What the hell, man. Are you sure this is the way to Neptune? I mean, I don’t remember all of these asteroids. For chrissake, I feel like I’m flying through an eighties-vintage arcade video game.
Oh, hi. Glad you decided to check in at this moment. Maybe you could help us with a little navigational problem we seem to be having. Our usually capable mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee seems to have gotten us a little off the beaten path between Saturn and Neptune. I think the explanation is relatively simple – Zenite snuff, helpfully provided by our perpetual sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn. As mentioned previously, Mitch is – while brilliant – not the best space craft pilot even when sober. With a nostril full of that hot stuff from the Small Magellanic Cloud, I doubt he could find his way to the zero-gravity can. Anyway, he appears to have followed the wrong lode star or something on that order, and we are now dodging some of the biggest, lumpiest, nastiest looking asteroids I’ve seen in a couple of weeks, bar none. (We’re using all kinds of exotic evasive maneuvers, like the reverse double-back figure seven and the inverted stroke-six with change back from your twenty. Hey, look ’em up – I can’t explain how they work!)
Okay, so here we are – threading our way between hunks of jagged stone en route to a planet that is probably in another direction entirely. This in the wake of a string of thrashing performances on the big planet, Jupiter, from which we were unceremoniously ejected when it became 
known that Mitch Macaphee had caused the big impact from a few weeks back. (Some kind of avionics test, I believe – Matt’s talked to him about this kind of thing.) What went down? Well, our rented P.A. system, for one thing. The man-sized tuber had to abandon the mixing console when our Jovian patrons started tossing burning wads of methane gas at him. (Tubey simply isn’t used to the plain-clothes club scene.) Marvin (my personal robot assistant) helped wheel the tuber out of harm’s way, but that didn’t keep the main speaker array from tumbling over into the orchestra pit. As a scholar once said, it blowed up real good. Oh, the horror… the horror.
In any case, the Jupiteranians (or Jovians or whatever the hell) drove us out at the point of a flaming pitchfork, as it were. Mitch’s little avionics experiment produced a titanic ‘splosion, we gather, and that has a tendency to piss folks off. There was screaming and gnashing 
of teeth, and that’s just amongst the band members. Those extraterrestrials have a whole sockful of different ways to express their anger, many having to do with the emission of high-intensity radiation. We all got out alive, thank whomsoever, though I think the man-sized tuber may have sustained some minor psychological injuries. We may even be talking post traumatic stress disorder. He’s been sitting in front of the only Web-enabled computer in our spacecraft, staring at the e-Bay listing for an enormous zucchini. (He has a kind of longing look in his “eyes” – it worries me, frankly.)
Hey, tubey – forget the zucchini of your dreams for a few minutes and man the navigation console. Tubey! Jesus H. Frankenberry… Is there a vegetable psychiatrist in the house?
to gain a couple of (or, more likely, just one) Republican vote(s) in the Senate – votes that would probably be superfluous without the public option anyway. At this moment, I’m hoping this was just a trial balloon put up by an increasingly pusillanimous White House, but my common sense tells me that’s not the case. The public plan was the ten-day-old soup bone tossed to the left in exchange for their acquiescence to the administration’s decision not to even discuss adopting a single payer system; so, of course, the triangulators we’ve put in charge of our government consider this expendable, just as they consider progressives a block of votes they can take for granted. Stupid move, if true. The public option is all that’s left of meaningful health insurance reform. Without that, we might as well not bother. The balance of the legislation will essentially require everyone to buy private insurance, with subsidies for those who cannot afford it, and that mandate would only benefit big fat private insurers. In fact, it would set things up so that whether the legislation passes or not, they would stand to win.
of why a national health insurance plan would tend not only provide better coverage, but actually save money… and lots of it. This is often framed as an effort to “socialize” the health care industry by having the government – and the taxpayers – pay to cover the uninsured, who are more often than not portrayed as a.) lazy, b.) irresponsible, and/or 3.) selfish – a kind of “hand out”, if you will. Here’s the part that, frankly, makes us look dumb: the government (and taxpayers) already insure the most expensive people in the country to insure, namely the elderly (Medicare) and the poor (Medicaid, S-CHIP). Extending, say, Medicare to cover everyone, including young, healthy workers, would make the system better able to pay for itself and provide better care. How good is Medicare, really? Ask mom or grandma… if she’s not too scared to talk to you because Glen Beck told her you may be a socialist.
Greetings from Titan, a dry alien moon orbiting the planet Saturn. We’re taking a little break out here on what’s described as “The Riviera of the Gas Giants” in all the travel brochures (my ass!) as we wait for the start of a second string of performances on Jupiter. I have to say, the accommodations are less than what we were encouraged to believe. For one thing, the hotel has no oxygen – it’s bring your own here on Titan. That’s probably because of the methane atmosphere – indeed, on this godforsaken rock they use bottled oxygen for blow torches. Freaky turnaround, dude. And the waterskiing! Not at all like the promotional DVD! They were showing black sand beaches and azure blue waters, and what do we find on the actual, non-promotional Titan? Liquid methane pools. Aromatic, to say the least. I am depressed.
energized atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet, still roiling from the impact of what was supposed to be a comet (but may, in fact, have been a test rocket launched by our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee). Whatever the cause, that fearsome impact has really lit a fire under practically everyone on this airless void of a planet. In fact, I was getting a bit nervous as we waited for our perennial sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, 
does deserve some credit for running the sound console during our first set. I should also say that, well, it’s an automated console, pre-programmed by someone more competent than a root vegetable, so his was not a particularly remarkable accomplishment. (He also had some kibitzing from Marvin, who may have thought he was still driving the spacecraft.) What other stand-out memories from that first performance? Well…. John throwing one of his sticks into low orbit. (Gravitational anomaly – happens all the time out here.) And then there was the fruit cup. Very delicious.