“I have an emergency,” she said as she shook off the dust that had accumulated from years yet to pass. “You must post these dates for Willie Nelson and Prince on the Internet immediately.”

“And how will posting these dates affect the future?” we asked her. “Will we stop a war? Avoid a flood? Prevent Hollywood from making a sequel to Glitter?”

“No,” she responded. “Nothing like that. By posting these dates, along with the new ones for Sugar Ray and Primer 55, you can help prevent the corporate naming riots of 2015.”

“So, the people will finally become fed up with corporate names plastered all over their favorite buildings,” we said with sort of a half-ass grin on our face. “What brought that on?”

“We’re not sure,” she responded as she reached into her purse for more concert schedules, “But we think it was sometime after the naming of the Verizon Buckingham Palace and before the negotiations for the Taco Bell Alamo. By the way, you better post these dates for The Big Wu and Loudon Wainwright III as well, or they’ll never build the Dick Cheney Amphitheatre.”

“What?” we said, astonished. “They’re going to name an amphitheatre after the vice president? When? Where?”

“When is 2012,” she said as her eyes noticed the TV in our office for the very first time. However, the ‘where’ part is a bit difficult to explain. It was built in an ‘undisclosed location.’ Er… What’s that?”

“If you mean the box in the corner, that’s our television.”

“I know what a television is,” she exclaimed indignantly. “But what are you watching?”

“You mean you don’t have the Olympics in your time? Is the future that grim?”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said as she absent mindedly slapped herself on the forehead. “You folks still have athletes competing in the Olympics.”

“Of course we have athletes,” we replied. “After all, it is the Olympics.”

“In the future,” she said as she sat down in front of the television, “all of our Olympic competitors are concert roadies.”

“Roadies? In the Olympics?”

“Of course,” she answered. “In the future, roadies are considered the ultimate athletes. After all, it takes brains, brawn and muscles if you’re going to schlep bands like Incubus and Strangefolk across the globe.”

“Makes sense to us,” we replied as she reached into her purse for her Palm Pilot and started calculating the time travel coordinates that would take her back to the future. “You must have some pretty interesting competitors.”

“That’s for sure,” she answered right before the time portal to the future opened up. “Our biggest star is Ian McTavish, Jr. His event is the Biathlon, which combines skiing, target shooting and hotel room thrashing. In fact, he was supposed to compete in our latest Olympics, but he was disqualified. Flunked the drug test.”

“That’s still a problem in the future?”

“Oh, yes. And Ian became the first roadie to be expelled from the Olympics because his blood-alcohol level was .08. “

“That’s terrible.”

“You bet it’s terrible,” she replied before she vanished into tomorrow. “After all, everybody knows that in order for a roadie to compete in the Olympics, your blood-alcohol level has to be at least 1.1.”