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Double-Pronged Extension Cord

|< < Prev #3198 (January 23, 2026)

Title text: 'Oh, and can I borrow 50 sacks of loose flour, a pile of lithium-ion batteries, a bucket of bleach, and a bucket of vinega--' 'NO!!!!!!'

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Explanation

This is incomplete: This page was created by THE EXTENSION CORD FROM COMIC #509. I can't explain the anchoring it to the wall part yet, and I didn't do the title text. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

As Ponytail correctly points out, extension cords with prongs on both ends are lethally dangerous. They are also known as suicide cords for this reason.

Ponytail seems to relax when she persuades Cueball to use a regular extension cord instead. But then he elaborates that rather than wanting the cord to carry electricity, he actually intends to use it as a makeshift support similar to the screwdriver in Louis Slotin's infamous "Demon Core" or "Tickling the dragon's tail" experiment, which proved fatal. Understandably, this horrifies Ponytail even more.

The title text escalates the innocently mentioned hazards...though arguably not as much as the radioactivity. Loose flour is a well known fire hazard and the key to a flour-air explosion; 50 bags of it plus some way to get it into the air could blow up a sizable building. Lithium batteries are well known fire hazards when overcharged, which is why the TSA restricts them in checked luggage and there have been numerous fires caused by the lithium batteries in "hoverboards" leading them to be oft-banned in cities, airports, and by retailers who might otherwise sell them. A bank of 50 might be overkill, but if charged in parallel (serial probably wouldn't work as well), could likely cause a noticable explosion or fire once one of them hit its limit. And while vinegar and bleach aren't a particular fire hazard, they do release chlorine gas when combined, which is rather unfortunately lethal. As such, the theme appears to be "innocuous-appearing substances which are actually quite dangerous" -- except for the plutonium, of course.

Transcript

This is one of 38 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Cueball is approaching Ponytail from off, who is sitting at a desk, with a laptop.]

Cueball: Do you have an extension cord with prongs at both ends? Can I borrow it?

Ponytail: No!!!

[Close up of Ponytail raising her arms in an exasperated fashion]

Ponytail: No one should ever buy or make those!

Ponytail: They start fires, destroy equipment, and risk electrocuting you or grid workers!

Cueball: OK, OK, I get it.

[The view zooms back out, showing Ponytail handing Cueball an extension cord.]

Cueball: Can I just borrow a regular cord, then?

Ponytail: Sure. Here.

Cueball: The prongs aren't important. I just thought they'd help anchor it to the wall.

Ponytail: Wait, what are you-

[Cueball is walking away from Ponytail, who sits at her desk with her hands to her head.]

Cueball: I need it to help hold up the top half of the reflector for this plutonium core that I'm-

Ponytail: AAAAAAAA!!!!

Trivia

Two days before this comic's publication, Randall Munroe released an xkcd "What-If?" video on YouTube, "How long would you survive with no DNA?", which suggests that the hypothetical instantaneous removal of all of a person's DNA would be similar in its effects to those of receiving a massive dose of ionizing radiation. Slotin's accident was one of the most notable such events known.

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Discussion

Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

pixels-assembly-3.png

how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf

There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!

(Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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