Witness protection.

Beard and glasses are no good. You've already got a beard and glasses, remember? Maybe you should just shave and squint more. Not sure anyone would recognize you anyway, but there's no point in taking chances.

Oh, hi. I was just attempting to help our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, with a little problem he's experiencing with law enforcement. No, he didn't get one of those threatening IRS calls demanding thousands of dollars in iTunes cards on pain of arrest. Nothing that exciting. Apparently, Mitch has been running a side-hustle. He built some kind of interstellar surveillance drone, and it's been spotted by NASA and disseminated to the press. Now he thinks the feds are after him for horning in on their game.

Yes, I know. He's got nothing to worry about. But Mitch's nerves have been kind of raw just lately, and he wants to go into hiding ... a kind of witness protection program, only the kind that shields you from the government. His probe - named "Oumuamua" by astronomers - collects call data from the planets it orbits, then transmits it down to Mitch's lab, where he puts it through a grey box with flashing Christmas lights and a kind of electrical arc that runs between two rods. (I told him he could use a standard toggle switch on the thing, but he insisted on the big-handled wall switch. It's no fun being a mad scientist without one of those.)

Hmmm... Doesn't look like a drone.I guess it's the downloading the data part that makes him think he might be in the crosshairs of law enforcement. Even Mitch, with his fevered astrophysicist brain, knows that that is a bozo no-no, so to speak, in the eyes of the intelligence services. I told him just to shut Oumuamua down for a couple of weeks or send it to another solar system ... preferably a slightly less repressive or litigious one. My guess is that he will eventually come around to doing something like that, though you would think the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might have worked that out for himself. No soap. So many difficult personalities to deal with in this business! So much freaking drama!

Okay, so Mitch is in a funk, and we're still inserting the funk into our latest raft of songs. Be patient, my friends ... they will drop one day soon, funk and all.

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