Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip; that started in Colombo, aboard this fucking ship. This is (A) 110 pounds of mashed potatoes; (B) George Washington, our first president; (C) the ballad of Big Green; (D) Gilligan.
Well, friends, in the titanic battle between Big Green and gravity, gravity won and won big. Let’s face it, we were fighting over our weight. That mighty magnetism of old mother earth is more than a match for the likes of us. So, as I indicated last week, it was down, down, down, through ever-thickening (and ever-sickening) layers of atmosphere, our skin temperature reaching somewhere around 7,600 degrees Kelvin (no, no, not our skin — the skin of the space ship, damnit!). That was a wee bit exciting, especially when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) started popping diodes left and right. (I was reminded of his “renegade robot from Mars” routine on a previous tour. Those were the days… not!)
Okay, so where was I? Ah, yes. We managed to survive re-entry thanks to the timely intervention of our bandmate John White, who has done enough virtual flying in his time to actually… well… know how to fly a second-hand spacecraft. (Multi-talented fellow.) On the advice of our resident science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, John kept us at the proper attitude for re-entry, then brought us down through the troposphere, dodging obvious atmospheric disturbances (i.e. tropical storms), and pointing us toward what appeared to be open water. (Actually, it was more than mere appearances. It was, in fact, open water… and lots of it.) As the waves got closer and closer, we broke out the floatation devices and prepared for the worst. Didn’t look good at that point, quite honestly. Even the man-sized tuber was breaking out into a cold sweat… and he doesn’t even have pores.
I expect it’s not easy for you to imagine how we worked around this particular crisis. Well, it wasn’t easy for us either. 
In fact, seconds before impact, we blacked out, all of us, cold as whitefish on a bialy. (Mmmmmmmm. Whitefish.) Where was I? Oh yes — when we came to, we were on the beach of this picturesque made-for-television desert island somewhere in the South Pacific… or North Atlantic… or Western Indian… actually, I’m not entirely sure where we are. We could be on a Hollywood back lot for all I know. Wherever we are, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so long as you have your north and south straightened out and your eyeglasses aren’t on upside-down. (Or perhaps you’re built upside-down. Does your nose run? Do your feet smell?)
Closing a tour with a forty-year-old joke — that’s just sad. But this is what we’ve been reduced to, my friends. At least the fucking phone isn’t ringing every five seconds. (Though, in fact, it very well may be…. I haven’t dug it out of the beach sand yet.)
They were, of course, referring to the terror attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. That one moment in time — one morning in September that must remain seared into our collective memory for all time. A moment of supreme infamy, as horrific as they come. There are other moments, however, that our government would much prefer we forget. In fact, they are relying on us not to remember those particular moments.
starting as early as 1982 (fully six years before the Halabja massacre). When he gassed to death 5,000 residents of that Kurdish community, our State Department put the word out that Iran was somehow responsible. When Saddam started attacking ships in the Persian Gulf, we ran escorts to protect the safety of shipping allied with Iraq — not Iran’s ships. When Saddam’s air force shot up the U.S.S. Stark and killed 30+ sailors, our leaders cursed Iran. No one in the Reagan administration, from the “Gipper” on down, gave a damn for Saddam’s victims throughout that entire war. Meanwhile, these avowed enemies of terrorism were secretly selling arms to Iran (which they considered the center of terrorism), funneling the proceeds to the Contra terror army in Central America, so they could shoot up more undefended civilian targets, like farms and clinics and anywhere their U.S. sponsors told them the Nicaraguan army wouldn’t be.
I spy with my little eye… a planet. See it? Just outside the viewport there? Right — very good. Yes, that’s right… the one that’s getting bigger and bigger with each passing moment. That’s the one. You’re good at this game. 
When I say “lurch”, I mean just that — an aimless forward motion. (Not a large, Frankenstinian butler working for the Addams family). We were propelled by the sustained power chord out of the asteroid belt and into the gravitational pull of our home planet, known to you terrestrial types as “de oit”. (That’s like “Detroit” without the “tr”.) Well, as many of you already know, the “oit” has a much stronger gravitational field than the asteroid formerly known as “planet” Ceres. And resisting said gravitational pull will take more than a mere power chord or two.