One hundred and thirty-one men, women, and children simultaneously were converted into maltreated chunks of barbecued meat falling through the sky. their roster included the pilot, the copilot, the third pilot, and eight other members of the flight crew; plus, among the passengers, mothers, infants, honeymooning couples, nonhoneymooning but equally amorous couples who did not happen to be married to each other, a middle-aged grape picker returning home after a five-days-four-nights all-expense tour of Sin City (which he had found disappointing), a defrocked priest, a disbarred lawyer, and a congressman from Oregon who would never now achieve his dream of dismantling NASA and preventing the further waste of the taxpayer's funds on space, which he held to be empty and uninteresting.
Whoever they had been when whole, the pieces of barbecue all looked pretty much alike now. It did not matter. Not one of the passengers or crew had died unhappy, since they had all been touched by the comet. (Some Joys Under The Star, pg. 240.)
fauxhawk (pg. 44) -- A type of hairstyle, a fake mohawk.
the tallest, strackest Korean (pg. 131) -- Squared-away, ready, looking-good soldier. Or sailor, in this case.
eductor (pg. 256) -- Some sort of fancy device for pumping flooded compartments in a ship, in this case.