Hear that whistling? There it is again. Is that coming from upstairs or…. down… stairs. Mitch!
Oh, hi. Not sure I should be signing in today, in point of fact. No, we’re not too busy with our 
melodramatic posing to blog. We’ve moved beyond that phase entirely. (No money dropped like rain from the sky, so that obviously wasn’t working.) Besides, we were all getting sick of hearing one another. And as you might suspect, the Cheney Hammer Mill is like an enormous cave. Why, it’s the Howe Caverns of the northern half of central New York. (Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. Maybe the Petrified Creatures Museum of Little Falls.) Don’t tell Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that I suggested anything of the sort. He’ll start emoting again!
Well, that’s not all that’s going on around here. There are whispers of some festival this summer. That’s all – whispers. I’m not saying sFshzenKlyrn is going to squirt lighter fluid all over his famed Telecaster and light it up, then mutter cryptic oaths over its burning carcass. I’m not saying that at all. But one never knows what may happen in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the summer. And if we get called onto the big stage, what happens next is a conundrum wrapped in a tortilla. (John used to have a conundrum, but he broke the bottom head on our last live show. Pity that. Now he’s stretched a tortilla over the hole. But I digress… )
There are other things as well. Mitch has had another brainstorm. Here’s how it happened. You know how everyone is complaining about the cost of travel these days. Fuel costs! Baggage fees! It’s enough to drive a painfully normal person (or a T.V. journalist) nearly mad with anger. Well, Mitch has a solution. You see, it seems the diameter of the Earth is a shorter distance than the circumference. And if you tunnel straight through the Earth’s crust, you can get places a hell of a lot faster. W.t.f. – China is only 8,000 some odd miles away, and it’s all straight down. All you need is a parachute for the very end (and something clever to say to that “America’s Energy Companies” lady riding past you in that glass elevator). Only trouble is… all these holes in the ‘Oit is going to make the old girl whistle as she spins.
Hmmmm… Whistle and spin. If they still made records, that would be a good name for one.
Oh, yes… the blog. As you can see, I’m at loose ends here. Just killing a little time between sessions. Matt put down a vocal the other day. (I wish he’d stop putting me down, man. I’m trying my BEST!) Next it’s my turn, but first Marvin (my personal robot assistant) needs to go in there and clean up the tracks a bit, do a little of his magic. (What kind of magic? Can’t say. It’s magic, damnit!) So while I’m just sitting here, I’m filling out crosswords, completing puzzlers, and… well… opening our overinflated mailbag. Some of these things have been sitting in there for six months or better. (I think I spy a christmas present…. from 1970…)
Okay, m’Lord, you see… “George” is a fictional character – a mad scientist, like Mitch Macaphee (who is, sadly, real). Not everyone in our songs is for real, okay? Sometimes we make up unlikely personages, like “Jane” or “Abraham Lincoln”, and sometimes we borrow them from other authors, like “Tarzan” and “Edward Teller”. And regarding the reclamation of Pangea, no worries… that will take some time, he-he-he…. sometime indeed…
What’s been happening around these parts? Let’s see, now. A thing or two. We’ve got a crack in the earth going, as you know. Straight down to the chewy center. Less said about that the better, frankly. After all, we’re still officially squatters here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and if the actual owners of this renowned property had any idea of the shape it’s in (let alone the fact that there is a major crack in the Earth’s crust contained within), they would see us evicted, convicted, etc. Then there’s those mongooses again – you remember them, don’t you? We had some problems with mongooses some years back, taking over our beloved lean-to, then invading the mill and trying on our galoshes while we were gone. Very pesky fellows indeed. Well, they’re back. C’est la vie. (I think it’s all the greasy cooking the man-sized tuber has been doing. More on that later.)
What about the man-sized tuber? Well, he’s given up politics. (It’s just too damn cynical for him.) He relinquished his post at the head of the town board and has decided to do cooking lessons out the back door of the mill. At first, he tried to keep us out of the loop on this, thinking we would want a cut of the profits. But you can’t keep us in the dark for more than a month or two, particularly when something is happening right under our noses. And I mean literally. The tuber has but one cooking implement, and that’s a frying pan. So whatever he’s showing people, it usually involves open flame, the pan, a gob of butter, and a whole lot of smoke. If he burns it to a crisp, he just cracks an egg over it and calls it done.