Hasta la vista, whatever that means. Let’s see you daaaaance, sucka! No? Okay, how about, put your hands together! All the girls. Now all the guys. Now just the left side of the room. Now the right! Okay, now just the one-armed Methodists with gingivitis. Great, great….
Oh, hello. Didn’t expect visitors on such a stormy day. I’m just running through the list of stuff we should try to do at our CD release party, whenever that may come about. Gotta’ get the crowd going, don’t you? Don’t you? Perhaps I’m wrong. Well, it seemed like a good idea. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is lending a prehensile claw. Yes, that’s right — I said Marvin. He is back, and so is Big Zamboola. That bloody ludicrous experiment in atmospheric science is well and truly finished, so they were able to make a soft landing in the courtyard of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our home bitter home). Great to have that strong right arm back again, I can tell you. (Though Marvin’s left arm was always the stronger one, so I may have misspoken.)
What was the outcome of Mitch’s grand experiment, you ask? The experiment that deprived us of essential personnel during one of the most critical points in the production of our new album? The experiment that necessitated gross extensions of our own menial responsibilities in and around the mill? That experiment??? Well, let me tell you. It was a success… a screaming success… if the intention was to make it rain incessantly for the past week and a half. I’m not at all sure that was the mission when the Zamboola-powered balloon left the ground, but it morphed into that somewhere just above the troposphere. And Marvin, good soldier that he is, refused to leave until the mission was accomplished. No cutting and running for him, my friend. (Also, he had no idea how to land that sucker, so that contributed to his stick-to-it-iveness. )
So now the rain is pouring in, filling up every crack and cranny in this creaky old mill, turning the streets into rivers and the rivers into moving lakes. Yesterday our replica J-2 spacecraft just floated away, its makeshift mast still crammed through the glass globe on the top of its hull. The basement is flooded, and the man-sized tuber has begun to resemble something recently yanked out of a mangrove swamp. (He’s growing knees, like a cypress tree. Very odd.) Trevor James Constable has secured some sort of floatation device for his patented orgone generating machine — god forbid that should ever get waterlogged. Why, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Time itself might become unglued. We could find ourselves running backwards through days, months, years, even decades before that contraption dries out. Want to shed years off your face, figure, physique, etc.? Pray for rain. Beat the drum like war. ‘Nuff said.
Hoo-boy, well I’ve wandered a bit. (Looks like I’ve wandered into the outskirts of Pittsburgh – who knew?) Best get back to the work at hand before Matt gets pissed off and tries to shoot me with some clueless hunter’s gun. Aw, Matt…. put away the goddamn gun. There’s a good lad.
and diplomatic experts of every stripe are hitting the airwaves talking about “phased redeployment” and “force protection”, but, perhaps most remarkably, there is now a broad acknowledgement that a) this war is a disaster growing worse by the day, and b) we are losing. Like the 9-11 commission, though, this group was tasked with focusing on the “what the hell do we do now?” more than the “wha’ hoppen?” of Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. There is no accountability assessment in this charge, and with good reason. Many of the people who cooked up this splendid little war are still in office and are unwilling to play the “blame game”… especially since they are, well, to blame.
Now Baker, Hamilton, Joe Frank, and Reynolds (whoops — wrong group) have submitted a recommendation to begin what looks like a pullout but is actually a relatively long-term commitment to leave behind thousands of U.S. troops as military trainers and special strike forces in a country where they are almost universally despised. This is basically “Vietnamization” — getting Iraqis to do our hopeless fighting for us, while we work on salvaging some part of the actual American project in Iraq — that of establishing a permanent U.S. presence in the heart of the world’s most productive oil-producing region. Not quite the same as “stealing their oil” (though we’re happy to help favored firms do that via privatization of Iraqi oil fields), this has been a central goal of U.S. planners since our expulsion from Iran. Saudi Arabia is too sensitive to support a large-scale U.S. military presence, and though we’ve got staging areas in Kuwait and Qatar, the plan is to secure Iraq as a political-military client state — crucially, one that possesses massive oil reserves relied upon by our major economic competitors in Europe and the Far East. So I guess the message to our troops is, “Sorry, folks — it wouldn’t be a rapture if someone didn’t get left behind.”
Greetings, web crawlers of all descriptions. I’m afraid you’ve caught me once again in the midst of a work-related crisis — trying to adapt to new, cheap equipment here in the bowels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill where we maintain our makeshift production studio. This time it’s headphones (I keep breaking the bloody things — damnable nuisance!); before that it was mic stands. We had those old, chrome piping jobs and the twisty friction-grip thingy wore out on them (and I apologize for using technical jargon on you). Ever try to sing into a moving microphone? Not recommended. In any case, we found it necessary to visit our local music recycling yard to see if we could find some adequate replacements. Never been to one? Beats the hell out of internet shopping, I can tell you. 
like much to you, but trust me — the incessant running back and forth between the “live” room and the control room can get pretty maddening. Then there are all of the Marvin-esque chores I’ve had to commandeer, like sweeping the beds and making the floors (not sure I’ve got that quite right yet), manning the night watch, bribing the local tax collector (for the privilege of paying our taxes — another story entirely), pretzel-bending, and the like. And now this… this is the final indignity. Marvin has always been our runner, our go-fer, our step-and-fetch-it, our get-it-the-fuck-over-here-or-die, etc. And frankly, I’m not the right person to take over that job. I’ve never been any good at telling myself what to do. (Where to go, yeah, but not what to do.)
has successfully completed his experiment in turning waffles to platinum. That’s right, friends — solid platinum, the metal that used to send Dr. Smith into great greed-soaked reveries. Mitch is truly the master of alchemy. Funny thing is, the device he created that does this miraculous transformation looks like, well, a toaster. You just put the waffles down, wait about a minute, and up pops the precious metal. Fact is, I mistook it for a real toaster a couple of days ago and nearly put my teeth out on a solid bar of platinum. (Platinum’s actually pretty good with a helping of blueberry syrup and a couple of strips of fried cadmium on the side. Mmmmmmm-boy!)