Somewhere over the years I picked up the habit of saying “like a million” (yes I know the comic uses “billion”, but generally I go with “million”). “Like”, in that sense, is meant to mean “approximately”. So for instance I’ll say “Man, I watched that movie like a million years ago” or “We’re already like a million hours late so let’s go!”

I bring this up by way of an explanation for the third panel, which probably didn’t need explaining but guess what I’m doing it anyway. What happened is that the people buying my idea have said “We’ll give you, I don’t know, like a billion dollars or something” and then whoever was in charge of printing the oversized novelty cheque just ran with that exact phrasing. It’s probably about a billion and fourteen, plus some change. [November 14, 2011]