Well, anyway… why do we have to do the same thing every time? I mean, I know safety is important, but frankly we can’t afford a spaceship at this point. Can’t we just hitchhike to Neptune?
Good god, man. Whatever happened to the spirit of adventure? We never used to be so risk averse. We used to bear to the left and take chances. Now look at us. (You can use a smoked glass lens, if you prefer.) We’re worried about lack of gravity, lack of oxygen, exposure to radiation – what a bunch of wimps! The only one who’s really not intimidated by any of this is the mansized tuber. (At least he hasn’t said anything about it to me.) Fact is, we have to do these tours on the cheap, what with a recession on and all that. Money’s tight, and our corporate label is even tighter. They don’t even want to budget for us, let alone a ship to carry us in. Looks like we’ll be relying on comped meals again. Ever try to get a free lunch on Uranus? Hah. Take it from me – it’s even less appetizing than it sounds.
As always, our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had a suggestion. “We should use some kind of rocket ship,” he told us. “Perhaps a multi-stage space vehicle with sufficient kinetic power to propel us beyond the surly bonds of mother earth.” (Sometimes Mitch tries to wax poetic, though it usually comes out sounding more like someone waxing their car.) To translate from Pretentious Asshole-ish, our learned friend had a specific space vehicle in mind. It was based on the Korean design that Dear 
Leader is so very fond of. Mitch reasoned that, in as much as that type of rocket had successfully put a satellite in orbit just a few short weeks ago, it would probably serve us well. When I pointed out that the thing had actually, well, fallen apart and crashed into the ocean, he seemed a bit irked. It’s almost as if he wants us to crash and burn. Sometimes I wonder about Mitch. What kind of mad science advisor is he, anyway?
Okay… so the Kim Jong Il missile vehicle is not such a good idea. Well, you’ll be glad to know that others in our entourage piped up with suggestions. The quality of same? Well…. not so great. Matt though we should rehabilitate the Robinson’s Jupiter 2 spacecraft. I’m thinking this is a little unrealistic, since it was just a stage set and is now owned by some guy in New Jersey. Then there was that converted treehouse we took up a couple of tours ago. That thing was reduced to splinters over the 
winter. (I think the plows hit it – terrible thing.) So Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had little to add to this debate. Fact is, he’s thinking about joining the Marvin Depreciation Society, a facebook group devoted to “Marvin the Paranoid Android”, who is a character in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I think Marvin is having a slight identity crisis over the fact of the other robotic Marvin’s existence, and is hoping the depreciation society will devalue the other Marvin, thereby enhancing his own value. Yeah, it’s complicated. (In addition, he and Professor John Robinson had words the other day, so it could be the Jupiter 2 option is off the table.)
Anyway…. we’ll get to Neptune. I am sure of this. How, we don’t quite know. Details, details. Ah, for the simple life.
The Times of London quotes a U.S. commander as describing this action in terms of a “D-Day Moment”, but in the context of a conflict that has lasted nearly twice as long as America’s part in World War II, this would seem in relative terms more like a second. Also, rather than attacking the flank of the most powerful military force in the world, we are invading a battered, impoverished region of one of the planet’s most miserable nations – a place where people struggle to subsist, and where large-scale conflict will likely result in a major displacement of the population, perhaps approaching the scale of what is now occurring across the border in Pakistan’s tribal departments.
WAR TAX LEVIES. Our system has corrected for this oversight, which proved the undoing of our last major imperial enterprise – the Indochina wars. By eliminating these two age-old institutional pillars of warfare, we have effectively disconnected the bulk of our population from the costs of warfare. Fueled by borrowed treasure and the victims of economic misfortune, our wars have become self-perpetuating. Afghanistan and Iraq are going to be a great deal harder to stop than was Vietnam (and it was hard to stop the Vietnam war, with the end coming far too late for the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). This flurry of recent fighting is just another flare up in what has proven a far longer, more difficult campaign than anyone thought going in. The real D-Day question is, when will our V-E day arrive?
Nah, Big Green’s not doing oldies – no sweat, man. Been there, done that. Besides, if you try to pull that off in the Crab Nebula, they’ll cook you for dinner. Literally. (Ask 
our notes, all of our old song lists, and pore through the lot, writing down the ones we want to do, crossing out the ones we don’t. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has his personal favorites, and his understanding of music is limited to a few lines from the 1956 World Book Encyclopedia, which his inventor Mitch Macaphee inserted into his memory banks as test data. (Hey… he’s going to be traveling with us to the great beyond, so why not allow him a few requests, right? I said, am I right? Hel-looooo?)
York State Senate. In fact, in the midst of our desperation, we’ve asked Mitch Macaphee for his assistance. (Sometimes a mad scientist can see his way out of a conundrum much more easily than, say, an unemployed musician or an oversized root vegetable.) It took Mitch about three hours to come up with a solution of sorts. He walked in from his lab with a small, oblong metal box which he called the “Tune-o-matic.” He pressed a red button on the right side of the machine, and a slip of paper emerged from a small slot on the opposite side. The paper has some writing on it that appeared to be in Vietnamese. Mitch took one look at that and stormed out of the room with the tune-o-matic under one arm. There has since been some banging and swearing from behind the closed door of his lab… I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this wondrous device presently.