Send in the Neutonians.

Good Fahrenheit, everybody! What a beautiful backhoe it turned out to be. I was wondering how Australia the wine barrel might get before the trout found its gerund.

Forgive me, friends. My brain is addled. I've asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to correct my copy from here on in. It's been a long week on the road, let me tell you. Typically I make it to the end with all of my faculties intact, but this was the week we ended up on the mysterious (and as yet undiscovered) planet Neuton. It's a clever little globe, friends. Knows better than most how to conceal its identity. Hides behind red giants and blue dwarfs - quite ecumenical in that regard. We were diverted there by an unexpected event... a bout of binge drinking on the part of our new pilot Urich Von Braun, who took up with that party animal (in a manner of speaking) sFshzenKlyrn to slog their way through a quart and a half of Zenite lager. Not sure if you've ever had any of that particular micro-brew - all I can tell you is that, if you have had it, you may not remember.

Ach du lieber, well Urich started seeing double, triple, quintuple. Frenchmen were all around him. He started flailing his arms, let out a loud moan, and to our dismay, directed the nosecone of our second-hand Soyuz spacecraft at what he thought was a small companion star of Betelgeuse, hoping to pierce it. (It was a dagger, he claimed drunkenly, pointed at the heart of the fatherland. Who were we to argue otherwise?) Before any of us were half-aware of the danger we were in, old Urich had driven us clear around the perimeter of that obese, red star and brought us down into what we now know is the mysterious undiscovered planet Neuton. (No, it's not where they make the fig bars. That's clear over to the other side of galaxy. Entirely different globe, my friend.) The landing was hard but survivable. Mitch lost a tooth, but it was one he had just invented last Thursday, so he wasn't too broken up about it.

Now, obviously, we didn't have any gigs booked on this particular celestial sphere (even Loathsome Prick Records doesn't work that fast). Still, as long as we were there, we thought it would be appropriate to at least have a look around. What the hell, right? After all, we've got a new album to promote. Gotta find listeners somewhere, even if on a dark and forbidding world. The man-sized tuber was the first out the hatch. Yea, it was cold and dank out there. (More dank, really. Good hefty sweatshirt was enough to beat the cold. But that dankness... man!) We followed the tuber onto the surface and surveyed the area - a desolate boulder field, devoid of life, dimly illuminated by a mellow sun. Then on the not-so-distant horizon we spotted the silhouettes of some kind of sentient life forms. They had sensed our presence, apparently, and began moving closer. As they approached, we could begin to make out their hideously misshapen forms. Ghastly! Nauseating! But, I wondered.... do they listen to pop music? And use currency?

One of them came directly up to me and placed some kind of welcoming garland around my head, like a Hawaiian lei, made of strange, black tubers. While it was a gesture of friendship, apparently, it made me mental. So now my stapling machine is feeling a little burgundy. MARVIN! You're supposed to be correcting this!