Downtown.

Skin temperature 500 degrees Kelvin. 550 Kelvin. 600 Kelvin. Damage report! Skin temperature 750 Kelvin. Pilot to co-pilot - what the hell is "Kelvin" and why is it so damn hot?

Oh, yes... hello, blogospheric visitor. You're catching your friends in Big Green at kind of a bad time, actually. I would ask you to come back in about half an hour, but we just may have all been burned to a cinder by that time. So... now's better. You may ask yourself, why is this band always chin-deep in some kind of unlikely peril, rather than wired to a mixing console, turning the pots and making the record you've been promised for the last four years? I have an answer to that, I'm fairly sure, only it's back on the surface of the Earth, where we are headed at approximately 575 miles per hour, through ever-thickening layers of atmosphere, like riding a matchhead over an enormous striker. Hot, baby, hot!

Not that you need a lot of back story (just look below, or click the "Usual Rubbish" link), but last week we rocketed into orbit in one of Gizmandiar's abandoned space vehicles in order to escape the mindless wrath of our oversized Zenite friend sFshzenKlyrn on his flapjack-fueled rampage through the heart of our little city. Mind you, Gizmandiar and his crew are from a whole 'nuther planet, so as you might imagine, the controls in this spacecraft were not exactly intuitive. It took me better than five hours to figure out which of these gizmos was a radio (during which time my imagination had gotten the better of me, filling my tiny brain with pictures of a devastated world below, devoid of life... a Rumsfeldian paradise, if you will). Luckily, the seriously unmoored sFshzenKlyrn had not reduced human civilization to ash - everything was still standing except the IHOP in our city center, which... I believe... the man from Zenon... devoured... whole.... (Cue timpani. I said, cue timpani! Damn it, man... you've killed the suspense!)

Anyway, his jones sated, his rampage disgorged, sFshzenKlyrn moved on to better things (somewhere in the Pleiades star cluster, I believe - check Entertainment Weekly - Galactic Edition). And with Gizmandiar presumably incinerated or dispatched to some other more tolerable realm of being, there seemed to be no point in bobbing around in orbit for very much longer. Loogit, we may all be indolent, but that doesn't mean we don't have work to do. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has to get back to his panhandling. (Once you cultivate a good corner, an absence of even two or three days can mean a serious loss of territory.) Besides, the two Lincolns are beginning to get on everyone's nerves, even the man-sized tuber's, who - being a root vegetable - can suck it up better than just about anyone in this organization. But for chrissake, first anti-Lincoln throws posi-Lincoln's hat out into space, then posi-Lincoln steals anti-Lincoln's juice box... I mean, how the fuck did either one of those guys win the Civil War, let alone establish the Republican party as a dominant force in American politics?

Okay, so... re-entry was decided upon, destination Cheney Hammer Mill. In the absence of a qualified pilot, it was down to John White, who has circumnavigated the globe many times in his virtual air crafts. Not a lot of difficulty here - just point the nose of the ship towards upstate New York, and down fast! (Though it is getting a bit warm in here...)