Put it down.

Move that comma a few words to the left. Okay. Now how about a stroke around that casaba melon? Don't think so? Why not? Hate melons... good reason. T'hell with it.

Oh, right... this is being recorded for posterity (or some approximation thereof). Hello, everyone. Glad you could stop by. Just lending a little guidance here - nothing pressing. We're in the process of creating a CD cover (CD? What's a CD, mommy?) for our new album and, well, it's a slow, painstaking process... particularly when you don't have certain basic conveniences, like... a designer, for instance. Now that would come in handy. As much as I'm against outsourcing, we did attempt to put this particular job in the hands of some extremely cheap, non-union surrogates in the subcontinent. Or so we supposed. (In the age of the Internet, who truly knows where anyone is? Why, I could be right here. Or over.... here! Or maybe even...... here!) Confused? Yes, so am I. Let me see if I can 'splain you.

Okay, so we've got the master of our new recording, International House. And we showed it to our rapacious corporate label, Loathsome Prick (LP) Records. And they saw it, and knew it was good. And lo, there was heard in the land a low braying and a gnashing of teeth. And we were sore afraid. For it was the Vice President of Marketing, Gertrude Al-Kabar, and her razor sharp eye was trained on the cheap cover we had fashioned out of used newspapers and tacky glue recovered from a direct mail envelope. "This is an abomination!" she cried, and the other members of the management team nodded in grim agreement. And lo, our cheaply fashioned cover was tossed to the ground and spat upon, whilst foul curse-words were cast upon it, and it was laid low and forever damned.

Okay, so THAT didn't go so well. Anyway, the LP team suggested we outsource. Gertrude gave us a lead on some firm she had encountered in her email inbox that very morning. So we followed it up, sent the proposal, and they went to work. Actually, the process went surprisingly fast. In fact, those subcontinental designers were quite intuitive. It seemed like they knew what we wanted before we even told them. Then one night last week, when Matt was up watching his Peregrine Falcons, he noticed the man-sized tuber working furiously on our one Web-connected computer terminal. This seemed odd, as... well... he doesn't have hands, exactly. But his little root tendrils were clicking furiously across the keyboard, and it took no time for Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to determine that tubey was, in fact, the outsourced labor we'd been corresponding with. Mystery solved.

All that money and effort, for what? To enrich one of our own? What a bloody waste! Worse, since we caught on to his ruse, the tuber has not been taking direction very well. Too much vegetation, damn it. What are we, landscapers??