361: Christmas Back Home

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 22:21, 31 August 2013 by St.nerol (talk | contribs) (Explanation: What I can see, Santa Claus' relation to jet lag has nothing do to with the comic.)
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Christmas Back Home
Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.
Title text: Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.

Explanation

The script begins similarly to the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas":

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The idea is that Cueball has been so used to being on the computer late at night (perhaps coding, or deep into some Internet argument) that, when Santa Claus arrives, Cueball is still awake. Note the mouse pun.

Being forced to sleep at normal times is compared with jet lag: Sleeplessness due to your body being synchronized to another time zone, so named because jet aircraft made it possible for people to travel farther and faster. Here Cueball needs to turn back his internal clock over five hours to sync with his family.

Transcript

'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house.
There were no sound of stirring save the click of a mouse.
For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept.
Santa: What are you doing out of bed so late?
Cueball: Late? It's barely 3AM!


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Discussion

Can we just change "used to using", if it is bad, into something better, instead of marking the explanation as incomplete because of a wording issue? -St.nerol (talk) 10:43, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Because Cueball exclaims that it's barely 3 AM, would Cueball's internal sleep clock need to be turned more than five hours to sync with his family? I know it's a small detail, but I thought it would be worth noting. Cueball would probably stay up past 3 AM into the morning hours before going to bed. NAE (talk) 14:45, 26 October 2017 (UTC)