Recently, the Planet Magazine offices received the following message from “The UFO Pilots Ass’n of Testbed Earth”. Interestingly, it came in via traditional fax. We were able to verify the information as correct, however, via the 1-866 contact number on the press release. When we called to ask, “A fax, WTF?! LOL!!”, the alien representative we spoke with told us that fax technology is a pure form of Lo-Tek and therefore fashionable among many in the Galactic Hierarchy.

Anyway, here is the communication in full, given the importance of the subject:

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Vacancies are still available at the “Sacred Burial Grounds Apartments” Complex in Indian Mounds, N.J. Free 2-week poltergeist insurance to the first dozen renters! Call: 555-5555, ext. 555.

…and spoil the reactor.

These are seemingly dark days in the transoceanic trucking industry. The seas are as deep and gloomy as they’ve ever been. Lotsa truck cabs are unheated and unpressurized, and they typically crumple under the pressure of even one aquasphere. More important, the goods being transported get wet, and flatter, even if they were wet and flat to begin with. So it’s harder than normal to retain drivers, much less good ones, as they usually don’t last for much more than one leg of an underseas road trip.

So will the transoceanic trucking industry simply sink like a stone, or perhaps dry up?

Not so, retort aqua-trucking scientists, perhaps a bit too loudly. They recently have developed a retrofitting method that removes the tires and seals the undercarriages of these trucks and adds a propeller in back. As a result, the vehicles actually can “float” and move about on the surface of the water, rather than crawl along the rutted and barnacle-encrusted seabed highways, past the brooding and spell-cursed ruins of Atlantis and the sleeping tomb of Cthulu and his many wives. They call this new method the BOuyant Advanced Truck System, or “BOATS”.

Well, glad that’s settled.

So, what’s next on the agenda for these scientific saviors of wheeled transoceanic commerce? Quite simply, they’re taking on a much more complicated task: the transatlantic and transpacific railroad industry!

The obvious solution, they acknowledge, is to create larger BOATS, rather than waste time figuring out how to make the rails float. But they also think there may be a way to add birdlike “wings” to the BOATS and move the propellers to the front. This could allow the BOATS to actually lift up and move through the air — an approach they are thinking of calling JETS or maybe PLANES, but the big stumbling block has been figuring out what those acronyms stand for. A UN committee is currently working on it, and until that’s finalized some day in the far, far future, History herself shall have to wait.

When The Clone War started up, my comrades and I in The Rebel Federation quickly determined that it was an exact duplicate of an earlier war, known simply as The War. A war that we had won. So we carefully did everything exactly the same again, using, ironically, clones of soldiers who had fallen in The War.

The choreography and continuity, that is to say, the tactical planning, was a little tricky since not everything in the first war had been quark-recorded and survivors’ memories were a bit faulty. For example, the attack ships that spent the war beautifully but pointlessly glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate would have been much more useful if they’d been positioned against the enemy bases near the shoulders of Orion. Should’ve realized that the second time around, of course, but at least we saved a few attack ships that way.

Anyway, as expected, we won — again.

The Awards Ceremony at the end of the movie, I mean at the end of The Clone War, was a little more yawn-inducing this time around (although Princess Luka’s crossed hair buns were as hot as ever).

I don’t suppose the other side, The Federation Rebels, will be trying a clone war again anytime soon. But just in case, the face-and-body dancers are keeping the clone vats warm for us.

One thing still puzzles me, though. Why didn’t the enemy also realize that it was a clone war and thus do something different this time? Could they really be that stupid? Or are they more clever than we realized, and some unseen hammer blow has yet to fall? Or, worst of all, could it be that the underlying logic of this blog entry was never fully worked out by the editor before being posted? We may never know, but we can guess. Oh yes… we can guess very well.

They called President Nixon “paranoid” when he said there were people in the FBI who were out to get him. But with the recent uncorking of No. 2 FBI honcho Mark Felt as “Deep Throat”, we can once again confidentally assert the following maxim:

Just because you fear people are coming to get you, doesn’t mean they aren’t!

Words to live by, indeed.

Of course, when we say “people”, we really mean “aliens”. And when we say “fear”, I suppose we mean “hope”. Maybe Nixon will be right about that too!

Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.

Red sky at night, sailors take fright.

Red sky at midday, sailors completely freak out and look for a new line of work.

Abstract:

From the Proceedings of the 49th Convention of the American Datatician Society Meeting, Akron Hilton, Akron, Ohio. November 1994.

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