History lovers often take their inner brains on– what if—trips. Ask any history buff, professor or amateur, –what if the Chinese had discovered America? The history person will withdraw from all conversation and sit motionless; and behind walled-off glazed eyes, appear to be communicating, one by one, with each and every personal body part. It often takes a jolt of sex, or politics, to bring the history person back into the world of the present.

To make matters worse there are millions of what-if destinations to take the interested brain.

What if Mongolian livestock had been grazed on opium poppies? What if conquering Mongol warriors needed local assistance to stand-up their horses and make them to saunter away from the lush pastures of victory?

Thinking through the possibilities is enough to send any history buff into his or her own opium-like trance.

What if tenure were abolished and history professors were forced to struggle with the working world of the present tense?

What if, people were told they had to ask themselves one-what if—history questions each hour of the day?

Most people would begin by asking themselves the historian’s most critical question: What if, I did not have to go to work today?

And men would go around constantly asking themselves: What if, women lusted at me as if my body were a cream-filled chocolate pastry?

And surely, soon enough, some lost fool would be found wandering around aimlessly in traffic thinking to himself: What if, I could enter another universe where the Gods made me a history professor?

This, of course would ruin the whole what-if vacation scene for everyone. Particularly since the most likely person to ask himself that question would be a history professor.

But, what if?

What if—Einstein had been a doctor?

Answer: Obese patients, with swelling bodies, would be told that their rate of food digestion is approaching the speed of light. Weight reductions programs would teach the obese patient to chew slowly.

And: Fat people could wreck havoc on crowded dance floors and deflect bullets, by distorting the shape of the space around them.

What if—Walter Heisenberg had been a marriage counselor?

Answer: Then prospective husbands would be taught the following wife uncertainty principle: When you know how much money your wife has,you cannot know how fast she is spending it. But if you know how fast your wife is spending money,you cannot know how much she has.

What if Shakespeare, really true, for sure, did not write the shakespeare plays?

Answer: A Shakespeare is a Shakespeare by any other name.

What if, aliens landed a billion Marilyn Monroe robots on planet earth? And what if, after any human male had sex with one of these robots, it rose up and meta-morphed into an Al Gore robot?

Answer: Everyone would be for global warming which, would be caused by having hot sex.

What if, rather than hit control-alt-delete to restart one’s computer, a person had stand up and shout:

“Ants in my computer” followed, after a 30 second interval, by the shout: “the ants fell in my pants!”?

Answer: Then Google earth would to buy up all the world’s ants while Bill Gates worked on cornering the pants market.

What if Al Gore had claimed to have invented the butterfly ballot after spending a night dressed up like Marilyn Monroe?

Answer: George Bush would have spent 8 years cutting Texas sagebrush.

What if Columbus had run into Chinese explorers who were in the middle of discovering America?

Answer: Then Asia’s 3 billion people would be called Indians.

What if Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe were shown to have been brother and sister alien robots?

Answer: Then we all would be hanging the same family poster on the wall.

What if Saint Paul’s first Christian convert had been a washed-up humpback whale?

Answer: Then no male over the age of 13 would be able to hit the high notes on Amazing grace without snapping his vocals cords in half.

What if the nickname for table tennis was instead, pong-ping?

Answer: No one yet knows.

What if a History professor took his brain on a what-if -I–was-the–nation’s leader trip and never came back?

Answer: Then he would keep running for president—even after all the other losing candidates had long ago given up.