I wrote this article with my neighbor George. You can tell because the funny jokes are mine and the others are his.

As I have often had cause to mention, my neighbor George is a nuclear engineer. This means he is responsible for anything that goes “BOOM” in urban or suburban environments.

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Of course, I don’t make jokes about explosions to George. For one, they’re not appropriate. For two, I’ve already recited about 1,000 of them, and I think he may be getting bored.

According to my neighbor George, nuclear reactors are perfectly safe. In fact, you might ingest more radiation by eating a banana than by standing inside a nuclear reactor.

I wonder what other things can be measured in terms of bananas. Weight? Hemoglobin? The speed of light?

Imagine a banana hurtling through the air faster than the speed of sound. Crack! A sonic boom makes fruit salad rain out of the sky. That’s a pretty impressive visual.

I just wasted five seconds of your life, making you imagine speeding bananas.

But apparently, wasting seconds is pretty much what George’s life consists of. When he has to inspect a reactor, he has to wait for all the personnel to get ready and dress up in lab coats and take the boxes of donuts off the nuclear missile controls.

Of course, I’m kidding! Not every nuclear station has donuts on the control panel. Some of them have bananas.

Then George has to go around asking questions like “Is the fluoroscopic entity homogeneous?” and “What are the post-Germanic roots of the conjugate here?” Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Obviously, the nuclear engineers in the reactor understand him. They wouldn’t be responsible for lots of deadly nuclear waste if they didn’t.

But I, a lone humor columnist along for the ride, don’t understand a thing about how nuclear power works, and I suspect the nuclear engineers are catching on.

Even when I asked a question about how many calories are in a gram of plutonium, compared to a banana, I got cold stares, as if I had invaded a sanctum and smashed an idol on the floor.

So, I take a donut, more to shut myself up than anything else, and continue wandering around as if I’m Homer Simpson.

The thing is, Homer Simpson actually knows where he’s going. Going down the hallways, I just see tubes and pipes.

“Mmhm glurbgot urpium?” I ask.

I swallow a piece of donut and point to a pipe above us with a trembling finger. “Is that carrying white-hot uranium?” I whisper.

“It’s an air-conditioning pipe,” sighs George.

So I continue wandering around, trying not to step on people’s lab coats or the occasional banana peel, and all too soon, I’m escorted out.

I remain impressed by our country’s nuclear facilities. I hope there’ll be more built to provide energy to all the urban and suburban homes that enjoy watching “The Simpsons” and making cracks about explosions.

I still find “The Simpsons” funny. And so does my neighbor George.

And coming from a real-life nuclear engineer, that’s the highest praise of all.

Copyright 2026 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Alexandra Paskhaver is a software engineer and writer. Both jobs require knowing where to stick semicolons, but she’s never quite; figured; it; out. For more information, check out her website at https://apaskhaver.github.io.

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