Every man is the captain of his soul, sure. But what about every robot? And every root vegetable? I mean, how many captains can this unseaworthy scow handle, eh? Cheeez.
Ahoy, mateys! Yes, it’s your old friends in the calamitous band Big Green shouting out to you from the high seas, somewhere east (or perhaps west) of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in sunny upstate New York. As you may have surmised, we…. um, excuse me… Hey Matt – ask one of the Lincolns to put his finger up in the air and get a check of our wind direction. No, no – not THAT finger! Mother of pearl…. As I was beginning to say, you have probably surmised that we made it through re-entry okay. A bit touch and go, though it helps to remember that we have had much, much more experience with the terrifying phenomenon of re-entry than practically any rock band in business. (Except perhaps Captured by Robots – they’ve got us beat, for sure.)
Yes, the strange craft we borrowed from Gizmandiar lacked comprehensible controls, having been designed by a strange anemic race from a distant solar system. In point of fact, we found the retro rocket switches through the 
process of elimination, having activated every accessory in the bloody vehicle (including all of the vanity mirror lights… and can you believe that Gizmandiar’s ship has electric sun visors?) We hit all of the banks at once, and the resulting shock threw Marvin (my personal robot assistant) across the cabin and into what turned out to be the space alien equivalent of a water cooler (assuming, of course, Gizmandiar’s planet finds toxic sludge somehow refreshing… like the rest of us). Despite this slight mishap, our bold action did in fact slow our descent and correct our attitude to the point where we could safely re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. (Who wants to come home with a bad attitude, right? People’d just as soon you’d stayed where you were.)
Okay, enough parenthetical asides, already! (I promise.) Our saucer-like craft rocketed down through the 
troposphere (forgive me – or what used to be called the troposphere) and ker-plunked into a rather large, salty body of water, quite probably an ocean… but damn, I’m just not sure. We asked Marvin to use his sensor array to try and determine where the hell we had ended up, but he was still loopy from his collision with the sludge-cooler. It occurred to me that the man-sized tuber might try behaving like a divining rod in reverse and find the closest land mass, but… well… that was just a…. dumb idea… So we put together some plastic insulation sheeting and hoisted it up on a makeshift mast to catch the wind so that we would start heading somewhere. John tried to raise someone with his cell phone, but it was no use. (Bloody Verizon!)
So here we are, bobbing away on the high seas (or ocean… whatever), issuing orders to one another, none of which ever get carried out. Someone out there, just do me a favor. Bring up Mapquest or something like it and key-in “Big Green” + “lost at sea”, then let me know what comes up. There’s a good chap.
while in fact speaking a portion of the grisly truth. “Freedom” may sound like human rights, but what they’re really talking about is the freedom to apply power at will. Pirates’ freedom, or perhaps more accurately, the freedom of the mafia don. Our standard is clear: a regime loves freedom if it is compliant with our directives. If not, it is radical, dictatorial, extreme. Uri Avnery, the great Israeli peace activist, 
If it weren’t so grim, it would be almost laughable to hear Dubya clumsily working his rhetoric around this situation when he and Olmert have so obviously undermined the very principles the claim to champion. Pundits in the U.S. media – those critical of Bush – fault him for being “disengaged” from the Israel / Palestine issue, but the problem is just the opposite. That lack of progress in reaching a comprehensive peace agreement? That’s what they’ve accomplished, with the full cooperation of the Israeli government. Bush has involved himself deeply, pouring money and arms into one Palestinian side, strangling the other (and 1.5 million civilians along with it), and fomenting this conflict under the watchful eye of their Middle East point person, Elliot Abrams, who by rights should be spooning gruel in a Nicaraguan prison right now. The result is quite typical for this administration – a total disaster, people at one another’s throats, that sort of thing. More birth pangs, and with a midwife like Abrams, you can see what this sucker is going to look like when it grows up.
Skin temperature 500 degrees Kelvin. 550 Kelvin. 600 Kelvin. Damage report! Skin temperature 750 Kelvin. Pilot to co-pilot – what the hell is “Kelvin” and why is it so damn hot?
the mindless wrath of our oversized Zenite friend sFshzenKlyrn on his flapjack-fueled rampage through the heart of our little city. Mind you, Gizmandiar and his crew are from a whole ‘nuther planet, so as you might imagine, the controls in this spacecraft were not exactly intuitive. It took me better than five hours to figure out which of these gizmos was a radio (during which time my imagination had gotten the better of me, filling my tiny brain with pictures of a devastated world below, devoid of life… a Rumsfeldian paradise, if you will). Luckily, the seriously unmoored sFshzenKlyrn had not reduced human civilization to ash – everything was still standing except the IHOP in our city center, which… I believe… the man from Zenon… devoured… whole…. (Cue timpani. I said, cue timpani! Damn it, man… you’ve killed the suspense!)
And with Gizmandiar presumably incinerated or dispatched to some other more tolerable realm of being, there seemed to be no point in bobbing around in orbit for very much longer. Loogit, we may all be indolent, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has to get back to his panhandling. (Once you cultivate a good corner, an absence of even two or three days can mean a serious loss of territory.) Besides, the two Lincolns are beginning to get on everyone’s nerves, even the man-sized tuber’s, who – being a root vegetable – can suck it up better than just about anyone in this organization. But for chrissake, first anti-Lincoln throws posi-Lincoln’s hat out into space, then posi-Lincoln steals anti-Lincoln’s juice box… I mean, how the fuck did either one of those guys win the Civil War, let alone establish the Republican party as a dominant force in American politics?