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company on the other side of town. I just happened to be out on my lunch break when the bear escaped into the city. I bent over to tie my shoes, and when I stood up he was sprinting toward me with both arms in the air. It was the single most terrifying moment of my life.
    AL : I’m so sorry.
    SAM : Yeah. I guess I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So … how much money did you win in the lottery?
    AL : Eighty million dollars. It sounds like more than it is, though! I have to pay a lot of taxes! (Long silence.) Listen, again, I’m really sorry about the bear. The whole thing sounds terrible. How did it escape in the first place?
    SAM : An earthquake broke open his cage. Then two lightning bolts knocked the guards unconscious. It’s sort of like God was doing everything he could that day to make sure this horrible thing would happen to me.
    AL : Jesus.
    SAM : So … do you buy lottery tickets often?
    AL : Actually, this was my first time. I was in a store and I saw the “World’s Biggest Jackpot” sign so I just kind of bought one on a whim.
    SAM : I buy lottery tickets pretty often. About five or six a week. I still haven’t won anything.
    AL : Why do you keep looking over your shoulder like that?
    SAM : Checking for bears. I know it probably won’t happen again, but I don’t want to take any chances. It’s a crazy world. Hey, what are you going to do with all the money?
    AL : I haven’t really decided. I’m still a little dazed by the whole thing!
    SAM : You know what I would do if I won the lottery? I’d build myself a suit to protect against bears. I’d wear it all the time, for the rest of my life.
    AL : You know, if you want, I could buy you a suit with my winnings! Seriously, I’d be happy to do it.
    SAM : What’s the point? Some bear would find a way.

where are all the time travelers?
    Stephen Hawking once said, “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?” Everyone I talk to thinks this is such a great quote and that it proves that time travel is just a fantasy. But what people are forgetting is that Stephen Hawking is obviously a time traveler.
    Think about it. “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?” That is exactly the kind of thing a time traveler would say . Everyone’s like “Oh, Stephen Hawking, you’re so smart, of course there’s no such thing as time travel!” Meanwhile, Hawking is probably at the dog track right now winning trifecta after trifecta.
    Let’s think about this rationally. If you were a time traveler who had visited the future, and someone asked you point-blank if time travel was possible, what would you say? “Oh, yeah, time travel is definitely possible. In fact, I’m a time traveler—confiscate my gambling earnings”?No. You would make some witty quip and change the subject. Then you would politely excuse yourself, call a bookie, and bet on Duke to defeat UNLV in the 1991 NCAA semifinals, even though they were eleven-point underdogs.
    Where are all the time travelers? They’re on Wall Street, smoking Cuban cigars and laughing so hard that tears are streaming down their fat faces. Meanwhile, we’re sitting around like morons, betting our money on random dogs and horses and talking about how smart Stephen Hawking is. He probably didn’t even write his books! If you could magically travel through time, think about how easy it would be to bring back some smart book from the future, retype it, and pass it off as your own.
    The following people are also probably time travelers:
     
the woman who married Bill Gates before he invented Microsoft
the guy who just happened to be filming JFK when he got assassinated
George Foreman (how else would he know to sponsor that grill?)
    There have always been time travelers. And anyone who says otherwise probably has something to hide.

desert island
    I was chatting with a girl at a cocktail party last weekend and she asked me, “If you were stranded on a desert island and you