Burn baby burn

Ball of fire: Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the car that burst into flames in Kent earlier this week caught fire when its battery was impaled by a metal object (Page A9). Which leads to today’s news quiz:

Q: What do you get when a Tesla rear-ends a Ford Pinto?

A: A mushroom cloud.

Third prize is you’re fired: NBC is planning a game show in which the grand prize will be a ride into space aboard billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic vessel (Page D6).

Second prize is a ride into Atlantic City with Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, in steerage: United Airlines says it’s adding four seats to its regional jets, in part through making coach-class seats thinner (Business Briefly, Page A8).

But rest assured that the seats in First Class, where Gwyneth Paltrow sits, will remain the same width.

Call tech support: The Obama administration is taking down healthcare.gov, its health overhaul website, for repairs this weekend in an attempt to fix glitches that have frustrated millions (Page A7).

However, the president and others were correct to compare the launch of the website to the release of a new Apple product — the Apple maps app, that is.

—Mark Carlson, Herald staff

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Initiative promoter Tim Eyman takes a selfie photo before the start of a session of Thurston County Superior Court, Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2021, in Olympia, Wash. Eyman, who ran initiative campaigns across Washington for decades, will no longer be allowed to have any financial control over political committees, under a ruling from Superior Court Judge James Dixon Wednesday that blasted Eyman for using donor's contributions to line his own pocket. Eyman was also told to pay more than $2.5 million in penalties. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
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