1 Jamie: Poor Adam! Choking on a giant frog. If only there was some way to put him out of his misery.
1 Adam: <hack> <choke>
2 Jamie: Well, despite the fact that we're already dead.
2 Adam: <cough> <splutter>
3 Jamie: What's that, Adam? Look behind me?
4 Jamie: 38 tons of dynamite? Now where did that come from?

Of course Jamie can tell exactly how much of it there is just by looking at it. It's dynamite - he has a lot of experience!

I considered using the metric tonne spelling, as would be customary for me in normal usage, but I decided the difference wasn't really important in this case, and didn't want to bother with a spelling that might be unfamiliar to some readers when the alternative, ton, is still used even in metric countries.

As is usual with quaint antiquated units of measurement, there are approximately 30 different and mutually contradictory definitions of how much a "ton" is. Thankfully, they're all reasonably close to one another. And when it comes to dynamite, a few percent difference won't really be terribly important.

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2025-05-27 Rerun commentary: Adding to the confusion is the fact that a tun is a unit of liquid volume, equal to 252 wine gallons, defined by a statute of Queen Anne in 1706 as 231 cubic inches (3.785411784 litres), and used exclusively for measuring volumes of wine until it was abolished in Britain in favour of the Imperial gallon (277.274 cubic inches or 4.543706784 litres) in 1826.

Despite the unit not having been used officially by anybody for ten years, the United States adopted the wine gallon as its standard measure of volume in 1836, as the US gallon.

The British Imperial gallon was later redefined in 1889 as 277.463 cubic inches (4.54680939 litres), then again in 1895 to 277.4195 cubic inches (4.546091879 litres), and finally in 1976 to 277.4194 cubic inches (4.54609 litres).

The US maintained the definition of a tun as 252 US gallons (953.9237769568 litres), while in the UK the tun was redefined to be 210 Imperial gallons (954.6789 litres).

The tun is also the basis for the tonnage, a measure of the volume capacity of ships, which has itself mutated into multiple different definitions and units.