Lawn robots.

It's not just the noise, man. It's just a stupid thing to do. For one thing, we don't HAVE a lawn. For another, it's three o'clock in the freaking morning!

Oh, hi. Sorry... I was reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Not that he needs to be reminded of its contents - It's been posted on a spike inside his memory banks for a good many years now. Nevertheless, I felt he needed reminding because he's been unusually disruptive of late. Sure, there have been times when Marvin's programming has gone south or when he's unduly under the influence of nefarious telemetry from alien planets (don't think it doesn't happen, because it does!). Only recently he's been trying his hand (or robotic claw, more properly speaking) at a number of different small enterprises, hoping to make a marginal living in these hard times. (What exactly he needs money for, I don't know. Perhaps some kind of automatonic inebriants.)

I don't know for sure, but I think this may have something to do with his having been trapped in a virtual mine shaft with the man-sized tuber for the better part of a month. (Even an electronic brain can go crazy. Just ask the robot on Lost in Space.) Whatever the cause, Marvin is obsessed with new ventures. He opened up a flower stand in front of the Cheney Hammer Mill last week, assisted by the man-sized tuber (who knows a thing or two about flowers, being what amounts to an enormous tulip bulb himself). When he heard about the president's plan to send men to an asteroid in the distant future, he desperately attempted to put himself on the short list for the trip, thinking the rewards to be great (like many pentagon contracts). Both of these, of course, fell flat.

Okay, so I'm in the studio, pounding on the keys, trying to make something that sounds vaguely like music. I hit the playback button, and I hear this grinding sound that bears no resemblance to the one emitted by my aging Oberheim rack unit. It was, in fact, motor noises being picked up by an ambient mic. So I go upstairs and see Marvin mustering a small army of robots - I don't mean five or six normal robots, but about 40 to 50 toy-sized automatons, all with little purring lawn mowers. He apparently crimped the little suckers into being the muscle behind his new landscaping business, and they were practicing on the Hammer Mill courtyard. Which is made of cobblestones. Genius!

Now that all their mower blades are dull, I'm guessing Marvin will talk the best of his little crew into putting together a band. He'll likely call it, "Marvin and the Lawn Robots". So great - Big Green brings him up from nothing, and now he's competing with us.