Two Welsh Girls on the Loose: Podcast # 173

Hi’s and hello’s, all! Sweet Betsy, here!!

Sorry, I know it’s been moons since our last ’Two Welsh Girls on the Loose’ podcast, but, you see, we’ve been busy. That is, if you can call being stuffed into a spaceship with eighteen steam-punkers, geeks, new agers, and all assorted’s, on a one-way (always read the small print, podcast listeners, I cannot overemphasize it!) journey to the planet Mars, as being busy.

But now — that is, as of just two hours ago — we have arrived, and I and Hermione are on the surface of the red planet itself!

Which brings me to the title of this podcast: “Are You Freaking Crazy?!”

To explain: during our descent from the orbiting spaceship to the planetary surface, there was, let’s just call it, an incident — the denouement of which has, come to think of it, just reminded me of a scene I once saw in an old timey movie (you know, the ones sans color; I think they were called greyscale flicks?), when some fat guy said to some skinny guy: “Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into!”

So, I’m just saying, Hermione is my best mate, and for the most part she’s got more than a lick or two of good sense about her. But all these ‘messes’ that I and she keep winding up in ... well, it’s not necessarily always a fifty-fifty split with regard to just who or whom it was that went and ‘stuck their foot into it!’ So to speak. Just sayin’.

Cutting to the chase — or maybe to the inevitable car wreck that comes after the chase — as I utter these very words to you, podcast listeners, The Two Welsh Girls on the Loose find themselves in a fix of ‘open-the-pod-bay-doors-Hal’ proportions.

Thought experiment: One finds oneself in an over-sized lipstick-tube-looking planetary descent module (alongside nine other ‘lipstick tubes’ carrying the eighteen other very-ripe-from-the-long-journey hopeless idiots), speeding at hundreds of miles per hour through the upper regions of an un-breathable atmosphere, headed for the surface of a lifeless, subfreezing planet, and what?!? — I ask you, loyal podcast listeners — would be the very verryest last thing you could imagine yourself doing? If you answered: ‘taking out your curling iron and attempting to plug it into a panel of blinky lights with the words “DO NOT TOUCH!” clearly printed on it’ — ding, ding, ding — guess what? — you just won the door prize!

After what I call ‘the lurch,’ we watched the other nine descent module thingy’s recede into the distance, on a course for the robot-built village, ‘New Newcastle,’ and an awaiting welcome buffet — while we (a.k.a. ‘fat guy’ and ‘skinny guy’) instead went hurtling off for a hard landing on a remote Martian desert plain.

At this point, I should probably hand it over to Hermione — this being, after all, an ‘odd numbered’ TWGOTL podcast, and therefore her turn at the microphone — but right at this moment she seems to have assumed some kind of spheroid-hedgehog position.

Whoa! Wait! Did you hear that, podcast listeners? Something’s going on out there! Hold on while I have a look out the … Hey! It’s good old stinkbomb steampunker Gary! And he’s driving a Mars rover forklift thingamajig! We’re saved!