Okay, we didn’t go on the boat trip up the Erie Canal. It was a stupid idea, I admit. Sounds like one of mine. I should remember where it came from, but I often forget the provenance of my worst ideas. Call it a self-defense mechanism … or call it “Lenny,” if you like. Whatever floats your boat.
As is always the case, life intrudes on the best-laid plans. We were all ready to load up our non-existent gondola with pick-a-nick baskets, life jackets, and a bunch of other stuff we don’t own, and then the news broke: Astronomers had discovered a small, Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star system to our own. As the story worked its way into newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, and web sites, it quickly reached the attention of our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. His reaction? Let’s just say that there was a little mushroom cloud where his head used to be. I thought he was experimenting with some new anti-personnel weapon – a personal nuke, perhaps, like Edward Teller’s version of the personal pizza – but he was just mad. Hopping mad.
Why the anger? Well, Mitch has anger issues. I suspect you’ve gleaned that from previous postings. Zero patience, my friends. The guy just needs happy pills or something, but you can’t tell him anything. Anyway, it appears that Mitch has been using the newly discovered planet, 
Proxima b, as a staging area for some of his experiments. Why pick that one and not, say, Wolf 1061c? Well, it’s closer, for one thing. Like I said, the fucker is impatient as hell – he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time in transit. And while he does do some of his mad science work in remote areas of our own planet, Proxima b (or “Sven Njordlosc’s planet” as Mitch strangely calls it) gives him the space to do fun stuff like change the composition of the atmosphere or switch the gravity on and off a couple of times in rapid succession. Great times!
In preparation for our last interstellar tour, we looked into doing a performance on Sven Njordlosc’s planet. No dice. The inhabitants only want to hear Norwegian Carpenter Songs. “Pleasures of the Dance” is their favorite record, even if it’s just a joke cooked up by Monty Python. We don’t play stuff like that, I think you know.
Oh well … I know what I’m getting Mitch for his birthday. Xanax. Lots of Xanax.
I’m here in what passes for my cabin in this rented spacecraft, editing the audio play we recorded a few days ago. We’ve also recorded a few songs, as is our tradition, to accompany the hack-job melodrama we’ll be posting in the coming weeks, so those will take some finishing. Work, work, work. I thought this trip was going to be something of a getaway, a chance of rest and relaxation, a hiatus in our otherwise hectic existence of hammer-mill squatting. Fat chance.
Not to put too fine a point on it, we are going to have to Mad Science the shit out of this thing. Mitch Macaphee is working overtime (as much as 3 hours a day) trying to adapt Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s solar power unit to the ship’s main drive. It is by no means a walk in the park for old Mitch. Good thing we brought some decent gin with us. (Though we left the rummy back at the mill.)