A Brief History of Time
Penn Jillette

	You just know that when the book, A Brief History of Time came out and no one was reading it but everyone was buying it; many witty jokesters said to their friends,"Yeah, I'll wait and see the movie." You just know some funny folks said that. And you just know their friends laughed. It's a good joke. So, now there is a movie of A Brief History of Time and . . . what's the call on this? Judges? What happens when your jokes becomes reality? Ask H. Ross Perot. So, I saw A Brief History of Time - The Movie, when it opened. But it takes me some time to get around to writing. Then the copy editors have to spend time taking out words to make it fit on one page. Then I argue about which words to take out. ("Yeah, I know I use the phrase `you just know' three times in the opening paragraph, but I like the way it sounds." "Yeah, no one reads my columns aloud but you can't cut `you just know.' And you can't cut the three `yeah's' at the beginning of the quotes. You just can't. Cut anything else. I don't care, cut the last 5 words of the goddamn column if you have to, but don't cut `you just know.' Please."). Then the artist has to get the draft, and decide how to put my four-eyed fat face into an appropriate picture. (I wonder what would happen if I put a non-sequitur phoney reference in the middle of the page about, oh let's say, me sitting around in my underwear playing Nintendo and eating pizza with Bill Clinton and Uma Thurman. Would the artist read the article, see Bill Clinton, Uma Thurman, Nintendo and pizza mentioned twice, have that image stick in her mind and paint an illustration that has nothing to do with the article? Let's find out.) So by the time it gets into your hot little hands, the movie is in the "previously viewed" rack at the local mom and pop video joint.
	But right now (about three months ago) I'm really jazzed about A Brief History of Time. Screamin' Steve Hawking is just so cool. Errol Morris, the movie-maker, is not afraid to show a funny, hip genius, who happens to have A.L.S. (Lou Gehrig's Disease). [For once I'm not using parenthesis where I don't need them - everyone who writes about little Stevie writes "A.L.S. (Lou Gehrig's Disease.)"] We see Hawking in his wheelchair. He can move only a couple of his fingers and he can't talk. When we hear him talk, we hear his computer talk. It's just a PC, and that's what's so cool. Hawking watches the cursor fly across the alphabet and he hits the button when it gets to the first letter of the word he wants to say. The cursor starts flying across words beginning with that letter and he hits the button again when he gets to the right word and the computer says it aloud. Then the computer takes a guess at the next word giving him several choices of words we all say often like the, a, and, and is. If it's one of those, he hits the button and he's golden and if it's not, it moves through the alphabet again. My info on the workings of this software is old, so I bet by now it guesses the most likely words from a personalized word list. If it were set for me, the first choices would be cool, you know, and Uma and I would wait until I could use those three modules in a row as a question and try to finagle an introduction. The movie doesn't make a big deal out of the computer. It's just a tool. As a technology cheerleader, I was thrilled. Because of a lowly PC, we are able to hear what this way cool guy is thinking and that's the