Editing 361: Christmas Back Home

{{comic
| number    = 361
| date      = July 24, 2007
| title     = Christmas Back Home
| image     = christmas_back_home.png
| titletext = Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.
}}

==Explanation==
The script is built similarly to the original {{w|A Visit from St. Nicholas}}, even derriving a few lines from the original poem ("'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house" "Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;"). The punchline is that Cueball has been so used to using the computer late at night (possibly either due to him working hard into the night at coding projects or using the Internet excessively due to all the interesting things that the Internet has to offer) that, when Santa Claus comes to deliver the presents (at a time when normal folks sleep), he notices a still-awake Cueball and apparently asks "What are you doing up so late?" The title text expands on this, contrasting Cueball being forced to sleep at a "normal" time against jet lag, that is, the feeling of sleeplessness due to your body being synchronized to a different time zone than the one you are present, so named because one traveling in a jet could easily pass through time zones, even though the sleep pattern of the pilot stays the same. (We can conclude that Cueball visited his parents for Christmas time, a Christmas tradition, but his family lives at a different time zone than him.)

==Transcript==
:Narrator: 'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house.
:Narrator: There were no sound of stirring save the click of a mouse.
:Narrator: For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
:Narrator: 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!

{{comic discussion}} 
[[Category: Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category: Comics with color]]
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 {{comic
 | number    = 361
-| date      = December 24, 2007
+| date      = July 24, 2007
 | title     = Christmas Back Home
-| image     = christmas back home.png
+| image     = christmas_back_home.png
 | titletext = Family going to bed at 10 PM is so much worse than jet lag.
 }}
 ==Explanation==
+The script is built similarly to the original {{w|A Visit from St. Nicholas}}, even derriving a few lines from the original poem ("'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house" "Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;"). The punchline is that Cueball has been so used to using the computer late at night (possibly either due to him working hard into the night at coding projects or using the Internet excessively due to all the interesting things that the Internet has to offer) that, when Santa Claus comes to deliver the presents (at a time when normal folks sleep), he notices a still-awake Cueball and apparently asks "What are you doing up so late?" The title text expands on this, contrasting Cueball being forced to sleep at a "normal" time against jet lag, that is, the feeling of sleeplessness due to your body being synchronized to a different time zone than the one you are present, so named because one traveling in a jet could easily pass through time zones, even though the sleep pattern of the pilot stays the same. (We can conclude that Cueball visited his parents for Christmas time, a Christmas tradition, but his family lives at a different time zone than him.)
-The script begins similarly to the poem "{{w|A Visit from St. Nicholas}}":
-:'''Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house''
-:''Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;''
-However, there is a change in the text due to the fact that Cueball is on a computer, perhaps coding or on the internet.  Instead, it reads
-:"'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house"
-:"There were no sounds of stirring save the click of 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 [[386: Duty Calls|Internet argument]]) and he's forgotten the hours normal people sleep that, when Santa Claus arrives, Cueball is still awake. Note the mouse pun.
-Being forced to sleep at normal times is compared with {{w|jet lag}}: sleeplessness due to your body being synchronized to another time zone, named as such because jet aircraft made it possible for people to travel farther and faster, throwing their internal clocks out of sync with the place they're in far more than in the age of necessarily longer travel times in which the full clock-shift is smeared over days, weeks or even months. Here, Cueball needs to turn back his internal clock over five hours to sync with his family.
 ==Transcript==
-:[The panel depicts the interior of a house with numerous Christmas decorations. Santa stares at Cueball, who is sitting at his desk with his laptop.]
+:Narrator: 'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house.
-:'Twas the night before Christmas at my family's house.
+:Narrator: There were no sound of stirring save the click of a mouse.
-:There were no sound of stirring save the click of a mouse.
+:Narrator: For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
-:For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
+:Narrator: I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept.
-: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!
 {{comic discussion}}
-[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
+[[Category: Comics featuring Cueball]]
-[[Category:Comics with color]]
+[[Category: Comics with color]]
-[[Category:Christmas]]