This week’s pinup imagines one of the many possibilities should Mr. Guzek ever get his yarn theory sorted out and succeed in using it to build a time machine. What happens is he winds up in the Late Cretaceous, coming bill-to-bill with a Parasaurolophus, a friendly one, too. Other critters in view are the grumpy Ankylosaurus and the nervous Anserimimus, the “goose mimic.” That’s a private joke, really, cuz although Mr. Guzek looks like a duck, I have always thought of him as part duck, part goose; hence the punny name and Chloe’s little aside way back here. Also featured is a random dino-ish creature I simply dub Muppetosaurus, cuz he looks like a Muppet to me.

As for the design of the time machine, I vaguely borrowed from the lunar module used by the late great Neil Armstrong to make his famous landing. Time travel devices have always been subtle affairs — Wells had his barcalounger, Connie Willis her drop cloth, even the TARDIS manages to sit quietly in an alley of Ancient Rome — but I like the idea of showing up in either the past or the future with the most obvious, clunky and graceless contraption science can engineer. Part of this design was inspired by the kind of industrial boiler you’d find in a school built before WWII; partly by my vague memory of what an undersea vessel used to look like; and those round nuclear reactors.

Clearly I am no industrial engineer. You may sleep soundly knowing no one pays me to be one.