Auckland, do you read me. Come in, Brazzaville, come in. Are you receiving me, Des Moines? Is there anybody out there, for chrissake?
Well, now we’ve done it. Golsh dang-git. I mean, god damn it… I may as well swear again, since Gizmandiar and his entire extraterrestrial junta may well have been atomized by deadly keltone rays, fired at city hall by our somewhat intemperate sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn. What the fuck… if only that were the end of it. As many of you know, we called sFshzenKlyrn in to help us deal with these foul usurpers, who had deprived of us squathouse, livelihood, and even language. And as I may have mentioned before, our Zenite friend is a little hard to stop once he gets going. And friends, old sFshzenKlyrn got going all right. He certainly hasn’t lost his touch with concentrated trans-dimensional matter disruption beams.
Okay, here’s what happened, judge. First the man from Zenon smashed city hall to smithereens. Gizmandiar had either returned to his home dimension or… well… gone to 
perdition, as he would have me put it. Anyway, to celebrate our liberation from this tyrant, we offered to take sFshzenKlyrn out for a hardy meal. Sadly, he chose the local IHOP and ordered about 17 consecutive half-stacks of buckwheat flapjacks with blueberry syrup and extra sweet butter. (Mmmmmm-boy.) I know what you’re going to say – why couldn’t you fuckers in Big Green stop him? Well… there’s no simple answer to that question. It was a matter of honor, you see. Also, we partook of a few half-stacks ourselves, and well… let’s say we soon found ourselves in a state of diminished responsibility. (Do I have to draw you a picture? I just got finished with a freaking breath test!)
Yeah, well anyway… what happened next. Like the last time, sFshzenKlyrn got big. I mean, really really big. He freaking broke through the roof of the IHOP and towered over our little city. Even worse, when he goes 
on a flapjack binge, his state of matter changes from gaseous to solid. It’s like a thunder cloud that suddenly turns to granite, only instead of just lying there, he starts tromping around the village emitting keltone rays left and right. Now, our little upstate town had never experienced anything like godzilla before – extraterrestrial mayors, yes, but no ten-story space monsters. The local constabulary was at a loss as to how to deal with sFshzenKlyrn, and so everybody just kind of closed their shutters and kept their fingers in their ears. This caused Marvin (my personal robot assistant) a certain amount of consternation. (When he can’t see your face, he thinks you’re gone forever.)
I have to confess, we of Big Green kind of panicked. In our flapjack-induced stupor, we commandeered one of Gizmandiar’s spacecrafts and launched ourselves into a super-wide orbit. Now I’m trying to raise someone down on planet earth, and not having a lot of luck. For fuck’s sake, if you’re reading this, contact us, damnit! We don’t know how to land this bloody thing! (And it’s chock full of lawn fertilizer.)
the biggest caveman on camera. I think this week’s prize might have to go to G.O.P. longshot congressman Duncan Hunter, who advocated using “tactical nuclear missiles” to destroy Iranian centrifuges. (There’s a man of conviction!) That’ll teach those Iranians to threaten … people with… nuclear … weapons…. (irony). Christ, they’ll probably kick up their uranium enrichment just on the basis of his little demagogic tirade. Then there’s the god-stakes, which was a bit more of a laugh than usual since the very same day I heard a political commentator on NPR opining that the Republican candidates were shying away from openly religious rhetoric to distance themselves from Dubya. Right on the money once again, NPR! What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? (How about today?) For chrissake, that Huckabee jerk started one of his answers quoting from Genesis (and I don’t mean 
It’s the same phenomenon that keeps international and national news off the front page of my hometown newspaper. The publishers – like the politicians – assume that we don’t really care that much about what’s happening in, say, Iraq, because 1) we don’t have to go and fight there, 2) we don’t pay for the war via added taxation, and 3) we re-elected George W. Bush, who can’t tell the ceiling from the floor, as our commander-in-chief. We’re insulated from the effects from our own wars, so why should anyone assume we want to know about them? That insulation is the product of our own gullibility. While a good many of us wanted the Iraq war, no one wants higher taxes… so our “leaders” came up with this “invade now, pay later” imperial strategy. Similarly, no one wants the draft, so our politicians lean more and more heavily on the volunteer force, making them go back again and again, perpetually raising the bar like Colonel Cathcart in Catch-22. Bush and our congressional leaders told us we could have a world war without having to fight or pay, and we, for the most part, bought it. 
Don’t tell me – let me guess. It’s big. It’s dense. And it’s very, very attractive. Ummmmm… that could be almost anything that fits those criteria. Am I getting warmer? Well, am I?
observed, and I’m sure at least one of them has our name written on it. If I can just get Marvin to tell me which one! Focus, damn it… focus!
later bombarding it with keltone rays which caused the building to shift from its moorings and… well…. kind of disintegrate. (Sorry, folks. Unintended consequences, you know.) Then there was a slightly larger boom, followed by a smoky smell and what felt like a minor earthquake.