Time in a Bottle

Studs Terkel died a week ago. I haven't read any of his books, but I do recall him as a guest on A Prairie Home Companion a couple of times. Garrison Keillor, host of that program, memorialized him on last weekend's program. Keillor told a story of how Terkel was on the show for his 86th birthday, so the cast and crew wheeled out a large cake with a girl in it.

That sounds like something my friends and I could do, if we should survive that long. (It would be roughly 50 years from now.) I started pondering how that would work. Let's say, for legality and ease of math, the young woman inside the cake would be 20 years old. Hmm, now 20 from 50 is...

Egad, the girl won't even be born for another 30 years!