Greetings from the soundstage of terusdanorf girundolph huzzah. Can you hear me out there? Are you sure? Testing, testing…
Oh, the trials and tribulations of interstellar tours! And who knows them better than Big Green, right? We know them all, like the backs of our hands. (Hmmmm…. never noticed that mole before. Better get that looked at. And when did I bark that knuckle?) We’ve grappled with irate, drunken crowds, ill-tempered club owners with six (or even seven) heads, venues that had no air or gravity (had to write those into our contracts – live and learn!), Frankenstein-like bouncers, galaxy collisions in the middle of the second set – we’ve been there, damnit. And if you include sFshzenKlyrn‘s experiences, we’re talking about every bad gig back to the big bang (which, I believe, was the name of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 tour, wasn’t it?) or even further. The big crunch, even. One of those. Anyway… what was I saying?
Oh, yeah. Difficult interstellar gigs. That’s how it went off on Proxima Centauri. They didn’t get our new song “High Horse” at all – again, a question of cultural references. And since we were on their equivalent of network television – a live performance 
show they call terusdanorf girundolph huzzah, it was a bit embarrassing to say the least. You see, they are more into our darker numbers. I think that’s because their companion star is so dim. (27 hours of night to every five hours of daylight. W.T.F., right?) So they reacted pretty well to stuff like Vital Signs and so on. Trouble is, when they DON’T like something you play, they start throwing stuff. Kind of a tradition on Proxima. (In fact, it’s a tradition on Earth as well, as it happens. Down there, the more they like you, the bigger the projectiles…. or so I’m told.) That gets to be a problem, frankly.
Well, yeah… so they chucked handfuls of finkonium (a mildly radioactive isotope native to Proxima) at us during High Horse. (Fans of neither country nor irony, they.) Then our mics crapped out in the middle of the set, and they started hurling that finkonium again – this time in big chunks. One of them hit Marvin (my 
personal robot assistant) upside the head as he attempted to scope out the problem with the mics. Apparently the radioactive properties in the finkonium interacted with those inside Marvin’s brass cranium in such a way as to turn him temporarily into a Frenchman. It’s kind of like foreign accent syndrome – you know, when you get into a fender bender and suddenly you’re talking like Victor Borge. That’s what happened with Marvin, except it’s the full monty – Francophone speech, stereotypical getup… you can even hear faint accordion music in the background when he enters a room. Most peculiar.
Not to worry. Mitch Macaphee, Marvin’s erstwhile inventor, tells me this should not last. Besides, anti-Lincoln finds it vaguely entertaining for some reason. (I think it’s because posi-Lincoln hates it.) Those two!
Israel’s rampage in Gaza. And it did not disappoint… it contains all of the elements that make Krauthammer’s screeds extra special: the hollow moralism, the chilling portraits of Palestinian depravity, the meticulous attention to select details coupled with a total neglect of even recent (i.e. the past year’s) history. One brief example – he cited 6,464 rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza on southern Israel over the past three years. Since we’re counting, I wonder if anyone has bothered to calculate the number of munitions expended by Israel on that sorry strip of land over the same period? No, I thought not. Never once does Krauthammer so much as suggest that Israel bears even minimal responsibility for the massive death and destruction now taking place in Gaza. Quite the contrary, it is Hamas that “is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering” while Israel is “committed to saving as many lives as possible.” That fiendish Hamas – using those peace-loving Israeli tanks and warplanes as instruments of terror. Will they stop at nothing?
with great effect over the past two years, since Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, then anticipated the coup Israel and the U.S. worked to foment through compliant elements in Fatah (i.e. Abbas and friends) and drove the Palestinian Authority from the strip. And yet Israel’s apologists, from their ambassador to the U.S., to Krauthammer and his fellow pundits, to the Israel Project’s Meagan Buren, talk as though a.) Israel is bending over backwards to give Gazans what they need, and b.) Gaza is an entity separate unto itself, totally divorced from the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Israel is perpetrating collective punishment on nearly 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, but also on the balance of Palestinian society elsewhere in the territories. While its apologists speak of “peace”, they provide cover for the encroachment of settlements that has taken place consistently over the past 40 years.
So, yes… a bit the worse for wear, our second-hand Soyuz spacecraft (personally checked for soundness by Yuri Gugarin himself) did actually carry us through the burning sun without major incident. The man-sized tuber had to turn up the humidity in his special space terrarium, but that’s no biggy. We have asked our pilot, Urich Von Braun (son of a rocket scientist, I’m told) to take us home via Proxima Centauri, where we may just stand to make a few extra bucks playing on their equivalent of Austin City Limits (which they call “terusdanorf girundolph huzzah” … not real catchy) before slinking home to the Cheney Hammer Mill and whatever housekeeping nightmare awaits us there. Hey – we couldn’t afford domestic help, okay? And that place sure as hell won’t clean itself. (Not yet, anyway. Mitch is working on a device right now…)
Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”… his high, reedy voice seeming a bit thin even to posi-Lincoln (who himself has a high, reedy voice) and his recollection of the lyrics a bit less than perfect. (Since when does Maggie’s brother “hand you a pickle”?) Still, way out here, you have to take what entertainment you can get, no matter how bad it sucks. What the hell – it beats zero-gravity rehearsal, right? (Just try to hang on to those drumsticks, boy. Just try.)
with Earth-bound politics. Hell, they would never have even heard of Dubya if we hadn’t brought him out there back in 2000 as part of our glorious first-ever interstellar tour. Contextualizing “High Horse” would require our filling them in on everything that’s happened over the last eight years, and that might take… well… eight years. The show’s only 45 minutes long, for chrissake. Let’s face it – they just won’t get the irony. And they don’t take well to country music out here, even if it’s gag-country. We’ll need another opener. (I was talking to Marvin just then – he’s trying to open a can of soup with a letter-opener. But yes, we’ll need to open with some other song.)