Lt. Cmdr. Smegg - "Home, home on the range"

Main engineeringShortly before our stop on earth
 
Chris Zodar was proving quite helpful in engineering; and for an amateur musician he really wasn't all that bad.
 
"Got a spanner?" Jason asked.
 
"Yeah, here," Chris said, then resumed practicing for the karaoke competition. What _was_ that song, it sounded vaguely familiar... Jason found himself working to the beat of Chris's singing instead of to the throbbing of the ship's engines, resulting in a mistimed ejection of fuel in the damaged drive system which caused the starship equivalent of "knocking"...
 
Boom! Which was very loud. Fortunately, no harm done, remember to use BP Premium 94,000 octane hydrogen cells next time...
 
Suddenly an announcement came over the intercom. "Attention all crew, we have arrived at Earth and will begin shore-leave in exactly 30 minutes. Please do not attempt to leave the ship before then or you will be subject to space corps directive 34267 which states that 'all crew members who depart on shore leave prior to the scheduled departure time will have their pay docked by thrice the amount they would earn in the time they were absent, not to mention that they won't be allowed to go on shore leave the next time but what the hey space corps ships hardly ever stop on shore leave anyway so by the next time either the captain will have forgot or you'll be captain anyway so it really doesn't matter.' Hey, does it really say that in there? Damn, that one time on Regul VII or whichever planet had the Britney-Spears-Clone-Gelf's..."
 
Zodar suddenly perked up and exclaimed, "Shore leave! Yeah!"
 
Smegg hadn't noticed the earlier announcement that the ship was even returning home either, but he remained calm. "Um, why exactly would you want to go on shore leave? You just got on the ship, isn't Earth kind of boring?"
 
"I didn't get on the ship _at_ Earth, remember? I haven't been there in, let's see, how long? One, two, three, no that was my niece's baptism that doesn't count, four five..." He got lost in counting.
 
"Well whatever, I guess I figure that if we signed on to go out and explore space, going back home is pretty dull in comparison, right?"
 
"Maybe for you it is," Zodar replied; "so far space has been only been a mess of talking pink palm trees and potatoes." He picked up a cobbled-together device he'd been assembling on his spare time.
 
"Pink palm trees?" Smegg inquired. "I must have missed those... And what in the world are you doing with that 50hZ transmitter? Disrupt all of Europe's power supply?"
 
And come to think of it, Zodar really seemed to be feigning excitement...
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------Red: "Welcome to the antique roadkill portion of the show we call --"Mike: "Yeah yeah can you go ahead and appraise this, I've got to meet with my parole officer in 15 minutes!"Red: "Okay, let me take a look at this... Mike, that's JUNK."Dalton: "Not to mention, it's MY junk!"