[288] Actually, the term is chaise longue ("long chair" in French), but I was unaware of that at the time.

[305] The Roswell incident was really a fairly minor one; only its timing made it important, and Majestic 12 would have been formed within a year or so just on the weight of things like the Kenneth Arnold sightings anyway.

[434] This joke would have worked a little better if Asuka's plug suit were blue or purple, but you can't have everything.

[462] Another reference to something not in my own library: I know this is a Pink Floyd reference just from spending so much time with Zoner, but I couldn't tell you what album it's from.

[613] X-COM's standard fighter aircraft in NXE, this version of the Raiden is an evolution of the Soviet-built MiG-31 Firefox (from the Craig Thomas book and Clint Eastwood movie of the same name). The Raiden itself is a reference to the Raiden series of video games (of which Raiden DX was the third).

[633] Like most people who figure they know the truth about the Second Impact, DJ does go down one blind alley here: He assumes that the First Impact, whenever it was, involved the First Angel. In fact both the First and Second Angels were present at the Second Impact; the First Impact (also known as the KT Event) really was an asteroid collision.

Since I don't know anything about the Raiden video games, I want to ask; were those derived in turn from the old Raiden combat-mecha anime? (When I lived on Okinawa in the mid-1970's, I was a fan - I might have mentioned this a time or two before - of many of the classic giant-mecha animes such as Gaiking, Combattler V, Mazinger and, of course, Raiden. (I also saw the first of the sentai series, Goranger, during its broadcast run.) )

-Joe-