Is the car ready? Good. Engine running? Double good. No, I’m not worried about wasting gas. Last thing on my mind, damnit. Don’t forget your driving shoes – there’s a good chap.
Hello again. Yes, we’re planning a little day trip. Nothing to get too excited about – just a brief opportunity to get our butts out of this place. Plenty of incentives to do just that, now that the gravity at the Cheney Hammer Mill is out of control Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has become a walking, talking, pop-up ad machine. Oh, yes… you heard me right. Ever since he opened that noxious email and got himself taken over by a pernicious computer virus, strange things have been happening to our mechanical friend. First, B-movies started playing on his video terminal. (He was like a walking drive-in for a few days.) Next came the pop-up ads…. kind of like what you get online, except these are little signs and banners that literally pop-up out of his head at unpredictable intervals. Some of them are accompanied by soft hits from the 70s. It’s pretty terrifying.
Mitch Macaphee – Marvin’s inventor and our resident mad scientist – has made several attempts to rid Marvin of this scourge. First he tried reprogramming him – no luck. (For 
a few hours, he thought he was a chicken. But the ads kept coming, so we ditched that.) Next came the arcane mad scientist methods – you know, magnetic fields, big glass tubs of boiling liquids, banks of v.u. meters and flashing lights, the whole bit. Nothing. He even resorted to pantomime… and while that did have some effect (it made the ads change faster, in fact), it wasn’t the solution we were looking for. Now I know this is going to sound like a total cop-out, utterly lame, etc., but it was my idea, actually, to just take a little day trip and sort of let Marvin’s problem sort itself out. These things have a way of taking care of themselves, you know. (Actually, not true, but as empty nostrums go, it will serve.) So into the car we go.
A little tip for all of you – don’t go for a ride with two Lincolns, especially if one is an anti-matter doppelganger of the other. Trust me, one Lincoln is plenty enough company, making speeches, cursing General McClellan, trying out 
new, grim, presidential expressions, etc. When you’ve got two of them in the back seat, Christ almighty! They never agree on anything! They’ll start trying to out-speechify each other. Then anti-Lincoln calls the other one “Maharba” (“Abraham” backwards) just to annoy him. So it’s, “Nice speech, Maharba!” Then you’ll hear posi-Lincoln start with the raspberries, and anti-Lincoln will say “Quit it!” That’s when somebody (not me) has to climb back there and put a stop to it. We usually threaten them with no major addresses for a week, or forbid them from sending the Army of the Potomac into northern Virginia. Sometimes I have to get the man-sized tuber to shake a stick at them. It makes for a pretty uncomfortable ride all around, suffice to say.
Okay, well…. you’ve got your troubles to attend to, no doubt. We’ll be in the car if you need to find us. It’s a green car with four wheels – you can’t miss it. (This is a small place.)
bother with Jindal’s response, and now I’m kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I’ve seen were pretty hilarious. I’m not sure where they were going with that entrance… it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part – an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there’s the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea… especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from “Disneyland” to Las Vegas. Interesting side note – the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it’s all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit… but then what do the Republicans have to talk about except taxes, the deficit (something they’ve apparently just determined is a bad thing), and wacky Democrat projects? With Jindal, Palin, Gingrich, and Joe “The Plumber” their headliners, they’re going to need more substance.
pretty universally bad. An example: an Iraqi man who was a member of the Baath party as part of the terms of his employment (it was a requirement for certain kinds of non-security related jobs); at some point he was kidnapped by unknown assailants, held and tortured for many weeks, such that he was partially paralyzed. During that time, gunmen invade his house and killed his 16-year-old son. His 8-year-old daughter’s school was attacked by assailants, who kidnapped her and other girls, assaulted them heinously and left them for dead (she survived, somehow). Then someone burned their house to the ground. Now they live in a one-room apartment in Syria where they have no means, no possessions, no hope, and no wish to ever return. Multiply that story by about a million and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of disaster this war represents.
about the intermittent gravity here in the Cheney Hammer Mill. I keep telling them, lighten up, goddamnit, but… then they float away. Why do they always grouse at me? Bring your complaints to Matt, you damn lazy Lincolns. At least HE has the sense not to respond in any way. (You know those artistic types.) I guess I answered my own question, eh? In any case, Mitch is still messing with the magnetism of mother earth, as you have likely gathered. Perhaps you yourself have noticed some minor glitches in gravitational constancy. Perhaps not. (Hey… there could be a lot of reasons for that floating feeling you get sometimes.)
of your worldly (and in Marvin’s case, other-worldly) goods through that series of tubes. It all started with unsolicited communications our robot friend received by e-mail. This was strange, as Marvin doesn’t have an email account. (I set one up for him just to avoid cognitive dissonance.) The messages kept on coming, and what the hell…. even I started reading them. I mean, look at this shit:
is actually a wireless mouse – laser pointer. Quite handy.) Suddenly, his arms started moving about in circles, his lights started flashing, and the little video screen on his back started showing scenes from “The Creeping Terror.” I brought Mitch in to have a look, and he said that Marvin had been taken over by some kind of computer virus. Now he spends a good part of the day in the lobby, his video screen showing some promotional video about buying digital photographic prints. Odd.