"In Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 69 the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics and its dismal decree that all information inevitably crumbles away is made vivid by a woman named Oedipa, who wonders how many men have slept on a sailor's burning mattress, how many lives lost forever," writes Alan Lightman in the New York Times.

And, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.