Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Do I have to say that every time before we lift off? Yeah, I do. What of it?
Oh, yeah – hi, everyone. Big 
Green here, on the as-yet undiscovered companion (or “planet”) circling the star Sirius, once again preparing for lift-off after a relatively successful string of gigs. What do I mean by “relatively successful”? Well, that’s a somewhat qualified term, I will admit. Let me put a finer point on it. In the Big Green performance book, “success” is defined in degrees of survivability. “Relatively successful” means that few of the bottles tossed at us from the first five rows actually connected with their targets. Fortunately, with someone like sFshzenKlyrn in the group, there’s a significantly lower likelihood of being hit by missiles of any kind, since our Zenite friend is himself a celestial object of indeterminate volume and mass, surrounded by complex magnetic fields that act like an invisible shield, like a protective blister of some kind. Beer bottles just bounce off that sucker, and sometimes vaporize like pyrotechnics. It actually adds interest to the show. (Though I think sFshzenKlyrn is going a bit too far by encouraging people to chuck shit up on stage. Not cool, sFshzenKlyrn… not cool.)
How was the ride from Rigel? A little bumpy. Our new pilot, Urich Von Braun, is not as familiar with Soyuz spacecraft technology as he led us to believe when we interviewed him. So yes, there was a learning curve… a curve that covered 
about 27 light-years worth of extra travel. (Our budget is totally blown – don’t tell our label, for chrissake.) Much as we encouraged him to use the navigational console, Urich prefers flying by the seat of his pants, as it were – a dubious approach to interstellar travel, in my humble opinion. There were a couple of occasions when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) attempted to draw Urich’s attention to one relevant read-out or another, but he was consistently rebuffed. It could be Urich has a problem with mechanical beings… or it could be he can’t see anything through those thick goggles. One way or the other, he’s clearly a pilot who takes no direction from anyone, not even his employers. (You’d think that would lend us some influence, at least. We’re not real good at this “boss” business.)
So, yeah, there were a few zig-zags, but we got here all right. On balance, it was head and shoulders over what we might have expected with Mitch Macaphee at the helm. Poor Mitch has been almost incoherent with obsession over his latest experiment – a new rubber-like substance that downloads and displays video podcasts and the like. So you can shape it like, say, a map of Madagascar, stick it to any wall you like, and watch, I don’t know, The Colbert Report in the shape of Madagascar. (As it happens, I prefer watching Colbert on a screen shaped like Portugal, but it’s your choice, really.) He’ll be working on that until the end of the 
tour, trust me – Mitch can really bury his nose in a project. Crikey, he spent the better part of a decade developing the technology that brought us Marvin, and Marvin’s I.Q. is more or less on par with that of the man-sized tuber. (You’ve heard of artificial intelligence? Marvin is artificial stupidity. Nearly as complex, but not quite.) So even with all of his quirks, Urich was a good hire.
Okay, well…. time to prepare for lift off. It’s almost nightfall, and this rocky little planet we’re on has a moon that radiates some kind of death ray (at least where humans are concerned). Mach schnell, Urich, mach schnell!
Pagan Pleasures. The good folks at PaganFM! on Portsmouth Community Radio have included cuts from International House and 2000 Years To Christmas on their Nov. 16 podcast – click here to give a listen. Show a little love and vote for their podcast at Podcast Alley. There’s a good chap.
address. However, it would be hard to post this without commenting on the Iraq/U.S. status of forces agreement approved on Thursday by the Iraqi parliament. This is, in essence, a timetable for withdrawal, setting an end date for our occupation of Iraq – something Bush repeatedly refused to do, used time and again to bait war opponents as being surrender monkeys, unsupportive of the troops, etc. (“Waving the white flag of surrender” as Sarah Palin put it.) So all of that…. was a lot of hot air again, right? Did you catch that too? Thought so.
many others in Washington – including Democrats – despise Chavez for the simple reason that he cannot be intimidated by them. They tried to remove him in a coup, supported by the U.S. and Britain, which quickly backfired. Now they treat him like a dictator, though in electoral terms he has far more legitimacy than George W. Bush, having prevailed in contested elections and plebiscites a number of times. Our leaders deplore his tendency towards empowering the poor and chipping away at the privileges the traditionally U.S.-oriented elite sectors of Venezuelan society, but what REALLY irks them is his material support for independent development and greater regional integration in Latin America. My guess is that most of Obama’s advisors will be on the same side as Bush’s Latin America team with regard to Chavez, judging by what the O-man has said himself. And now, in true cold war fashion, they are making hay out of his arms purchase from Russia and the presence of Russian war ships in “our” hemisphere.
probably a mistake leaving your forwarding address. We were only going to be gone a month or two, damnit. Ah, well.
space ship. For another thing, with Mitch in the driver’s seat, it’s positively hazardous. (Mitch has gotten kind of erratic as a driver. I think it’s the medications he’s taking. More on that later.) I don’t want you to think that we’re not taking this seriously – god, no! In fact, we have been offered a substitute pilot for the next leg of our