
Good evening, everybody… glad you could tune in. This is Joe of Big Green, and I’m joined here by my bandmate/brother Matt Perry, mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant).
We’re running this little web-a-thon to raise funds for our bail, frankly. That’s why we’re broadcasting from this cramped little cell in a Kaztropharian jail. Yes, yes… we landed back in the crowbar hotel here on Kaztropharius 137b thanks to the efforts of Mitch, here, who took it upon himself to start playing ducks and drakes with the planet’s gravitational field. Long story short, it ended up more drakes than ducks, and a pound of flour on Kaztropharius 137b now clocks in at about five tons. At 37 drachmas a pound… well, you do the math. No one can afford the stuff. Bread factories are closing down. Bread riots have plagued the capital. And as the last pockets of resistance are vanquished, the emperor gazes ruefully down from his citadel and ponders the fate of his… his…
Okay, I got a little far afield there. Suffice to say, the authorities weren’t too pleased by Mitch’s placing
of a massive technological thumb on the scale of every commodity on the planet. To say nothing of the Kaztropharians’ self-esteem. They all weigh several tons now, and most are too ashamed to go to the beach. (Of course, here on Kaztropharius 137b, the beaches all front pools of liquid methane… so if you were considering this a possible tourist destination, consider again.) So, into the hoosegow we went. Sad but true. Got any good ideas about getting out of here? Seriously, if you ever did time on this planet and found a tunnel to the nearest launch pad, get in touch with us pronto…. like NOW.
Right then, on to the phones. What’s that? We HAVE no phones? What the hell kind of telethon is this going to be? Oh, I see … no cameras either. Well, that would seem to eliminate the need for phones. Stupid Kaztropharian prison! Okay, so I’m calling out to you surfers out there, right now, over the interWebs, from a great, great distance away (but not so far that we don’t have wifi). GET US OUT OF HERE!
Did you get that? Not sure how I would know. Hey, Matt… you shout for a while.
Oh, hi…. We’ve found our way to planet Kaztropharius 137b with both hands, as you might divine from that last bit of dialogue – the latest venue on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour of the galaxy. How do you tour a whole galaxy exactly? Quite simple – just jump on the ship before we take off… next time. Right now we’re deep in the middle of nowhere, anchored to a planet that seems to like our music (something in the air, I think, makes it sound better up here… perhaps a hallucinogenic quality). Kaztropharius 137b (I think I’ve got that spelling correct) is a solid little globe with a nickel core. Molten nickel, I’m told – I can’t say for certain, since I’ve never been there, but it seems a reasonable assumption.
I don’t know – we probably just wore out our welcome. The Kaztropharians have always been fairly hospitable, even when Mitch made the mistake of sending us back through a time vortex to their Pleistocene era
Well, space travel has just gotten a lot more confusing, people. Much, much more complicated than even a few weeks ago when we left planet Earth to embark on this ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour. It seems that normal (i.e. not mad) scientists back on Earth have discovered the existence of literally millions…. perhaps BILLIONS of Earth-sized planets circling stars throughout our galaxy. As we’re bobbing around out here, trying to find our next destination (Kaztropharius 137b), we’ve been scratching our heads, trying to figure out where all of these freaking planets came from. None of them are on the charts. Lots of them look alike. This is bloody ridiculous.
As you can tell, we weren’t getting a lot of help from him. A little later on, he sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into my quarters (an empty storage bin, actually) with a recorded message. “Use the laser cannon,” Mitch said on the recording. “If a planet splits straight down the middle, it can’t be Kaztopharius 137b. That thing is made of solid quintilium. The best you can get is a clean hole, no split. Just keep shooting til you find it.”