Lights are off again. I thought I just bribed that guy last week. Didn’t I? What…. it was the wrong guy? His pushcart was decorated with a cardboard sign that had “electric company” written on it in crayon. Seemed legitimate to me.
It seems I’m too trusting. We all are here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s crap shack of distinction. Oh, we’ve had a lot of crap shacks through the years, from a tumbled-down house on Irving Avenue in Castleton-On-Hudson to the slightly less beat up place next door to it…. (and one or two others, if memory serves). Then of course there was the lean-to in Sri Lanka. (What happened to that? It leaned fro.) Anyway, next to all those joints, this abandoned hammer mill is the next best thing to being someplace decent. And yet, here we are… lights off, phone disconnected, water intermittent, gravity reversed (Mitch Macaphee’s been at it again)… It all comes down to one thing: frankincense. No, wait. It’s another word…. Money. Yeah, that’s it. Bleedin’ money.
Now, Mitch… there’s a guy with frankincense… or, rather, Franken-sense (i.e. the sense of Dr. Frankenstein). He’s always inventing some kind of half human, have robot hybrid. That’s 
why he’s the only one with any cash around here. For chrissake, the government has dropped more than one grant on him for developing “hybrids”. The fools think Mitch is building cars; instead, he’s formulating a cyborg army in his spare time. I should have him pay the electric bill – he’s the bastard that’s using it all. One might suppose that Marvin (my personal robot assistant), built some years back by Mitch, was some kind of prototype, but not a bit of it. Marvin is pure robot; no organic components whatsoever. He’s clean, man. Ergo, he has no role in the coming reign of the cyborgs. (Not to worry, friends. This is just one of Mitch’s pipe dreams. All mad scientists must have them.)
Yeah, I’m putting Mitch on the hook for pizza tonight. The rest of us are completely tapped out. Typical. That’s what we get for, well…. lack of ambition, let’s call it. Though, to be fair, not all of us are lazy mo-fos. Take the man-sized tuber, for instance. Now, he’s willing to do anything 
the situation calls for, including standing out in the street and selling #3 pencils. Particularly when we specifically ask him to do this kind of thing… which, of course, we did, just as soon as he wheeled himself out of the time warp and back into the 21st century. And yes, I did say #3 pencils (we sold out of the #2’s last week). Truth be told, his take has been somewhat disappointing thus far. Perhaps he needs bigger pencils. Marvin! See if we’ve got any of the big number threes!
I know, I know – we’ll only get so far abusing the help. Time to start planning an escape from this crap shack. Can you say, interstellar tour 2009?
keeping things from getting out of hand. I’ve talked about the foreign policy establishment in the Obama administration not being all that different from the late Bush II administration (or that of Bush’s father, for that matter). On the domestic policy front, we see more of the same. All of the major economic decisions are being shaped by Wall Street types, focusing on the health of companies rather than the well-being of workers. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the auto company bailouts. Obama’s automotive task force is made up largely of financial types, and their solutions reflect that experience. What the hell – we could have gotten THAT from McCain. 
some major financial institutions? The fact is, some of them wouldn’t even exist anymore if it wasn’t for our massive infusions of cash. Maybe we should, I don’t know, direct them to provide some capital to expand industrial production in the United States, focused on useful stuff (rather than superfluous weapons systems). Yes, I know… that sounds an awful lot like central planning and socialism, but what the fuck – if we leave this up to the corporate boards and the financial mavens, what’s left of our industrial capacity will have vanished in a few short years, along with our infrastructure for research and development. Nothing will be made here, nothing will be invented here… and the majority of us will be living in Hoovervilles. (Too many of us are right now, frankly.)
Oh, hi. Good god, y’all…. this is a grueling task. To what do I refer, you may ask? No, I’m not making gruel, at least not this evening. (Tomorrow’s menu, however, may include that dubious delicacy… who knows?) Lord, no… many of us here are engaged in finding evidence of the man-sized tuber in various historical accounts, including encyclopedias, history textbooks, comics, etc. After all, it is HE who saved the Republic from a fate worse than death. It is HE who rescued the honor of our most revered president and restored him to the exalted position he once held in the pantheon of the American story. And it is HE who introduced the chocolate cream pie to the post-civil war dinner table… and this BEFORE the invention of the refrigerator. Yes, this is one man-sized tuber that’s larger than life. 
seem an impossible objective: wrest control of the nation away from that nefarious usurper, anti-matter Lincoln, who had inserted himself into the machinery of state like a log in the works. Some kind of conspiracy, you say? An evil effort to subvert the judgment of history and render meaningless the near-incalculable contribution of one man-sized tuber?
Mitch Macaphee to apply his massive brain to the problem. He actually very cleverly reached back in time to the instant anti-Lincoln arrived in the past and snatched him back to futureland before he could do all that damage. Near as we can tell, all is back as it was before. Except for one small detail. This will make you laugh. Remember president George H. W. Bush? Well, because of some insignificant act on the part of anti-Lincoln back in 1864, Bush’s son George W. became the 43rd president. Weirdest thing.