Going to have to transpose that one as well. Try it in B-flat. That’s right, B-flat. No, no… not THAT B-flat, the one that’s between A and B. Jesus.
Oh, hi, reader. (I think you’re out there, somewhere). Just reharmonizing a thing or two before Big Green gets underway with their upcoming interstellar tour 2010 (theme not yet announced). Matter of no small necessity, actually, as I just blew out a key on my Roland A-90ex – the A below middle C, as it happens. I think it died of overuse. (We seem to play a lot in A and A minor.) But, frugal as we are, rather than replace the sucker, I’ve been working around it. Hey… we’ve got to keep our tinder dry for this tour, man. Wouldn’t want to be halfway out to Aldebaran without a spare dime in our pockets, now would we? (Would we? Could be a question for Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, who is an unaffiliated expert on interstellar economics. I myself cannot be certain. A dime COULD be worth a FORTUNE in space…)
Okay, so this is becoming kind of an annoying workaround, to tell the god’s honest truth. For instance, we might usually play “Johnny’s Gun” in A. That’s a non-starter. Key doesn’t exist, damn it, unless I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) stand by and make the appropriate A-440 tone every time I hit the broken key. Seems less than a practical use of his time, quite frankly. Not that there is a truly appropriate use for his time. He’s a freaking robot, for chrissake. Built to serve man… and I don’t mean that in the sense of some contrived semantic turn of phrase meant to conceal the fact that he, in fact, cooks people for lunch (or perhaps supper). Not a bit of it. Marvin eats tofu and light machine oil, 
that’s it. Just like the rest of us.
You may wonder why it is that we take such a large complement of hangers-on along with us on these extraterrestrial tours. Well, you know the old saying, there’s safety in numbers, right? Well, that’s got nothing to do with us – we’ve never been particularly good with numbers. What I was about to say was that we need help, and lots of it. We’re not teenagers anymore, and we’ve long since lost track of our unicycles and pogo sticks. If we’re going to face multiple G’s, interplanetary turbulence, meteor showers, unexplained magnetic phenomena, irritable and unreasonable extraterrestrials with death-ray eyeballs, extremes of heat and cold, and so on, we’re bloody well not going to do it alone. That’s the bottom line, friends. We need human (and some non-human) shields and plenty of ’em.
And the first step in our self-defense strategy is learning everything in the right key. What? Oh, damn. sFshzenKlyrn broke a guitar string. Now we can’t play in E either!
Man, I’ll tell you – tempers run short here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in the middle of July. All this heat… it’s driving us mad! Those of us who weren’t mad to begin with, that is. (Strangely, it kind of drives Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, sane.) I’m just trying to clear out the clutter a little bit, and I threw out a beam of wood. I mean literally, I threw it out the window in hopes the trash collectors would pick it up. Next thing I know, it’s back in the freaking hallway. I guess Lincoln (or perhaps anti-Lincoln… I keep mixing them up because the heat makes them switch personalities) has grown attached to that particular fallen roof beam, or was perhaps planning to whittle it into something more attractive. Don’t know for sure, but he appears to have taken the heat. Calm down, Mr. President!
Still, as many of you probably know, the main consideration with these tours is logistics. I don’t know if you’ve followed our previous outings, but typically we run into some kind of technical or manpower-related difficulties at some point in the proceedings, then mayhem ensues. That’s been the pattern. Why, you ask? Well, it could be because we’re just plain unlucky. Or maybe because we’re getting a little old and codger-like. But I think the most convincing explanation is that we rely too much on frail human faculties to carry us from solar system to solar system. We need more automation. And watching all that footage of those BP robots working furiously on that spill in the Gulf, I’m reminded that robots – excluding for a moment Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – are an under-utilized resource in this operation.
Hey, there. Just starting to plan out our trip to the outer limits. No, not the sixties television show – that was a piece of broadcast entertainment, not a place you can actually go to. I mean the outer limits of the space-time continuum, already – that dark pocket of nothingness where all of the demand for Big Green performances floats in a vacuum like a cork in a bathtub. We must pursue that cork, my friends, for it beckons. The cork beckons! Behold, the cork! Death to Moby Dick! Right, well…. be that as it may. (I’ve been hanging around with anti-Lincoln a bit too much lately – he sometimes doest this extended riff on Captain Ahab and, well, he’s kind of convincing with that beard of his.) We must follow the demand, whatever cliff it may lead us off of.
Assisting us in this tiresome duty is our old friend, Rear Admiral Gonutz (ret.), formerly of the Naval Reserve. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) looked him up at our request when we realize that this was a job several magnitudes too subtle for the mind of the man-sized tuber, who has been filling in as our road manager. (He basically occupied roughly the same volume of space as a road manager might; other than that, not much.) As some of you might remember, Gonutz is not shy. He believes in aggressive touring – musical “shock and awe”, as it were, at least in terms of the itinerary. I personally think he is insisting on Jupiter because he’s fond of the club scene, but that’s just a suspicion. (I’m chock bloody full of suspicions.) Proud man.