No WPIX? That’s odd. Okay, then. Try WRVO in upstate New York. Nothing? Well…. that may not mean anything. Still…. you’d think there’d at least be static.
Hello, friends of Big Green. Now, I’d like to be able to tell you that we managed to break out of the strange inter-temporal space warp we zagged our way into a couple of weeks ago. (Has it been a couple of weeks? Bobbing through a time warp, I tend to lose track of time.) And I’d like to be able to tell you that we flew our way over to Neptune for a string of highly successful and lucrative – yes, LUCRATIVE – performances to adoring crowds of seven-legged leviathans from the nether reaches of our solar system. I mean, what band wouldn’t like to be able to tell you that? (Can’t think of a single one.) Alas, it was not the case. Yes, we did emerge from the time warp… but apparently not in the right place at all. (I just hope sFszhenKlyrn is having a good time in our absence, playing those cushy gigs and collecting all that cool, cool, money. Sonuvabitch.)
Okay, so we come out of this weird-o space void, right, and we’re someplace that looks kind of familiar: general vicinity of planet Earth. You know, the ‘hood for us Earthlings, right? Only something’s funny…. very funny. No satellites. No space junk. No television signals. This was 
strange. Another thing, too – we could clearly see the city of Los Angeles from an orbit of 150 miles. That’s totally not right. (Aside from the fact that it was little more than a Spanish mission church with some stables and a well.) Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) communicated through his aldis lamp light-flashing code something that roughly translates to: “This is totally freaking me out, man.”
Hey, look… we’ve been in tight spots before, we of Big Green. (And no, I’m not talking about some spandex-wearing 80’s hair-band permutation of the group). We’ve gone back in time, forward in time, even sideways in time. But this is different. I mean, okay… if we saw, say, Genghis Khan signing the Magna Carta (think back to your elementary 
school history, boys and girls), that would be unnerving enough. However, Genghis Khan riding a moped across the newly-completed intercontinental railroad as he signs the Magna Carta – that’s just wrong in so many ways. (Take that, Hammermill Days graphic arts department, a.k.a. man-sized tuber!) And yet there he is, before our very eyes. How can it be? Well… the nearest we can determine, Mitch Macaphee’s reckless driving has thrown us into the equivalent of a “time blender” – as if the monumental forces of time and space are rendering history itself into a multi-temporal smoothie. Drink deep, friends.
So, we’ll be putting down on this bizarr-o planet Earth to get our bearings. My guess is that we’ll see, oh I don’t know, dinosaurs wrestling with ocean liners as volcanoes spout renaissance paintings. (Take that, Tubey! HA-HA!)
gathering is described as an expanded club of economic powers, there is one global economic power that is not on the guest list. Which one? To borrow a time-worn phrase, the workers of the world – all those folks in all those countries who make the whole thing run; workers that are paid, underpaid, and unpaid…. everyone from the office drone to the subsistence farmer to the domestic slave-spouse. The folks that carry all those wealthy people on their shoulders – they will be severely underrepresented in Pittsburgh, and with good reason. If they start informing global economic policy, well then…. that would be a different game altogether.
over for dinner on the weekends. You’re always gambling on nothing going wrong, and something always does. If the car breaks down, you’re basically fucked – better luck next month. I had one credit card that kept me rolling for a few years – that was my rainy day, in essence. And I had no kids (cats, though). Can’t imagine what people do with dependents in a situation like that. What energy is left for organizing? I’m always amazed by the poor in countries like Haiti, where people have organized and faced down very powerful forces, decade after decade, setback after setback… and yet still they link arms and try again.
Oh, yeah… hi out there in normal-land. It is I, Joe of Big Green, speaking for the entire enterprise when I say, w.t.f., we are more lost than ever, if such a thing is imaginable. Bad enough our renegade man-sized tuber went on a rampage, reducing our navigational console to a somewhat less than functional state. After that, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee decided to take the reins, using a little technological prestidigitation to make the ship go this way and that. Unfortunately, one of his most dramatic “zigs” (or was it a “zag”?) sent us through what can only be described as a hole in the time-space fabric. (Hey, the universe is getting a little long in the tooth, okay? It’s bound to fray around the edges. Just wait until you’re 13.5 billion years old and see how you feel.)
on the phone to Dell tech support, and was talking to someone in about three minutes. So clearly, time is like an accordion in this place, and it’s not exactly clear how to get from here to planet Neptune. And as you might imagine, any time-space continuum that resembles an accordion is bound to be annoying as hell. The only thing worse would be the banjo dimension, or perhaps … I shudder to suggest it (for in some sphere of hell it will then be real) … a … a bagpipe dimension. OOOHHHHHHHH….. Not a nice place! Well, that’s not where we are, anyway. Narrows it down a little, at least.
programmed with an understanding of no less than 73 languages, including 19th Century television-show English. Well, Marvin chewed on the Lincolnian advice for all of seven minutes, then spit out a little slip of paper that read, “contact