The robot, it was a chicken. Oh god.

Is the car ready? Good. Engine running? Double good. No, I'm not worried about wasting gas. Last thing on my mind, damnit. Don't forget your driving shoes - there's a good chap.

Hello again. Yes, we're planning a little day trip. Nothing to get too excited about - just a brief opportunity to get our butts out of this place. Plenty of incentives to do just that, now that the gravity at the Cheney Hammer Mill is out of control Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has become a walking, talking, pop-up ad machine. Oh, yes... you heard me right. Ever since he opened that noxious email and got himself taken over by a pernicious computer virus, strange things have been happening to our mechanical friend. First, B-movies started playing on his video terminal. (He was like a walking drive-in for a few days.) Next came the pop-up ads.... kind of like what you get online, except these are little signs and banners that literally pop-up out of his head at unpredictable intervals. Some of them are accompanied by soft hits from the 70s. It's pretty terrifying.

Mitch Macaphee - Marvin's inventor and our resident mad scientist - has made several attempts to rid Marvin of this scourge. First he tried reprogramming him - no luck. (For a few hours, he thought he was a chicken. But the ads kept coming, so we ditched that.) Next came the arcane mad scientist methods - you know, magnetic fields, big glass tubs of boiling liquids, banks of v.u. meters and flashing lights, the whole bit. Nothing. He even resorted to pantomime... and while that did have some effect (it made the ads change faster, in fact), it wasn't the solution we were looking for. Now I know this is going to sound like a total cop-out, utterly lame, etc., but it was my idea, actually, to just take a little day trip and sort of let Marvin's problem sort itself out. These things have a way of taking care of themselves, you know. (Actually, not true, but as empty nostrums go, it will serve.) So into the car we go.

A little tip for all of you - don't go for a ride with two Lincolns, especially if one is an anti-matter doppelganger of the other. Trust me, one Lincoln is plenty enough company, making speeches, cursing General McClellan, trying out new, grim, presidential expressions, etc. When you've got two of them in the back seat, Christ almighty! They never agree on anything! They'll start trying to out-speechify each other. Then anti-Lincoln calls the other one "Maharba" ("Abraham" backwards) just to annoy him. So it's, "Nice speech, Maharba!" Then you'll hear posi-Lincoln start with the raspberries, and anti-Lincoln will say "Quit it!" That's when somebody (not me) has to climb back there and put a stop to it. We usually threaten them with no major addresses for a week, or forbid them from sending the Army of the Potomac into northern Virginia. Sometimes I have to get the man-sized tuber to shake a stick at them. It makes for a pretty uncomfortable ride all around, suffice to say.

Okay, well.... you've got your troubles to attend to, no doubt. We'll be in the car if you need to find us. It's a green car with four wheels - you can't miss it. (This is a small place.)