Is this the Boise office? It ain’t? Well then, who the hell is this, anyways? Okay, okay, get me Washington. Huh? Since when? Never mind, then… get me Lincoln. What… him too? Jeezus….
Oh, it’s you. Just try to get somebody on the phone these days! I mean, you’d think with all the portables and the VoIP and all that, it’d be easy… but nooooo. Actually, I’ve been trying to reach our rep over at Loathsome Prick Records – not the annoying PR guy who puts words in my mouth, but the A&R guy who takes money out of our pockets…. that guy. Wired up like a freaking christmas tree, he is. Never seen so many bleeding lights on something that wasn’t a tractor-trailer. (So much for the colorful asides.) Been dialing long distance all morning and so far no luck. It’s almost like they don’t want to talk to us. And no, I’m not using the royal “we”, nor is there a mouse in my pocket. When I call someone, it’s on behalf of all of us. (Particularly the crank calls.)
Why the urgency? Well… couple of things. First off, I’m hoping to extend the grace period on the delivery of our next musical “product” – the long-awaited sophomore Big 
Green album. We’ve been running into some post production difficulties, as you may have gathered from the last few columns. I know, I know… with Marvin (my personal robot assistant) turning the dials and the man-sized tuber sulking in the corner, how could we miss, right? Friends, it’s not as simple as that. There’s the never-ending battle with entropy, for instance. And as you well know, if the entropy doesn’t get you, then the inertia certainly will. (Maybe both will get you. Ever consider that possibility?)
Then there’s the other thing. See, we were hoping for a little advance on our next release… and everybody thought it made sense to ask for this at the same time I’m informing them 
that the master won’t be ready on time. Who says we’re not cost conscious? (Actually, Geet O’Reilly, our financial advisor, suggested we cut down on the long distance charges.) Anyway, we thought… well… maybe a couple of grand in small bills might be appropriate, seeing as though we’re living in an abandoned mill and haven’t had a properly cooked meal in several months (since coming off our last interstellar tour, actually). Face it, Big Green is a cheap date. Just ask Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm Inc., our former corporate label. Don’t think they spent much on us, aside from the cost of the goon squads they put on our ass. (And goons were pretty easy to get back in those days. Just ask the Indonesian military.) That was a heap of trouble.
So what the fuck, Loathsome Prick Records – let’s have a little respect, eh? We’re making the bloody album. It’s coming, like Issa’s snail climbing Mount Fuji (slowly… slowly). I’ve got a hungry robot over here, and a couple of impatient Lincolns. Send money!
withdrawal (on good news) by sometime in 2008 – not exactly good news for those shipping out to Iraq for a third or fourth tour of duty. There are many reasons for this continuing failure, but prominent among them is the Democratic leadership’s fear of appearing as though they don’t fully “support the troops.” For chrissake – how much effort does it take to knock that straw man over? Voting for funds to send soldiers into a bloody catastrophe is not “supporting the troops”; it’s killing and maiming the troops. If congress defunds this policy, the Pentagon will have plenty of money to get everyone home safe, of fucking course. And yet they remain unwilling to do what needs to be done… what they were elected to do.
It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the crisis we have ignited in the middle east. Something like