3269: Airport Meeting

Airport Meeting

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Title text: Although it was a setback for physics, I'm glad the particle naming rights issue led to the cancelation of Pizza Hut's Superconducting Super Collider in the early 90s, so the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark ended up just being named 'top quark.'

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Explanation

This is one of 42 incomplete explanations: This page swapped briefcases recently. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic plays on the classic movie trope of a briefcase swap causing massive consequences. It uses this premise to jokingly explain the oddly mismatched, famous side-ventures of two major global companies: Michelin and Red Bull.

Michelin is a company that manufacture tires for cars and heavy machinery. However, they have also created the Michelin Guide, originally a guide for motorists in France that eventually branched out into dining and travel and spread across the world.

Red Bull is a company that manufactures the eponymous energy drink. However, they have also invested heavily in motorsport events, competing as a team in NASCAR and Formula One. "Red Bull Supercar" might refer to upcoming Red Bull RB17.

This comic implies that this is because two employees, each working for one of the companies, accidentally swapped briefcases at an airport, suggesting that originally one had information that Michelin was using in support of the motorsport business and other possessed information that Red Bull was using to identify restaurants, which better fits with the companies' existing specialties. By leaving with each other's paperwork, and making use of it, both companies found themselves with departments pursuing opportunities that pivoted into the technically quite different fields more closely related to the other. It seems strange that they would both remain unaware of the switch, and keep going with the plan anyway, unless they were sent travelling to remote offices without themselves or anyone at the other end yet being privy to what confidential project material they were supposed to be carrying, and too much effort had been spent by the time any pre-briefed person became involved again. Possibly they actually intended to mutually conspire to take the other person's briefcase all along, in a version of the common spy bag swap trope, but this seems unlikely from the comic.

In reality, the Michelin Guide, which covers restaurants and hotels, originated as a way to encourage early automobile owners to drive more and therefore need replacement tires more often. The early guide included maps, automobile maintenance instructions, and listings of hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and auto repair mechanics across France - information which was not easily found elsewhere at the time. The popularity of the restaurant listings led to greater investment into the section, and the classification of two-star restaurants being 'worth a detour' and three-star being 'worth a special journey' to tempt motorists into driving to them.

Red Bull's motorsports sponsorships are part of a larger strategy of owning or sponsoring numerous sports teams and individual athletes as a means to advertise their brand, placing their logos on uniforms, in stadiums, or on race cars. Besides its racing teams, the company owns or has stakes in over a dozen soccer clubs, along with ice hockey, rugby, and bicycle racing teams, and regularly sponsors various extreme sport competitions. These sponsorships are less related to the company's energy drink business, but still make sense as advertising.

The title text expands this concept into particle physics. The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was a real, massive particle accelerator project under construction in Texas during the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was designed to be much larger and more powerful than the current Large Hadron Collider (LHC). However, the US Congress officially canceled it in 1993 due to skyrocketing budget concerns.

The joke suggests that the project was actually a commercial partnership with Pizza Hut. In this alternate timeline, the project wasn't canceled due to government funding issues, but instead because of a dispute over commercial naming rights.

The top quark is a real elementary particle that was discovered in 1995 (shortly after the SSC's cancellation). The title text jokes that if the Pizza Hut collider had succeeded, the particle would have been branded as the "Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Topping Quark" instead of its actual scientific name.

Quarks are a type of sub-atomic particle (which come in six 'flavors': up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom) but it is also the name of a type of cheese. The claim that the top quark was originally named the Double Stuffed Extra Cheese Extra Topping quark, before being shortened to top quark, suggests it was used as a pizza topping. In reality, the top and bottom quarks were originally named truth and beauty quarks, and are still occasionally referred to as such. Nearly all pizza toppings are made out of quarks.^{[citation needed]} However, the flavor of quarks is highly dependent on their general configuration into particles, atoms, molecules, proteins, and such.

Transcript

This is one of 31 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Cueball and Ponytail are standing together and talking to each other. Cueball holds a black briefcase, while Ponytail has a grey briefcase in front of her.]

Cueball: I do restaurant analysis for a beverage company.

Ponytail: Neat! I work in the automotive industry, developing parts for specialized vehicles.

[Same as first panel, but Cueball has put down his briefcase next to Ponytail's (partly obscuring it from view) and is looking at something in his hand (could be either a boarding card or his cellphone, depending upon how many 'years earlier' than now this was).]

Cueball: Oh, my flight is boarding. It was nice to meet you!

Ponytail: You too!

[Ponytail and Cueball walk off in opposite directions, carrying each other's original briefcase.]

[Header:] Years later:

[A book with a star on it that reads:]

Michelin Tire Company

Star Restaurant Guide

[A fancy sports car, facing to the right. On the body of the car, it says:]

Red Bull Supercar

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Discussion

About this comic

Since there's no explanation text yet, the joke is that they left with the wrong suitcases. :) SevenTheGamingKitty (talk) 00:52, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Not wanting to be pedantic, but the guide Michelin exists since 1900, three years before brothers Wright performed the first motor flight. There are older airports, but the first commercial terminal operated in Sydney since 1920, and before 1920, practically all commercial flight was postal service only, anyway. --2001:16B8:CC2E:500:9AAF:4351:6EB6:C918 21:09, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

This one of those times when I had no idea what the comic was trying to say without explainxkcd's explanation. Both baggage swap and criss-cross of end result being uncrossed at the beginning are hard to grasp. And now I'm stuck thinking how the comic could've been made better... (the best I've came up with was switching character exit direction in panel 3 so that characters would've faced the same way throughout; and to somehow emphasize tires in Ponytail's line since restaurant guide has that as the attention-focus word) 159.224.64.162 22:56, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

About the wiki

Why can i not make first comment on last comic... also... what happened to the website??? 216.25.182.141 02:48, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

The site was having problems for several days. It wasn't picking up the new comics, and we couldn't login. See the box at the top about some community members working on a replacement site, since the original maintainer isn't interested any more. Barmar (talk) 02:56, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Ah, so that's why the site felt so unstable recently. SevenTheGamingKitty (talk) 03:31, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Midwest America has been a bit unstable in terms of Internet since last Friday (Jul 3rd), brought on by a particularly bad storm. My home internet, usually pretty stable, has been out for a couple hours every day since the power came back on. Microsoft Azure has also had some issues recently. This may have either caused or exacerbated the recent site instability to a point where everyone noticed it this week. Not to say that the original maintainers lack of maintenance didn't contribute, but I don't think it was the whole story. (Dartania) 2601:40D:4283:28E0:2587:5B61:A9FE:1A87 15:52, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

I didn't realise this was a sinking ship. Very sad. Hopefully someone is able to export all the explanations at least so that they can be ported over to a new site. And who is paying for the servers if the admins have all vanished? Alcatraz ii (talk) 03:46, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Not really a sinking ship, though might have been lacking the steersman necessary to carefully weave it around any inconveniently appearing icebergs (which could finally sink it; and looked like it had, until the reprieve just now).

Multiple exports seem to have been made. And the absolute worst case for the recent problems was always likely to have been just a site frozen in aspic without further modification (at least until the server crashes, or stops being paid for, maybe due to entirely other reasons).

In fact, I think I might blame several 'full site exports' from creating some of the (not utterly blocking) instability. Perhaps not all of them, but I've seen several people announce (elsewhere) that they've decided to make "a full copy", and only one of them directly suggested that they were doing so in a 'nicer' rate-limiting manner. Which suggests that the rest may not have realised they could/should. 82.132.236.148 11:38, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

The full copies I know of that were made were Eunakria's and mine's, we both discussed this and we both independently rate limited it. Even if there was someone else out there who didn't, though, I don't think they particularly contributed. A wikiteam3 dump calling the API is small potatoes compared to the aggressive web scraping and bot traffic the site has been receiving (and on the new MediaWiki instance, which is about to become the canonical instance after Jeff transfers the domain over, I've added some things which should hopefully avoid these problems). Celene (talk) 09:30, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Is there any specific information about the new fork, who are creating it and is there any information on it? I'd like to help. Mouse 15:24, 10 Jul 20206 (CEST)

You can join User:42.book.addict's explainxkcd Discord server for more information about the new fork. Capycapybara (talk) 17:16, 10 July 2026 (UTC)
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