conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about Breen, Potiphar, Sun entitled The Year of the Jackpot.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Year of the Jackpot: Potiphar Breen is a middle-aged bachelor with a settled, orderly life, and a rather unusual hobby.\nWe meet him first at breakfast in a Los Angeles diner, where he orders his usual meal, takes notes of various apparently unrelated items in several newspapers, and carefully counts out his payment, adding an exactly calculated tip.\nHe then walks out to a bus stop, where a young lady is removing all her clothes.\nA pair of passing transvestites try to provoke a beat cop into arresting her, but the cop refrains for fear that the publicity will simply inspire more kooks to disrobe.\nBreen is unmoved.\nHe waits for her to finish undressing, then wraps his coat around her just as the bus arrives.\nShe promptly faints.\nHe drives her to his house, lets her dress, and after explaining that he is not trying to take advantage of her, interviews her.\nShe explains that she has no idea why she had the sudden urge to take her clothes off.\nHe tells her why he was not surprised at what she did.\nApparently women have been doing the same thing, all over the city, for some time.\nThe news has been carefully hushed up, just as Breen himself called a friend at the newspaper and fed him a phony account of this incident.\nBreen is a statistician.\nWorking mostly for insurance companies, he advises them on probability and trends.\nIn his spare time, he studies cycles.\nHuman behavior seems to run in cycles, with prices, wages, hemlines, fashions, and entire economies crashing and rising again for no reason, except that each was following the ups and downs of a cycle.\nThree big cycles bottomed out in 1929, causing the Crash of 1929.\nIt is now 1952, and every cycle he tracks will either trough or crest simultaneously in about six months.\nBreen explains to Meade Barstow, the young lady, that "This year, the human race is letting down its hair, flipping its lip with a finger, and saying \'Wubba, wubba, wubba.\n\'" Meade\'s striptease, along with the commonplace public transvestism, the new churches with their ceremonial nudity and all the other pieces of minor insanity are simply symptoms of the inexorable trends.\nAs Breen puts it, while any one person may seem to be rational, in the bulk people behave statistically, whether they like it or not.\n"Meade," he says, "I think we\'re lemmings".\nMeade and "Potty" grow close, and as the weeks pass and the craziness increases, both abandon their jobs and prepare for when it will be "time to jump".\nBreen has transport, supplies and a firearm or two.\nHe plans to head for the Mojave Desert.\nThen the record drought breaks, and the skies open.\nThey decide to leave.\nOn the way, there is an earthquake.\nA hitch-hiker attempts to steal the car at gunpoint.\nMeade surprises Breen (and herself) by shooting the thief with Breen\'s pistol.\nFar from the city, they are horrified when a nuclear explosion apparently destroys Los Angeles.\nLiving at an isolated cabin, they wait for things to stabilize.\nThere has been a full-scale nuclear exchange, but the weather was so bad that few bombs reached their targets.\nBreen himself has had to shoot a group of marauding Russian soldiers.\nBut now the world is at peace, and Breen can catch up on his reading, in journals of astrophysics.\nHe comes across an article where the author calculates the exact conditions required to make the Sun explode in a nova , and even offers predictions about when in the life of the Sun this might occur.\nMeade comes out of the cabin to join Potiphar and watch the sunset.\nThere is a rather large sunspot on the Sun\'s face.\nSuddenly Breen realizes that this has not just been a bad year.\nLooking again at the article, he knows it is the final year.\n"There\'s something wrong with the sunset," says Meade.\n"No," replies Potiphar Breen, "with the Sun".
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. End with the sentence ' His female companion wore a business suit and Homburg hat; she stared with lively interest.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Year of the Jackpot
  Leiber's more satirical tone and the hopeful outcome of his scenario counterpoint Heinlein's post-WWII vision of a world tearing itself apart through "lemming-like" behavior. An additional fifty years of global survival after Leiber, despite our current plethora of problems, gives further hope. Either we have begun to come through Heinlein's "Crazy Years" intact—or we are merely so inured to madness that we can no longer recognize the reality of such prophets of doom as Heinlein became for the duration of this shattering novella.
  She was standing at a bus stop only ten feet away. He was indoors, but that would not have kept him from noticing; he was seated in a drugstore booth adjacent to the bus stop; there was nothing between Potiphar and the young lady but plate glass and an occasional pedestrian.
  The items he recorded seemed randomly unrelated—among them a publicity release in which Miss National Cottage Cheese Week announced that she intended to marry and have twelve children by a man who could prove that he had been a lifelong vegetarian, a circumstantial but wildly unlikely Flying Saucer report, and a call for prayers for rain throughout Southern California.
  He stood up, placed his glasses in their case, folded the newspapers and put them carefully in his right coat pocket, counted out the exact amount of his check and added fifteen per cent. He then took his raincoat from a hook, placed it over his arm, and went outside.
  The transvestites were frankly staring. The male member of the team wore a frilly feminine blouse, but his skirt was a conservative Scottish kilt. His female companion wore a business suit and Homburg hat; she stared with lively interest.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.. End with the sentence '
  But it was also a description of every invasion that had come out of the "heartland" in the memory of mankind.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Meade's prize to show him was the usual Rosicrucian comeon, elaborately printed, and including a photograph (retouched, he was sure) of the much disputed line on the corridor wall which was alleged to prophesy, by its various discontinuities, the entire future. This one had an unusual time scale, but the major events were all marked on it—the fall of Rome, the Norman Invasion, the Discovery of America, Napoleon, the World Wars.
  Nevertheless, he took the next afternoon off, spent it in the reference room of the main library, confirmed his opinion of soothsayers. Nostradamus was pretentiously silly. Mother Shippey was worse. In any of them you could find whatever you looked for.
  He did find one item in Nostradamus that he liked: "The Oriental shall come forth from his seat... he shall pass through the sky, through the waters and the snow, and he shall strike each one with his weapon."
  That sounded like what the Department of Defense expected the commies to try to do to the Western Allies.
  But it was also a description of every invasion that had come out of the "heartland" in the memory of mankind.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last three paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Everybody talks about "when the stars grow old and the Sun grows cold," but it's an impersonal concept, like one's own death.
  What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a touch of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style.
  He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. 1739 A. D. and 2165. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that 1952 was...
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: ... Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that 1952 was. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. and 2165. D. 1739 A.
  He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. But sometimes they finish in style.
  What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a touch of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star.Everybody talks about "when the stars grow old and the Sun grows cold," but it's an impersonal concept, like one's own death