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 comic plays on the classic movie trope of a briefcase swap causing massive consequences. It uses this premise to (spuriously) 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, which is famed as guide for fine dining.

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. This involves designing and building their own vehicles. The "supercar" represented here may refer to the Red Bull RB17.

This comic suggests that this is because two employees, each working for one of the companies, took each other's briefcases at an airport. The implication being that each originally had information that was logically in line with their primary business: the Michelin with documents related to vehicle parts, and the Red Bull employee with documents related to restaurants that might serve its beverages. By leaving with each other's paperwork, and making use of it, both companies found themselves with departments pursuing opportunities that pivoted into fields very different from their primary business. Possibly they actually intended to mutually conspire to take the other person's briefcase all along, in a version of the common spy drop 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. These classifications became influential enough to become a mark of distinction and value in the restaurant industry. Incidentally, contrary to the universe of this comic, the Michelin Guide is also older than the concept of an "airport", having first been published in 1900.

Red Bull's motorsports sponsorships are part of a larger strategy of advertising and public relations. It's not uncommon for beverage companies to use sporting events as a venue for advertising, and Red Bull has invested heavily in this strategy: sponsoring numerous sports teams and individual athletes, placing their logos on uniforms, in stadiums, and 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. This strategy has been successful at getting the company's name in headlines, usually connected with sports and extreme physical challenges.

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 concerns about skyrocketing budget. The comic suggests that the project was actually a commercial partnership with the pizza chain Pizza Hut. In this alternate timeline, the project wasn't canceled due to government funding issues, but because of a dispute over commercial naming rights.

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

[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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