Time Is On Their Side…Yes, It Is

Wrap your brain around this one.

M.I.T. is known for its academic excellence and really smart people. And time travel conventions.

Apparently, the Time Travel Convention was today. But the PR machine didn’t really get moving on this one in advance until this weekend. Which is fine. Why? Because this isn’t the “first annual” Time Travel Convention. Technically, they point out on their website, all you need is one. “Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted.”

The FAQ page includes such topics as “Isn’t Time Travel Impossible?” and “I’m From the Future, and I’d Like to Attend.” They also tell you how you, the reader, can help to make sure that people in the future know about the Convention:

We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

Tonight on SNL, my neighbor Tina Fey said (and I’m paraphrasing because I couldn’t remember it exactly) that unfortunately, no one from the future attended because they already knew that the party sucked. Heh.

The donation button on their website was to raise funds for snacks. If only they had learned enough to promise “Free Palestinians.” Even Eric Cartman knew enough to promise “punch and pie.” (Want more on this story? Here’s the NY Times article on the subject…)

This isn’t Jewlicious per se on any kind of overt level. But we’ve already had a Jewlicious conference and a Jewlicious birthright bus is rolling out at the end of the month…what if Jewlicious had its own Time Travel Convention? Who do you think would come from the past? Would Laya finally meet Theodor Herzl and book him as a special guest speaker for birthright trips? Would CK start a tempestuous romance with Golda Meir? Would Muffti finally be able to commune with the great Greek philosophers and engage in a dialogue with philoso-scientists from the 40th Century who proved the existence of God? And what about the future of diaspora Judaism? Would we discover that all the movements had merged into some sort of mega-tribe of Conformadoxystructionists? Would the Jewish educational system of the future be Holocaust-based or Israel-based? Is cheerleading outlawed or encouraged in yeshiva environments? Are boys still not to be trusted? And is there still a “shidduch crisis”?

Of course, Judaism could also have vanished completely, along with other organized religion, or because of in-fighting over copepods in the drinking water. But I’m not going to think about that. Not without punch and pie.

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Esther Kustanowitz

For more posts by Esther, see EstherK.com, MyUrbanKvetch.com and JDatersAnonymous.com.

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