Flame Retardants

Well, as I live and breathe dangerous levels of airborne toxicity or, perhaps, plumes of second-hand opium! If it isn’t the clown princes of psychedelia! The freakazoids of the festival fairgrounds! The multi-instrumental mind-benders from Okoboji, The Red Hot Flaming Lips®!! Bravo, Perry Farrell and the nameless lot of you! You’re looking fine and dandy — which is to say, joyful and ridiculous in your crowned and costumed splendour. Hey, Perry Farrell, if I may so boldly inquire, what was all that business about Yoshimi and the Pink Robots — or was it the Spiders From Mars — that you were yowling about with such earnest? Let me get this straight: Impish, young Yoshimi is a black belt in karate, workin’ for the city, she likes to discipline her body. Got it. I’m imagining yoga, Jazzercise™ and the rest of it. But the part about her battling evil-natured robots that are programmed to destroy us?! It sounds as though you and the lads got into some bad shiitake mushrooms, haha. Truth be told, I liked it better when you were extolling the merits of Vaseline™ petroleum jelly as a hair lubricant. As any barber will attest, a dollop of pomade keeps one coiffed all the livelong day, but it took you mad wankers to tunefully inform the unkempt long hairs in your audience of this fact! Now if you can only convince them to run a lathered cake soap under their arms and up their bums, we might all breathe easier. I bid adieu, then, and give proper blessings to the nonsensical sideshow that is The Red Hot Flaming Lips! May you journey safely across the mud-caked festival fairgrounds and up into the extra-terrestrial cosmic sphere!!