Jet Lag
Jet Lag
[Hairy, with more messed up hair than usual, is rubbing his eyes while small "sleepy" bubbles form over his head, while walking towards Ponytail.] Hairy: Sorry, I just woke up. Ponytail: It's 3 PM! ...Oh, of course, you're still jet lagged. Hairy: I-yeah, that's it! I definitely didn't spend half the night reading Wikipedia articles about random maritime disasters.
[Caption below the panel:] I love traveling, because my sleep schedule is as messed up as always, but suddenly I have an excuse.

Jet lag is a physiological condition widely attributed to the effect of changing one's longitude fast enough that one's "body clock" is unable to adapt to the official clock. (The actual causes are somewhat more complex, and may be influenced by the cramped conditions on the airplane.  The effect of travel between the east coast of North America and the west coast of South America, which are at nearly the same longitude, and differ by only one hour in official clock time, is much more severe than the effects of setting clocks ahead an hour in the spring and behind an hour in the fall.  Some White House staffers get jet lag when they travel on commercial flights but not when they travel on Air Force One.)  Symptoms include a sleep cycle which does not match the solar cycle as it usually would. [ citation needed ]
Hairy , representing Randall , has just woken up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and Ponytail mentions he must be still jet lagged (possibly from a recent trip). Hairy then denies much too specifically that he has actually been up to some late-night Wikipedia browsing and reading about maritime disasters .
In the caption Randall confesses that he loves traveling, because he can then use jet lag as a nice excuse for what is actually his usual messed up sleep cycle.
In the title text, Randall states that he had to do some important research. But what he lists, are clearly also just topics he read in Wikipedia: proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics , canceled skyscrapers , and every article linked from " Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century ." Randall has earlier illustrated this issue in 214: The Problem with Wikipedia .
Randall has previously discussed his oft-changing sleep cycle in 320: 28-Hour Day and 448: Good Morning , and has alluded to it more subtly in 68: Five Thirty , 92: Sunrise , and 776: Still No Sleep . We can thus see that this is a habit of Randall's that has persisted for more than a decade, as has his obsession with Wikipedia.
[Hairy, with more messed up hair than usual, is rubbing his eyes while small "sleepy" bubbles form over his head, while walking towards Ponytail.] Hairy: Sorry, I just woke up. Ponytail: It's 3 PM! ...Oh, of course, you're still jet lagged. Hairy: I-yeah, that's it! I definitely didn't spend half the night reading Wikipedia articles about random maritime disasters.
[Caption below the panel:] I love traveling, because my sleep schedule is as messed up as always, but suddenly I have an excuse.
