A little more to the left. I said LEFT! (Schmucks…) Little more…. little more… good. Okay, now we need another one for the north wall. Hurry… I think I hear the sound of bricks crumbling.
Oh, hi. Didn’t notice you there on the other side of the computer screen. Greetings from the abandoned Cheney 
Hammer Mill, just one week after our triumphant return from the great beyond (where we do nearly all of our performances). Did I say triumphant? Wrong word. Ignominious is a better fit to the circumstances. What can I tell you? Broken down spacecraft (nothing new there). Problematic re-entry (nearly a burn-up, as it happened). Crash landing on solid ground (ouch!). Limping home in disgrace (with the exception of the man-sized tuber, who had to be wheeled in a cart… being a vegetable and all…). Being met at the Hammer Mill door by virtually an entire police department (investigating an abandoned space vehicle complaint… and yes, it was down to us). So that thing about “triumphant?” Yeah…. just forget it.
Okay, well… it took a couple of days to clear up that whole police thing. They took us down to the station, fingerprinted us, scanned our retinas, etc. Keen to unpack from our long interstellar sojourn, we scraped together enough bail to 
get the human contingent out of there – that left Marvin (my personal robot assistant), the tuber, and Big Zamboola behind bars for a few hours while we called the local bail bondsman. As it happened, they set a pretty stiff bail for Zamboola, mainly because of the impracticality of keeping a celestial body (with its own gravity) in a holding cell. Marvin they let go on his own recognizance. (He was talking to them while they worked and, well… it got kind of annoying, I think. He started telling them about his anvil collection. Sheesh.)
Once the bribe… I mean, bail was paid and we had a chance to re-acclimate ourselves to positive gravity, it became obvious that things hadn’t been going very well at the Cheney Hammer Mill in our absence. No, those mongooses (mongeese?) hadn’t come back, though that remains a very real possibility. No, it wasn’t once again occupied by 
either pirates or space creatures, nor by denizens of middle earth…. nor cavemen. (Did someone say mimes? No, no mimetic infestation as of yet.) No, it was more in the way of general dilapidation. Frankly, the place is falling to pieces. No great surprise, right? I mean, the foundation is literally crumbling beneath our feet. (Especially Mitch Macaphee’s feet. He’s been putting on a little weight lately… not from good eating, you understand, but from some arcane experiment he’s running on himself… something to do with increasing his specific gravity to nearly five times its original value. We now call him “titanic man” behind his back.)
So anyway, we’ve been down in the catacombs, the arches, the basement… whatever, shoring up the beams with spare timbers. Not a lot of those left…. we may need to use something else. Oh, tubey! Got a job for you!
write these words. Now, I’ve mostly heard from Republicans on the topic this week (because I listen to NPR), and they seem determined to characterize everything in the bill that is not a tax cut as “wasteful spending,” as “pork,” etc. Not sure they quite grasp the concept of Keynesian stimulus in this context at least. That’s the general impression I’m getting. They are philosophically welded to tax cuts – specifically, capital gains tax cuts and those that benefit the wealthy disproportionately. That’s all they ever talk about, practically. And though more than a third (now, 42%) of the stim package is just that, they’re still squawking. Their idea of “compromise” is having the other side sign on to their program. Once would hope that’s not going to happen, but with the Democrats, anything is possible (though Obama does seem to be showing a little spine on this issue lately).
military budget. That baby is packed full of all kinds of high ticket items that are utterly useless, but that are nonetheless produced in Congressional districts all across the country. Essential stuff like Virginia-class submarines (about $2 billion a piece), F-22 raptors ($300 million plus a piece), and, of course, everyone’s favorite endless boondoggle, “missile defense”, which really should be named “defense contractor defense”, because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. These great Republican defenders of the public purse vote for these projects time and time again, sluicing billions of dollars into the sink hole that is military procurement, while all other human needs are neglected… including those of our military personnel!
you… it was HARD. We more or less followed the re-entry instructions Urich found tucked under the navigation console (it was buried in coffee grounds and cigarette butts, but still readable). His angle of descent was a bit too steep, perhaps, and the second-hand Soyuz capsule heated to the traditional 450 degrees Kelvin. That was the first piece of difficulty. The second? No water landings with Russian spacecraft. We were forced to find open ground somewhere within walking distance of our long-term squat at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (Why walking distance? No cab fare. And it’s not like we’ve got the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln out there trawling for us…. even though we have not one but two Lincolns on board.) 
pinheads, protozoa, large molecules, smaller ones…. then, CRACK! We came to a kind of sudden stop. I think we all lost several inches in height – particularly Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who may have compacted one of his hip-gimbals. (He’ll need to consult with Dr. Macaphee on that, no doubt.) My teeth seem to move around a lot more than they did last week. Oh, and the man-sized tuber has a greater specific gravity than he did before. (Mother… now I know why they call it CRACK.) 
I have to come back there again!) In fact, it took us so bloody long that the local constables beat us to the door. So how, you may ask, were we able to run afoul of the law in such a short time on Earth? Well… our Soyuz capsule is apparently considered hazardous waste… not surprising, since it is chock full of noxious chemical substances and was found lying squashed like a cigarette butt in the middle of a beet field. We should have taken Mitch’s advice and set the freaking thing on fire before we limped off into the sunset. Live and learn.