At first I thought this timesonline.com article was brought to you by our friends at the Onion, but apparently, it’s the real deal, so without further ado…

It seems a “flying car” is not that far away – brought to you by the Massachusetts-based Terrafugia company (note: their website seems to be temporarily down – no doubt crashed by sci-fi fans). Supposedly, we’ll see this two-seater car that can transform itself into a plane in 15-seconds, in showrooms sometime next year.

Questions: Can it take you where you want to go? Well, it can fly about 500 miles on a tank of gas – at about 115 mph. Cost to you? About $200,000. Where to find car/plane runways? Well, planes can legally take off from roadways in Alaska, but elsewhere – who knows…

In the water, he makes like a fish. On land, he makes like a lot of money, especially with all his commercial deals.

And you can see one of Michael Phelps’ ads on the site of that veritable Renaissance man, Perez Hilton — if you just click here.

This particular commercial is for Citation Shares, a division of Cessna – which offers “fractional jet ownership”. You see Phelps boarding the snazzy plane with all his medals on, but it’s no problem! He’s on a private jet and doesn’t have to go through the hassles of metal detectors and security stuff. Get it?

Not bad, actually.