The Czar is late on some mail.

The first email? You are totally on your own, but Mandarin might want to roll back the rum portions he hands out to the crew up on the space station, as Nightfly demonstrates:

Dear dread-yet-adorably-cuddly Masters-

Happy Belated New Year from the Supersonic Rocket Ship, and thanks very much for your well-wishes for the holiday. I would have paid respects sooner, but R & D got into the good eggnog and thought it would be fun to take the whole shebang out of orbit and buzz Kim Jong Il’s funeral procession. Fantastic idea, but drunken engineers do not make the best helmsmen. (Temporal coordinates require a steady mind.) I think we wound up vaguely annoying Times Square, and nobody really noticed because Lady Gaga was on and we looked like one of her hats.

That’s all settled now. R & D is on half-rations until further notice. With your merciful permission I’d like to keep them on, since we’re still in the middle of the Ron Paul Caper. By the end of February we’ll have the man convinced that he helped do the alien autopsies at Area 51, but THEY suppressed the knowledge from their secret moon base, which is why we never actually went to the moon, because then NASA would have learned the TRUTH!!!onetwo!! (You should see the model of the base. The Fourth Doctor was kind enough to help with tech details so it’s period-accurate. I guess the good eggnog wasn’t wholly wasted.) We could find an expendable to feed to Sleestak if you please.

We discovered this footage while trying to bring the SRS to heel. The parade is definitely a nice touch, and HK was received with the proper gleeful dismay. I also recommend Ms. Ledford for further operations. Under her care the SRS mailroom has never run more smoothly, and the decorations for the Christmas Party were quite lovely.

Yours,
Nightfly

The Czar isn’t certain, but feels that the above was an odd commercial for someone else’s website.

We also got a more or less anonymous email written in ink sent to us via carrier yak. Operative AA, we think, wrote this interesting bit:

It appears that Russian technology may not be state of the art but it is consistent.

One of my all time favorite night sky views was of a Russian satellite burning up in the earth’s atmosphere one summer night in the late 1960’s. We were up in the mountains standing around a campfire when a bright light appeared in the sky to our north. It got closer and bigger and brighter until almost directly overhead it broke up into a dozen or more lights all shooting out from a now diminished center. The now multiple lights continued arcing across the sky until they disappeared over the southern horizon. I understand that any pieces of this burning satellite that reached earth ended up in the Gulf of Mexico. I want to thank you for arranging our light show and hope that you can do as fine a job with the present hunk of metal.

To be fair, if we recall correctly, it was some Soviet thing that GorT shot down. Net effect was the same, but the takedown was awesome.

Glad you remember it; we just about forgot the whole thing.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.