OK, first of all, I'm no science officer. You see our author (whose a rather interesting fellow) likes to play with different literary genres of the late 19th/early 20th century throughout Against the Day. In one such sequence -- where the Chums of Chance attempt to dissuade the Vormance Expedition from digging up a sentient being in their search for Iceland spar -- Pynchon abrupt shifts the narrative voice to that of a Tom Swift type boys adventure. Voila, I am transformed into a scientific genius.

But I guess my "I am not a scientist, but I play one in a thematic digression in a confusing, post-modern novel" status makes me the ideal person to guide you through this stop of the tour which is over what is now known as Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia.

The year is 1908 and that ridiculously loud boom you just heard (apologies for the lack of heads up on that), was an explosion packing 1000x the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima almost 40 years later. Now thank goodness we're in the middle of East Bumblefu-, uh, uninhabited parts of Siberia, so only the reindeer and trees have borne the brunt of the blast.

Since it's gonna take the Russkies a bunch of years to get around to checking this out, let me jump ahead. So the logical theory is a meteoroid, but upon investigation -- no meteor crater. The plot thickens.

Everyone loves a good mystery, so the theories start flying. Side effects of time dilation associated with alien visitation. Black hole passing through the earth. Annihilation of a chunk of anti-matter in the atmosphere. The deuterium of a comet undergoing nuclear fusion. What amounts to a 10 million ton natural gas fart. Here's my personal favorite. Tesla was attempting to put on an electrical light show for Admiral Parry at the North Pole with a pulse from his shuttered lab at Wardenclyffe, but miscalculated the effects of gravity and...well, blew up Siberia instead.

The truth is that it probably was a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere, hence the lack of crater. But what fun is that? Tunguska has gotten all kinds ofplay in pop culture from sci-fi novels to comic books to X-Files episodes. And keep an eye out for the Tunguska movie in 2014. Pretty sure they won't go with the meteor theory.

So there you go. Everything you never wanted to know about Tunguska. Dr. Counterfly signing off.