Rising stars.

Who said an elevator has to go up? It could go down, even sideways, if the spirit moves it. Just ask any mad scientist.

Well, friends, in case you're still curious (and I know you're not), yes, we are still trying to work out a way to get to Aldebaran without trooping on board the same old leaky spacecraft and taking the same old petrifying risks we always take in the name of science... I mean, music. (Arts and sciences, as it were.) This is proving a major pain in the Aldebaran, quite frankly. Don't know if I've ever seen Mitch Macaphee in a fouler mood. He's really stuck on this project, and like a temperamental post-impressionist painter, he sometimes suffers through every second of the creative process. Why, he's out in the courtyard right now with an airgun, popping holes in our wooden outbuilding. And in the man-sized tuber, I suspect, since that's where he sleeps. (We call it the "Root Cellar.")

His starting point in this strange endeavor has been that very edgy technology known as the "space elevator". That's where they throw a cable up into space, hook it to an asteroid or a passing alien star destroyer, and run a jitney between the ground and the celestial anchor. The principle is a bit like tying a cord to a rock and swinging it around your head. Try it at home, sometime... like right now. Do it for a moment or two. While you're doing it, you'll notice a strange phenomenon - some strange energy is smashing all of your glassware to tiny bits. That is the power of centrifugal force... a power so, well, powerful that it bowls your personal robot assistant over when he walks into the room. (Actually, it's probably better if you don't try this in the kitchen.)

Right, so anyway... experimentation aside, the whole idea is getting us up into the great beyond without time-consuming repairs and costly rocket fuel (now more than $573.00 a gallon... though if John McCain gets Exxon to drill just under where he's standing, it will be A LOT CHEAPER!!). My sense is that Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and discoverer of the space warp (no, it wasn't Zephram Cochrane, damn it), is opting for some kind of virtual cable for his space elevator - a laser or particle beam solution that he can just aim in a given direction. That means we need only confine ourselves to destinations that can be reached by following a straight-line trajectory. Piece of cake!

Of course, that's easy for me to say. I'm not the inventor. I've been telling Mitch that Aldebaran is more in a sideways direction than strictly up, but he just gives me funny looks.