The following is included largely as a result of Robin's repeated references to the "Pig Truck Incident" in Cryptonomicon and because I know you all love scatological jocoseness.

Whereas I might have said, "The driver honked his horn loudly as he attempted to pass a truck full of pigs. The pig truck swerved and I got sprayed with pig shit," Neal Stephenson would say:

The primary horn of THE GRACE OF GOD was apparently going unheard, possibly because it it was competing for audio bandwidth against large numbers of swine voicing their displeasure in same frequency range. With aplomb normally seen only among senescent English butlers, Bong-Bong reached up with his horn/gearshift hand and gripped a brilliant stanless-steel chain flaining from the ceiling of cab with a stainless-steel crucifix on the end of it and jerked downwards, energizing the sceondary, tertiary, and quaternary honking systems: a trio of tuba-sized stainless-steel horns mounted to the roof of THE GRACE OF GOD and collectively drawing so much power that our vehicle's speed dropped by (I would estimate) ten km/hr as its energies were diverted into decibel production. A demi-hyperbolic swath of agricultural crops twenty miles long was flattened to the ground by the blast, and, hundreds of miles north, the Taiwanese government, its collective ears still ringing, filed a diplomatic protest with the Philippine ambassador. Dead whales and dolphins washed ashore on the beaches of Luzon for days, and sonar operators in passing U.S. Navy submarines were sent into early retirement with blood streaming from their ears.

Terrified by this sound, all of the pigs (I would suppose) voided their bowels just as the driver of the Pig Truck swerved violently away from us. Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value.

Another passage that I found amusing came shortly afterwards, and I'll include it here as a bonus—though it contains nothing about butts, poo, or hyperbolas (sorry).

We then covered an amount of distance equivalent, in terms of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, to one more Lewis and Clark Expedition Day, a convenient unit of distance, danger, perspirational weight loss, poor sphincter control [Ed: Ok, so butts.], wishing you were at home, exasperation, & emotional toll which I will hereinafter abbreviate as LAC.

As these two passages both fall within what is by far the most odd chapter of the book thus far, I thought perhaps you'd like to read it to gain a bit of perspective. (And yes, that site has the entire book online for those of you who relish the idea of reading a 1150 page book on the screen of your laptop.)