Please pull on the other leg, there's a bell on that one.

And so, an hour later, Sam was the happy possessor of a Philips time machine, as good as new.

"What I can't understand," he said to Deleu, "is that I don't see where your profit is. I mean: what's the use of granting me credit if you only get your money in about nine hundred years?"

Deleu laughed boyishly. "I'm going to get it immediately." He pointed to his private time machine.

"Oh," Sam said stupidly, and "Oh," again a few seconds later, when he understood.

Paul van Herck, Where Were You Last Pluterday?

Sunday night, hopping around on the Internet - why would anyone think this was like surfing? - when what to our wondering eyes did appear, but a banner ad for time travel. Now, you might not have been tempted, but I feel an almost professional interest in things like this.

So, a quick click on the link, and there it is - "VOYAGE IN TIME - ONLY 4 SIMPLE STEPS".

Step 1. Invest $18 in time travel fund and receive official certificate;
Step 2. Your fund grows extensively until the time machine is invented;
Step 3. Your investments finance your ticket on the time machine;
Step 4. Dreams become reality — Travel in Time!

Ah, and it doesn't even matter if you die before the time machine is invented, because they'll just return to before you died to pick you up. Sorry, but this has to be a scam - because logically, if this was legitimate, wouldn't the time travellers already be here, shuttling people around?

But let's try to be fair, you may be one of those people who is okay with travelling back in time and creating new timelines as a result or some such Star Trek silliness, even so, the concept may be flawed financially

Okay, let's say that you bravely fork over $18 for a time travel certificate, and that $18 is invested at 3% compounded annually. In 500 years that money will be worth $47,193,790.22. (Well, $47,193,790.2154417, but I rounded it up.) The bad news? If the inflation rate stayed at a constant 2% annually, that money would be worth $2,364.82 in 2509 dollars, which really doesn't sound like a lot. But then, we're talking 500 years - who knows, maybe you'd be able to pick up a nice used time machine for under a grand if you looked on Craigslist, and going back in time and taking people on sightseeing trips might be like driving cab on the weekend, just something that people do for extra money.

As much as I would love for any of this to be feasible, it's pretty obvious that this web site is based on a different time-related phenomenon: the fact that there's a sucker born every minute...which means that 48 possible buyers of time travel certificates entered the world during the time it took me to put together this posting.

- Sid