Send in the clones.

Trans-Martian insertion commence... four... three... two... one... one... ONE! Commence, damnit! What's the matter with you clones? Geebus!

I'm telling you, my friends - you just can't get good help these days, not anywhere. Not on Earth (our home planet). Not on Mars (our current place of business). Not in deep space (which separates Earth from Mars). As you may recall from our previous Web-based utterances (known as blog entries), we're running a little short-handed here in Big Green-land, particularly owing to the recent "brain drain" at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. The more knowledgeable (and higher-paid) members of our contingent - mad scientist Mitch Macaphee and etheric energy specialist / inventor Trevor James Constable flew the coop, having grown tired of our slovenly ways, our peasant fare, our... general ripeness, if you will. Anyway, they lit off for Rio, Monaco, Paris, and pretty much anyplace better than the mill.

So what the hell, we thought, we don't need them. We can manage our own interplanetary travel, right? I mean, it's not rocket science. Well, the fact is, folks... funny story. Turns out, it is rocket science. And self-sufficient as we may be, we are not bloody NASA, okay? So yes, we did manage lift off (with some difficulty), but that was the end of the easy part. On Matt's advice, I had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) point the nose of the ship towards our objective - planet Mars, where bookings awaited us. Right... now this is the complicated part. Turns out shooting for Mars is shooting at a moving target. That sucker's speeding along at some ungodly speed. So by the time we're what should have been half-way there, it's way the fuck ahead of us! That meant making some kind of complicated course change that required more hands than we could muster. Oh, there was one other option. You know... being screwed. No one's favorite, as it happens.

Well, luckily for us, our good ex-friend Mitch Macaphee left one of his travel trunks in the ship's storage bay. In desperation, we cracked it open, looking for something... anything... that could get us out of this jam (even if it was just a rope to hang ourselves with). Buried under some novelty tee-shirts ("I'm with Frankenstein"??) and other throw away items was one of Mitch's many inventions - a small device he had been obsessed with over the course of several weeks... something he called the clonolator. He was going to try and sell it to Clonaid (a movement run by space people called the Raelians, not a refreshing drink) but I suspect he was asking too fat a price. Anyway, we thought what the hell - let's clone the help we need to get this sodding ship back on course. So we ran tubey through the clonolator and zip-bang, it created several replicas of our erstwhile little root vegetable. Just the extra hands we needed.

Well, quite nearly. Don't ask me why we didn't run someone competent through that thingy. I guess we thought the man-sized tuber could handle it better than we mere mammalian mortals. Whatever - these clone-tubers are almost as useless as tubey himself. And Mars is getting farther and farther ahead of us! Damn you, Mitch!!!