Albert A. Kazam.

Want to see me make a donut disappear. Ala-kazam! (*Gulp*) Ta-daaaa! Okay, now... watch me do a half-moon. Presto-change-o! (*Gulp*) Where'd it go? Where'd it go? Next...

Oh, hello. (urp.) Glad you could surf by. I suppose you might be asking yourself, What the fuck is he doing now? Well, friends.... "what the fuck" indeed. The things I have to do to keep people on board with this pointless venture of ours! (Yes, yes... we keep losing people to other unrelated pointless gestures - it's very discouraging.) You may recall that sometime last week, in our despair over the water table having been depleted by the man-sized tuber's thirsty relatives, we began digging makeshift wells in the cobblestone courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill. And, having run into some (predictable) difficulties with that endeavor, we resolved to employ some kind of hacked-together magic to make our well-holes - this seeming a more immediate course of action than waiting seven years for Mitch Macaphee to get off his lazy ass and invent a stone-piercing neutron laser.

With me so far? Okay, then. So I sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) over to the local public library in search of some standard volumes on magical spells and incantations. He was gone several thirsty hours, only to return with some lame-ass tome they must have ordered through the mail in 1973 from a publisher's over-stock house somewhere in New Jersey. (This I know from nothing.) I mean, it was full of pointy hats and al-a-kazams and hey-prestos... the kind of stuff that would embarrass a sit-com pre-teenager. Just plain sad. We were thinking the real dark arts stuff... you know. Beads and flammable powders, all that. Still, I was getting too thirsty to think clearly, so I actually started messing around with some of the spells in the book. I borrowed a few strands of spaghetti to use as a wand, a rolled-up newspaper for a sorcerer's hat, and went to work. What happened next was shocking, just shocking....

Did I say "shocking"? Perhaps that was too strong a word. Let's go with mildly surprising. The lame-ass magical spells did nothing to further our well-digging enterprise. (Nothing except earn me the derision of my peers... particularly anti-Lincoln, who's a hard-nosed little bastard.) What did happen, though, was that I had drawn the collective attention of all of tubey's relatives. Picture a thousand potatoes in a room, and all eyes on you. Kind of unnerving, actually... but they were being mildly entertained. And that meant less water being drawn off of our somewhat piffling little water table. Within an hour or so, the taps were working again and we could even switch on the humidifier in tubey's terrarium. (His skin gets scaly during the summer months - that's why I keep a peeler handy.) Talk about the law of unintended consequences! (Did that ever make it out of committee?) This situation was so twisted, it came out straight.

Trouble is, now they just want magic all the time, and my little bag of tricks is empty. Ergo, I'm resorting to cheap sideshow deceptions. (Which will likely be the theme of our next tour... not bad... not bad... )