I've been reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon again, and I must admit that I love this book. The humor is right up my alley. The following is not meant to represent the funniest thing in the book... it's just a passage that made me laugh a lot. And there have been many such passages.
He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible: broken all of their codes. This explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto--who ought to be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden--is, in point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk. He must get the word out! The codes must all be changed! This is what he is thinking when he flies head-on into a hundred-food-tall Octomelis sumatrana.
I salute your taste, sir. Moreover, I envy you deeply -- the opportunity to appreciate Cryptonomicon anew is something I think I've lost forever, having read it six or seven times now. And you still have the Pig Truck Episode ahead of you!
I've basically decided than it's probably not possible for me to be normal friends with anyone who actively _doesn't_ like Cryptonomicon. At least virtually all of my good friends _do_.
Also, urinal-based allusions are strongly advocated...
I love the scene, and Stephenson is a gem.
In particular, here he manages to make a hysterically comic irony manifest: one of the open questions of WWII is "why _didn't_ the Japanese figure out that Purple, etc. had been cracked by the Allies?"
His answer -- well, "they" _did_, but died before they could tell anyone... And in place of the corny life-flashing-before-eyes, we witness an endocrine-overload-dump-fueled magnificent _insight_ -- very cool.
"Me 'at's off to the Duke." Ingenuity and panache. It has the ring of something that actually could have happened, in addition to being somewhat over the top. That's rare in my experience.
It goes without saying that you are inherently kewl for appreciating this scene. :)
Nort
Tactical Impersonations of one sort or another are also seen highly by this particular reader.