Aw, c’mon Mitch! You’ve got at least three electron microscopes to your name. Can’t we just use one of them for our experiment? One little one?
Damn these scientists and their ethical codes of conduct! Yes, that’s right — I did indeed make reference to ethics and Mitch Macaphee in the same sentence. Far be it from me to ever suggest that our resident mad doctor (or as you say, “daktari“) has constrained himself to purely ethical behavior through the course of his long and spotted career. No, no — I’m referring to this annoying internal code that scientists maintain between one another. It’s kind of like a secret handshake. In fact, with respect to Mitch and Trevor James Constable (another member of the scientific contingent here at the Cheney Hammer Mill), it is a secret handshake. (Honest — they really will not let us watch them shake hands. It’s kind of… unnatural…)
Why do we want to play with the shiny, pretty, candy-like electron microscope? Well, if you’ll recall last week’s episode (and there’s absolutely no reason in the universe why you should), the entire Big Green contingent was on a hunt for water. Potable water has become rather scarce 
here at the mill, what with the recent drought, earthquakes and sandstorms we’ve been experiencing. And then there’s that other thing… yeah, right. We haven’t paid the water bill in 18 months. That may have had something to do with it, as well. Anyway, there were several plans circulated, some of them involving divining rods (my idea), some involving acts of plant-like ingenuity (the man-sized tuber’s idea), some involving mayhem and hooliganism perpetrated against our unsuspecting neighbors (the evil anti-Lincoln’s brain child) — none of them seemed quite the thing. Then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had one of his notions… and frankly, it was a cracker.
No, no — not that kind of cracker. And not Robbie Coltrane, either, so don’t even go there. I mean kind of a … well… not bad idea. You see, Marvin pulled a tiny fragment of knowledge out of one of his microscopic electronic brain units — it was something he 
read somewhere about a certain amount of water residing in every object, every cubic inch of air, every club sandwich. It may be an extremely minute amount of water (as in the case of the club sandwiches over at Bolanders’s deli… I swear, they’re made of real clubs!), but because it is everywhere, that water may amount to a significant amount… perhaps enough to fill a pool. If only we could see it. Ergo, electron microscope. Point the sucker at some water-bearing object (Lincoln), and start sponging it up. Simple, right?
Well… maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I’d still like to borrow Mitch’s microscope. No particular reason. Well, there is one. Our neighbor is watching re-runs of Daktari, and we don’t have a telescope, so… you know…
Tony Snow, his even lamer “uncle” Dick Cheney, and the ever faithful bride of Frankenstein, Laura, who opined to Larry King recently that things are going not too badly in Iraq except for that one bombing that discourages everyone. I think she may have meant to use another word that begins with “dis”, like “dismembers”. In any case, all this minimizing does have some effect. Some recent polling shows that large numbers of Americans have no even semi-realistic notion of how many Iraqis have been killed since we unilaterally decided to “liberate” their country (by destroying it). People seem to think about 10,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003 — that’s only 1/3 of the ludicrously low-ball estimate Bush himself offered some months back. 
Sadly, I don’t think we’ll have to wait for the next president. This one and his team are ready to strike a blow against Iran and, more broadly, what they view as Shi’ite extremism on the rise throughout the region. They appear to think that they can attack the center of regional Shi’ism without pissing off the millions of co-religionists who live in neighboring Iraq. (Check out 
Empty again, eh? Throw another bucket down there. Was that a ker-plunk I heard just then? No? Okay, okay. Dry as a bone, I guess. Saints preserve us… not that they have any reason to. What the hell — we’re not saints…
We started dropping the bucket down our community well yesterday when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) dumped the last of our drinking water onto the mixing console. (Yes, Marvin is still having “issues”, even with his newly installed framistat. Lately he’s taken to wearing silly hats, but just don’t get me started on that subject…) All that came up was air. Not that air is unimportant — quite the contrary. I’ll tell you, if we were on Titan or Kaztropharius 137b, we would KILL for that air. No sir, there ain’t hardly a terrestrial rock band that understands the value of air better than we do. It’s just that, here on earth, we have no practical use for an air well. We expect water from the ground, damn it. We get no water, we get no where — simple as that. Little known fact: Big Green is more than 60% water. So, in essence, it’s as if one of us — John, say — were made of rock. Something to think about.
There have been a number of different views on how to satisfy our water needs — one view per squatter, in point of fact. Some have been a bit more aggressive in their thinking than others. Anti-Lincoln thought that we should take a three-pronged strategy that goes something like this: