No, I haven’t seen your camera. Or your enlarger. What the hell do I look like, a custodian? For crying out loud – if I were a custodian, I would be retired by now on a decent state pension … instead of cooped up in this drafty squat house with a mad-man inventor who can’t find his freaking camera.
Oh, hello. You’ve just caught me in the middle of a small dispute with one of the members of Big Green’s retinue. As I am the very soul of discretion, I will refrain from saying which one … Mitch Macaphee. (I didn’t say it, I typed it.) Suffice it to say we have our share of disagreements, and it’s usually over stupid shit. Last week it was some old piece of quartz he had mistakenly left at the local watering hole. By the way he was carrying on, you would have thought it was the only quartz in the world. And I can assure you … there is more quartz out there … more than you ever dreamed of.
Now – this week – Mitch is cheesed off over some photographs he saw on the Internet (though why he wastes his time surfing the web is beyond me … that thing is never going to amount to anything). NASA just posted some shots of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft that make the planet look like a giant marble or close detail of a 
Van Gogh painting. Mitch got a little overwrought when he saw them. He claims that they were photos he took on our last interstellar tour. He started pacing up and down the corridor, grousing about how NASA is always using his material without compensation or attribution. Then he disappeared into his laboratory.
We all hope he’s just sulking in there. I sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in to check on Mitch; he returned with some kind of electronic device attached to his torso. It has flashing lights and makes an odd, whirring sound. Not sure whether or not it’s having an effect on Marvin – he seems to act normally, though I did notice that he now eats corn-on-the-cob on a vertical axis. Could be a coincidence. People change, right? So, too, of robots.
Okay, well … we’re trying not to let the strange sounds emanating from Mitch’s laboratory distract us from our primary task: that of making strange sounds emanate from our recording studio.
We’re thinking about stopping over to Pluto for a brief engagement, maybe four or five shows, back to back. Which sounds shorter than it is. See, if we play consecutive days, it will take something like a month, because each Plutonian day is worth more than 6 Earth days. (See … Mitch told me that, too. HE knows all aBOUT Pluto.) We’re going to try out a few of our Ned Trek songs and see if the Plutonians start throwing frozen methane at us. (Not much more to put your hands on out there, frankly.)
Right, well … I was just talking to our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee via Skype, and it seems he has a problem. And when Mitch has a problem, frankly, we all have a problem. That’s the thing with mad scientists. One day they’re inventing something dumb and innocuous, like Marvin (my personal robot assistant). The next they’re assembling the elements of some plane-smashing behemoth or a diabolical extreme weather machine (though I think that last one has already been invented by the mad “scientists” we call America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry).