Are you broke in Hoboken? Skint in Flint? Empty in Tempe? Down on your luck in Keokuk? Well, let me tell you friend, I’ve been there. I’ve BEEN there.
Hope you’re well. Things are okay here… about as okay as things can be. Actually, right at this moment, my knees are a little cold, but aside from that, all is well. (Bloody winter! It’s miserable even when it’s not here yet.) I suppose I should get our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to look at the thermostat one more time. Seems like no matter how many times I turn that dial clockwise, the old Hammer Mill stays cold as a New England clam. And now that we’re on the subject, I notice that there are icicles hanging from Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Great Scott… it’s not just a little glitch in the temp control. This place is a block of freaking ice. What the hell – didn’t I bribe the oil man this month? Oh, right…. not suppose to say that on the Internets. (Please don’t let that get around, okay? There’s a good chap.)
As you might imagine, it’s hard to heat a big old barn of a place like the Cheney Hammer Mill through these upstate New York winters. When that cold air blows in from Canada, this place is like an ice chest, 
what with all the nooks and crannies and outright gaps between the bricks. (Then there are the broken windows. Six or seven… dozen…) Fact is, even when we can fill the fuel tank, most of the heat goes straight outside. And fixing the windows would take effort … effort better spent on the things that only Big Green can do. Like wasting whole decades in a state of near somnambulant immobilization. (Ask our guitarist friend sFshzenKlyrn about that. Once he ate a barrel full of desiccated herring – a favorite delicacy on his home planet of Zenon – and fell into a deep stupor that lasted 12.5 million years.) I guess my point is that we need our innovators, our problem-solvers to get us out of this hole. All we can do is make music-like sounds with our various instruments. That won’t keep anyone warm.
I’ll share a brief anecdote with you. Our old cohort Trevor James Constable spent part of one winter with us, some years back. One night he left his patented orgone generating machine plugged in and running, with its fearsome array pointed at the wall between his quarters and mine. When I awoke the next 
morning, my bedroom wall was glowing orange and white, like a creamsicle (except less awesomely delicious). Heat was just wafting off of that sucker. At first I thought the place was on fire, and when I realized it was the O.G.M., I thought it had somehow irradiated the wall, turning it into a molten mass of hell fire. Curiously, what had actually taken place was that Trevor James’s infernal contraption had created a space/time warp to somewhere in the tropics – it may have been Honduras, because I smelled cigar smoke. It was such a hot day on the other side of the warp that the heat was rolling into my bedroom in waves. Astounding phenomenon!
Anyway, my point is… we need help, damn it – expert help! Where the hell is Trevor James when you need him?
Looks like the bottom is falling out of the legislative health insurance reform effort. Oh, there may be a bill, but the political legs are getting very wobbly. All of the compromises and fall-backs the left has agreed to over the past year have been painted as too radical for the public at large, even though the public at large broadly supports elements like the “public option” and expansion of Medicare to people under 65. In other words, the majority of people in the United States think there should be some kind of government provided health insurance available to everyone, not just retirees, veterans, and people in the United States Congress… but Joe Lieberman and 40 G.O.P. senators don’t want it, so it’s not going to happen. Small wonder that more recent polling by one of the major networks and the Wall Street Journal shows a majority now against the health care legislation under consideration in the Senate. Someone should poll Lieberman and make sure that he’s mostly happy now, since that’s all that seems to matter.
Okay, so… look at the poll again. Something like 55% of those surveyed say the country is going in the “wrong direction.” What the hell does that mean? Wasn’t it going in the wrong direction last year as well, under Bush? Are we to assume that this means that a majority wants to elect Republicans, the folks who work tirelessly for the failure of the kind of health reform most people support (e.g. single payer, public option, Medicare expansion)? If this is like most political polls, it’s just a simple question – is the country moving in the right direction: yes, no, undecided. It seems as though, as with support for the war, there is an expectation on the part of those being polled that all one needs to do is vote every two years, sit back, fold your arms, and wait for the change to come in the mail. A portion of that is, I would guess, a function of how disconnected most respondents feel with the policy…. Yeah, war is bad, but I don’t have to fight it, so go for it. Yeah, being grievously ill without health coverage is bad, but it probably won’t happen to me, so leave everything the way it is.
Matt’s doing okay, thanks very much. He finished that little project he was working on – you know, the papier-mache helicopter that can fly between dimensions and traverse great distances fueled only by a LePage glue gun. Man, THAT was a big disappointment! Gave the prop a spin, tossed it over the battlements, and down to the street it went like a week-old cabbage. Man got to have his hobbies, you know. If it weren’t for the daily task of keeping those bazooka-toting, treestand-dwelling deer murderers away from the back forty, I don’t know how else he would occupy his time.
John has been playing guitars, banging drums, changing the laws of physics. He’s had a little help in that regard from Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, who spent a good part of this year tinkering with gravity and inertia. Next year he hopes to move on to the study of dark matter, but that involves a bit more driving around than he likes. You know old Mitch! Likes to keep close to his home planet, if he can. Anyway, he sends his regards. (Just handle them carefully… they may be radioactive.)
digress… ) Marvin’s last score in robot school was 1,694,668 calculations per second. He’ll have to work on that, obviously, but still…. we’re proud… VERY proud…