Friday February 2, 2001
Book 1: The Tub of Happiness — Bombs Ahoy
For those of you having trouble with today's punchline, here are a few astronomy notes.

Between 6,000 and 7,000 BC, a star we now call Eta Carinae (pronounced "ate uh kuh rye nuh") exploded messily. The light from that event reached earth circa A.D. 1845. In 1995 the Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of the aftermath.

So you see, any light-energy that gets put into the Carinae system today won't be visible to earth-bound astronomers for about 8,000 years. Also, you've got to wonder about Tagon's sense of aesthetics.

Eh? Get it? Eh?

I bet the folks at Nasa think it's funny, and they're smarter than you are (except the guys who do the metric conversions).

Original Art

Transcript

Narrator: T-minus five minutes, and counting...
Kevyn: Captain, evacuating the hellevator is useless, The yield on those conversion bombs is huge.
Tagon: I think we can contain most of it. We'll put full power to the shields, and invert and constrict them.
Kevyn: But when the shield generators are destroyed, the blast will still escape at full strength.
Tagon: Nope. Because we'll have tripped the teraport, and the ship will be in the process of ripping itself through a billion-billion nanoscopic wormholes.
Kevyn: And most of the blast will rip through those selfsame wormholes, instead of out into populated lunar orbit. You're smarter than you let on, captain.
Kevyn: So, where do you want those wormholes to end up?
Tagon: Eta Carinae might be pretty again if it were properly back-lit.
Kitesfear: