Write soon (right soon).

That's one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go, cat, go! Don't you step on my... ah, what's the use? Can't do covers... even when I'm panhandling.

Welcome back. I almost said "to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill," but I caught myself in time. Actually, our august squat house is now, indeed, abandoned... in the sense that there is now no one in it. Yes, friends... our new extra-terrestrial mayor, Gizmandiar, has made good on his threat to evict us - call it a down payment on the opportunistic election campaign he's planning for this fall. This fucker's racking up empty promises so fast, you could swear he was born on the planet earth. (In fact, never having seen this creature, I can't say for certain that he wasn't.) Everywhere you turn in this town now, it's Gizmandiar's doing this, and Gizmandiar's in favor of that.... and one of those things he's doing is enforcing building codes and vagrancy laws, no matter how obscure. Hence, our homelessness. (He sent in the goons. And let me tell you, baby... they're good at what they do.)

Matt, John, Mitch Macaphee, and the others (with the exception of the two Lincolns) think that the lawn-loving space people are just sticklers for the law, and when they took over the town government (by bribing our local officials all the way to Tahiti), they went on a good-government rampage. I personally think that this Gizmandiar character is taking revenge on us for complaining about the carpet-like lawn they established in our courtyard when they first arrived on this sorry planet. What the hell, I even cajoled Trevor James Constable into training his orgone generating device on their space craft. I'm sure even on their anemic planet, turnabout is fair play. (Though if they have negative gravitation, that may not be the case.) Whatever the truth may be, they have found an effective way to squelch criticism of their landscaping fetish.... and we've earned our one-way ticket to palookaville. (I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody... instead of a bum....)

Now, I don't know about you, but I think it's one hell of a coincidence that astronomers have discovered a strangely Earth-like planet a mere 20 light years away at precisely the same time that these odd space aliens showed up in our little town. We asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to calculate the odds of these two events happening at the same time, and the results were astounding - seventy-three trillion to one against. (Of course, those are the same odds Marvin gave me when I asked him if it was going to rain last weekend.... and it rained last weekend. So yes, he could certainly be a meteorologist in this town.) So... is it true? Are the local aliens really from the strange rocky world known as "New Earth?" Can discarded lawn darts really be repurposed as inexpensive bottle openers? Is guar gum a vegetable? Is our children learning?

Yes, friends.... the answers to these and other questions can be found right here next week. And for all those who wrote letters of sympathy and support for your friends in Big Green last week, all I can say is... something went wrong down at the post office, because we didn't receive any letters of sympathy and support. (I haven't checked the trash can today, to be fair.) Write us, damnit - we need scrap paper!