planet, so as you might imagine, the controls in this spacecraft were not exactly intuitive. It took me better than five hours to figure out which of these gizmos was a radio (during which time my imagination had gotten the better of me, filling my tiny brain with pictures of a devastated world below, devoid of life… a Rumsfeldian paradise, if you will). Luckily, the seriously unmoored sFshzenKlyrn had not reduced human civilization to ash – everything was still standing except the IHOP in our city center, which… I believe… the man from Zenon… devoured… whole…. (Cue timpani. I said, cue timpani! Damn it, man… you’ve killed the suspense!)

Anyway, his jones sated, his rampage disgorged, sFshzenKlyrn moved on to better things (somewhere in the Pleiades star cluster, I believe – check Entertainment Weekly – Galactic Edition). And with Gizmandiar presumably incinerated or dispatched to some other more tolerable realm of being, there seemed to be no point in bobbing around in orbit for very much longer. Loogit, we may all be indolent, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has to get back to his panhandling. (Once you cultivate a good corner, an absence of even two or three days can mean a serious loss of territory.) Besides, the two Lincolns are beginning to get on everyone’s nerves, even the man-sized tuber’s, who – being a root vegetable – can suck it up better than just about anyone in this organization. But for chrissake, first anti-Lincoln throws posi-Lincoln’s hat out into space, then posi-Lincoln steals anti-Lincoln’s juice box… I mean, how the fuck did either one of those guys win the Civil War, let alone establish the Republican party as a dominant force in American politics?

Okay, so… re-entry was decided upon, destination Cheney Hammer Mill. In the absence of a qualified pilot, it was down to John White, who has circumnavigated the globe many times in his virtual air crafts. Not a lot of difficulty here – just point the nose of the ship towards upstate New York, and down fast! (Though it is getting a bit warm in here…)

Auckland, do you read me. Come in, Brazzaville, come in. Are you receiving me, Des Moines? Is there anybody out there, for chrissake?

Well, now we’ve done it. Golsh dang-git. I mean, god damn it… I may as well swear again, since Gizmandiar and his entire extraterrestrial junta may well have been atomized by deadly keltone rays, fired at city hall by our somewhat intemperate sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. What the fuck… if only that were the end of it. As many of you know, we called sFshzenKlyrn in to help us deal with these foul usurpers, who had deprived of us squathouse, livelihood, and even language. And as I may have mentioned before, our Zenite friend is a little hard to stop once he gets going. And friends, old sFshzenKlyrn got going all right. He certainly hasn’t lost his touch with concentrated trans-dimensional matter disruption beams.

Okay, here’s what happened, judge. First the man from Zenon smashed city hall to smithereens. Gizmandiar had either returned to his home dimension or… well… gone to perdition, as he would have me put it. Anyway, to celebrate our liberation from this tyrant, we offered to take sFshzenKlyrn out for a hardy meal. Sadly, he chose the local IHOP and ordered about 17 consecutive half-stacks of buckwheat flapjacks with blueberry syrup and extra sweet butter. (Mmmmmm-boy.) I know what you’re going to say – why couldn’t you fuckers in Big Green stop him? Well… there’s no simple answer to that question. It was a matter of honor, you see. Also, we partook of a few half-stacks ourselves, and well… let’s say we soon found ourselves in a state of diminished responsibility. (Do I have to draw you a picture? I just got finished with a freaking breath test!)

Yeah, well anyway… what happened next. Like the last time, sFshzenKlyrn got big. I mean, really really big. He freaking broke through the roof of the IHOP and towered over our little city. Even worse, when he goes on a flapjack binge, his state of matter changes from gaseous to solid. It’s like a thunder cloud that suddenly turns to granite, only instead of just lying there, he starts tromping around the village emitting keltone rays left and right. Now, our little upstate town had never experienced anything like godzilla before – extraterrestrial mayors, yes, but no ten-story space monsters. The local constabulary was at a loss as to how to deal with sFshzenKlyrn, and so everybody just kind of closed their shutters and kept their fingers in their ears. This caused Marvin (my personal robot assistant) a certain amount of consternation. (When he can’t see your face, he thinks you’re gone forever.)

I have to confess, we of Big Green kind of panicked. In our flapjack-induced stupor, we commandeered one of Gizmandiar’s spacecrafts and launched ourselves into a super-wide orbit. Now I’m trying to raise someone down on planet earth, and not having a lot of luck. For fuck’s sake, if you’re reading this, contact us, damnit! We don’t know how to land this bloody thing! (And it’s chock full of lawn fertilizer.)

Don’t tell me – let me guess. It’s big. It’s dense. And it’s very, very attractive. Ummmmm… that could be almost anything that fits those criteria. Am I getting warmer? Well, am I?

Crikey. Sometimes Marvin (my personal robot assistant) takes his programming far too seriously. I’ve asked him to help me with a little problem I’m trying to work out… namely, what inhabitable planets can we sail off to in case the titanic struggle between sFshzenKlyrn (trans-physical etheric energy being from Zenon) and Gizmandiar (lawn-obsessed, power-mad space creature now occupying the seat of our local government) renders the earth uninhabitable for a brief time (perhaps six or seven million years… which passes quickly if you are made of feldspar). Matt heard recently that the astronomical community has identified another 28 planets circling distant stars they’ve observed, and I’m sure at least one of them has our name written on it. If I can just get Marvin to tell me which one! Focus, damn it… focus!

We’re almost certain that Gizmandiar and his turf-hugging minions came to us from the relatively proximate planet known as Earth 2. That certainty, of course, is not based on any scientific evidence, since the science complement of our party has long since departed the vicinity of the Cheney Hammer Mill (Mitch Macaphee, never fond of the alley, has other fish to fry, while Trevor James Constable has grown tired of fighting the sewer rats for discarded breadfruit rinds. Mmmmmm…) No, sir, we’re shooting from the hip here, scientifically speaking, and that’s plenty close enough for Big Green. Fact is, the discovery of Earth 2 was announced around the same time that these too-clever-by-half space creatures showed up and started bossing us around, so we made a major inductive leap on the basis of that. (Don’t try this at home!)

Anyway, last week we put out the call for sFshzenKlyrn and he responded with the usual dispatch, faithful cohort that he is. Of course, this hyper-powerful man from Zenon is as uncontrollable in normal life as he is on stage. And if you’ve heard one of his rip-snorting guitar solos, you have a pretty good idea of how sFshzenKlyrn conducts his affairs more generally. I suspect he and this Gizmandiar have some history – maybe a little bad blood, if that term can be said to apply to gaseous beings that exist in multiple dimensions at the same time. sFshzenKlyrn set about stalking city hall in a semi-menacing fashion, later bombarding it with keltone rays which caused the building to shift from its moorings and… well…. kind of disintegrate. (Sorry, folks. Unintended consequences, you know.) Then there was a slightly larger boom, followed by a smoky smell and what felt like a minor earthquake.

So yeah – it was at this point that I started asking Marvin about other hospitable planetary bodies. Just a little insurance, you understand – nothing to get worked up about. So far the best he’s come up with is one of those Magnetars – a neutron star with a tremendously powerful gravitational field. Of course, unless I learn to eat gamma rays for breakfast, that’s probably not much better than a trash-strewn alley on a condemned world… Care to join me? (Thought not.)