He’s about to pull the lever. He’s pulling it. Grit your teeth! Oooohh, no. He’s done it. Hmmm… I don’t feel any different. Do you?
Hi, folks. Back at the Hammer Mill again for some more off-season fun, eh? I’ll tell you, never a dull moment around these parts. You’d think we’d have enough to do, preparing for our trip out to Aldebaran to debut the songs on our soon-to-be-released new album, International House. W.t.f., there’s a ship to pack, instruments to lug about, Lincoln clones to verbally abuse… We’ve got to train a man-sized tuber in space-bound emergency procedures (his performance rating was very poor on our last outing). Matt and John are busily typing up lyric sheets to hand out as party favors at our first pre-concert reception. (I keep telling them… you don’t have to type them all. Just use a photocopy machine.) That’s what we call 
the personal touch around here. Customer service, that’s what Big Green is all about. Have a seat. Anything I can get for you? Drink, perhaps? Something a little stronger?
Man, with a spiel like that, they’re going to love us on Aldebaran… if we ever make it there alive. Unfortunately, this may not happen. In fact, you may be vaporized by the time you read this. I imagine you’ve heard about the impending “Big Bang” experiment utilizing the Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France. (Yes, that big bang experiment.) Well, it’s going forward despite doubts that it may in fact spawn tiny, powerful black holes that will swallow the earth and pulverize all we know into a massively dense ribbon of compressed matter. That sort of thing can, well, ruin your whole day. And though the experiment’s detractors have been roundly criticized, you have to wonder a bit whether or not there’s something to these fears of imminent destruction. Hey… I live under the same roof as a mad scientist. Imminent destruction is a fact of life around these parts, friends.
Anyway, here’s the problem. Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), etc., had at one point harbored ambitions to be a part of this Big Bang experiment, but was spurned by its organizers. He has since held a bit of a grudge. This might not have been a problem, except that now that he has finished work on 
our space elevator (built from spare submarine parts), Mitch has got a lot of time on his hands. And let’s face it, the Large Hadron Collider has been very much in the news just lately. I mean, every time the guy watches the evening news, smoke starts coming out of his ears. So for a couple of days, he holed himself up in his lab, hammering away at something, ultimately to reveal a diabolical-looking device which he claims has the power to inhibit the Collider experiment, even though it is halfway around the world from here. How it is supposed to do this, I don’t know…. but before I could ask him, he pulled the lever.
Don’t know if it’s nervousness or what, but it feels like the ground is shaking. Crikey – we’d better get that new album out fast.
psycho Bin Laden put a loaded bazooka into the sweaty hands of a dry-drunk frat-boy named George W. Bush. God knows, the ruins of the twin towers hadn’t even stopped smoking before Dubya started blowing holes in everything pretty much at random. The war he started in Afghanistan – the “good war” as many see it – is nearing the end of its seventh year, still sowing death and destruction week after week, with no end in sight. This success story has become a dire failure, even in the eyes of military commanders, and our primary objective appears to have become one of staying there permanently. Not very different from our goal in Iraq, in essence. We allied ourselves with some of the most retrograde elements in Afghanistan, many of whom worked alongside the Taliban before our invasion (and in tandem with our own intelligence services two decades ago). These are the power brokers in that country – blood-soaked creatures like Dostum. Little wonder large areas of the country are beyond the control of the national government.
booster; the candidate’s chief foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann as well. Scheunemann is a bona-fide neo-con, member of the Iraq Liberation Council and, as noted previously, a paid lobbyist for the government of Georgia up until earlier this year… though he is still apparently representing their president in his new role of shadow national security advisor. I have to say, Georgian President Saak’ashvili certainly got his money’s worth this week, with the advent of a major party candidate for the vice presidency of the United States going on record as saying we may go to war with Russia over Georgia. Why this Alaskan creature is not considered a dangerous lunatic is a matter for Americans to sort out (and quickly), but she’s probably a big hit in Tbilisi right now.
What’s this one for? Cabin pressure? Kool. And this one? Get out! What the fuck, this thing is like something out of… I don’t know… fantastic voyage or something.
must say… it’s sweet. Very sweet by our standards, certainly. Usually we’re pock-pock-pocking around the galaxy in some rent-a-wreck or a distressed piece of interstellar transportation history borrowed from a cheap sci-fi television show. This sucker is different. All that plush furniture, a working refrigerator, gauges and levers galore…. I half expected Captain Nemo himself to come striding in disapprovingly. (John could play the Kirk Douglas part… I’ll take Peter Lorre.) In fact, at one point, I turned to Mitch and asked him if perhaps he thought we were playing our first promotional gig in Atlantis.
ourselves to order take out from his favorite restaurant, the Bavarian Castle (big fan of…. uhhhhlll… sauerbraten….). That did lift his mood a bit, though I think I may have hit a particularly sore spot. Turns out that the space elevator he devised was built from remnants of an undersea vessel of some kind. Where did the parts come from, specifically? He wouldn’t say. And with his twitchy hands on that death ray, I wouldn’t ask him. (They were someone else’s, now they’re ours. End of story.)