Dear Mr. the Rabmag: Last night I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, with vassals and serfs at my side; and, of all who assembled within those walls, that I was the hope and the pride. I had riches too great to count—could boast of a high ancestral name. But I also dreamt, which pleased me most, that you loved me still the same. What do you think it means? —Sincerely, Arline.

Dear Madam: Doubtless this dream represents a dim memory of your tragic origin story, and it is likely that you are well on your way to becoming a supervillain, if indeed you are not one already. The one consoling observation is the last part of the dream, which suggests that you may also be mad. Most supervillains are mad, and their madness invariably leads them to overstep the bounds of prudence in the execution of their diabolical plots. Although you will handily outwit the local police, and the entire United Nations will cower prostrate at your feet, it should be a relatively simple matter for the nearest costumed hero to foil your plot to destroy the world. You need not worry yourself too much about that, however: although you will appear to have perished in the blazing inferno that consumes your lair, future sequels will reveal that you survived by means of some exceedingly implausible plot contrivance.

Dear Dr. Boli: What is the difference between science and philosophy? —Sincerely, Dr. Tiarella von Sachs, Ph.D., Professor of Phenomenology at the Pennsylvania University of Indiana.

Dear Madam: “Philosophy,” a Greek term meaning “the love of wisdom,” once embraced all the studies we now think of as science, as well as problems of ethics, psychology, and every other branch of knowledge. The ancient Greeks classed all these as species of the same endeavor, because they believed that the way to address any question in any field of knowledge was by getting drunk and talking about it (see Plato, Symposium; Xenophon, Symposium; Theognis, Symposium; &c.).

With the advent of the experimental method, however, those branches of the discipline previously classified as “natural philosophy” drifted away from their alcoholic roots, and eventually came to be known as “science,” distinguishing them from pure philosophy, which no longer attempts to explain the natural world, considering that endeavor beneath its dignity. Philosophers, in turn, attempted to imitate what they perceived as the rigor of science by embracing impenetrable technical language and rules of reasoning. Thus we may define science as “the use of rigorous procedure and highly technical language to describe the natural world,” and philosophy as “the use of rigorous procedure and highly technical language to describe the works of other philosophers.” We may add that there is still a fair amount of drinking involved.

Second Series.

Freezing. It is now known that the freezing of water, formerly thought to be a process of crystallization, is due to simple congenital laziness.

by Dr. Aronia Baker, N.D.

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Dear Famous Nutritionologist: Why are hydrogenated oils bad for you? And are they bad for me, too? —Sincerely, A Consumer of Fried Goods in Hazelwood.

Dear Reader: Hydrogenated oils are bad for your health because they contain hydrogen. Imagine your body as the dirigible Hindenburg. Now imagine filling that dirigible with hydrogen. What do you suppose happens if a stray spark comes too near? Do you see now why hydrogenated oils are the enemies of good health?

And when, in addition to the danger of spontaneous combustion, we add the danger of nuclear fission, we can see that hydrogen is not the sort of thing you want to be eating for lunch. Bikini Atoll is still uninhabitable today because of hydrogen, and similarly the inside of your refrigerator is uninhabitable today because of all the margarine you have stored in there over the years.

Fortunately, the food industry is at last beginning to take our health concerns seriously, and many delicious snack foods are now made with heliumated oils instead of the traditional hydrogenated versions. Foods rich in heliumated oils have the advantage of making you lighter the more you eat, so it is definitely a good idea to check the label before you make your next processed-snack-food purchase.

Dear Dr. Boli: I am admiring the “Gluton Free” labels on these shelves. How is it that one may eat food, yet without ingesting the glutons (as they have been separated from the food) he does not commit gluttony?  —Yours, Nearsighted in Whole Foods Market.

Dear Sir or Madam: The gluton, as students of quantum phenomena already know, is a subatomic particle whose spin and charge are responsible for the deliciousness of certain kinds of food, such as bread pudding or doughnuts, according to the Standard Model of subatomic cuisine.  Gluttony is the sin of excessive indulgence of the desire for food. By removing the glutons, health-food marketers remove the desirability of the food, thus making gluttony impossible. (Note that the similarity of the words gluton and gluttony is a mere coincidence; etymologically they are quite different, gluttony having come to us from an Old French word, and the gluton being named for its discoverer, Sir Theobald Glute.) Thus the marketers encourage us to eat food we do not enjoy, steering us away from the sin of gluttony and toward the still greater sin of apathy.

Dear Dr. Boli: I have on many occasions been forced to vigorously defend against hostile skeptics, my long held belief that at the end of every rainbow is a creel full of trout. Are you aware of any scientific evidence to refute this? —Sincerely, Clay Potts.

Dear Sir: The ends of rainbows have not been explored much of late, though several famous expeditions were mounted in the nineteenth century. The prominent Victorian spectrologist Hugo Pennybetter, whose success as a student of all things related to the rainbow is all the more remarkable because he was completely colorblind, explored a number of rainbows in South America in the winter (or, below the equator, summer) of 1877-1878. He was able to reach the ends of four rainbows, a record never equaled by any other explorer. At the end of the first he found a pot of gold, but only inferior 10-karat stuff that failed even to pay the expenses of the expedition. At the end of the second he found a unicorn, a gryphon, a chimera, a cockatrice, a sphinx, and a duck. At the end of the third he found a platter (not a creel) of trout, but (surprisingly enough) speckled trout, not rainbow trout. It is not known what he found at the end of the fourth, since, having found it, he refused to come back.

Dear Dr. Boli: Okay, I have what may seem like a silly question, but it’s kind of freaking me out. Where are all the pomegranates coming from? Until a few years ago, people ate pomegranates where pomegranates grow, and in the rest of the world, pomegranates were a rare specialty item in gourmet stores. But then suddenly somebody started this rumor that pomegranates cured cancer or baldness or something, and every supermarket and convenience store in North America was stuffed to bursting with hundreds of gallons of 100% real pomegranate juice. Have you ever tried to juice a pomegranate? Do you know how many pomegranates it takes to make one gallon of juice? (Answer: about three dozen, according to the all-knowing Internet.)

So where did all those pomegranates suddenly come from? I mean, suddenly everybody in North America needed pomegranate juice, and there were somehow enough pomegranates to make it for them? But pomegranates grow on trees, for Pete’s sake. You can’t just plant a pomegranate seed in April and have a bumper crop of pomegranates by June. I’ve been thinking myself into a dither, but I can’t for the life of me understand where all the pomegranates are coming from. Can you help me? —Sincerely, A Botanist.

Dear Sir or Madam: Dr. Boli regrets that you have asked him one of the few questions he cannot answer. It is not because he does not know the answer, but because it would be exceedingly dangerous for you to know it. There are dark forces at work, darker than you can imagine. If you value your safety and your sanity—if you love your family—you will put all questions about pomegranates out of your head at once, and think about bananas or carambolas instead.

Radio telescopes monitoring the star HD 189733, about sixty light-years from earth, have detected broadcasts of Fibber McGee and Molly emanating from what appears to be an Earth-sized planet orbiting the star.

Only a small part of the spectrum of light is visible. The rest is made up of colors too ugly to look at now that the 1970s are over, like “Harvest Gold.”

The so-called “poison-dart frogs” (Dendrobates spp.) cannot actually shoot poison darts. As a natural defense, they usually sue predators into bankruptcy.

Hypothetically, if two twins were sitting at a table, and the second twin were suddenly whisked off on a round trip to a nearby star at nearly the speed of light, by the time he got back, his soup would be cold, and the first twin would have eaten all the rolls.

Einstein’s theory of special relativity posits that the speed of light is constant for all observers, except in Coosawhatchie, South Carolina, where everythin’ slows down considerable.

Dear Dr. Boli: I was thinking I might like to learn Dutch, but I’ve never learned a foreign language before. Do you have any advice that will make things easier for me? —Sincerely, Hendrik M. Bilderdijk, Ph.D., Professor of Indo-European Languages, Duck Hollow University.

Dear Sir: You have made an excellent choice. Dutch is a good first foreign language to tackle, because it is simply English very badly spelled. You will have little trouble if you remember to spell words the way they sound rather than the way English spelling rules dictate that they ought to be spelled. Once you have mastered Dutch, you can go on to German, which is English spelled even worse, and the Scandinavian languages, which are English spelled really atrociously.

If for some reason Dutch is too intimidating at the beginning, you might start with West Frisian, which is a fever dream of English in an alternate universe where the Norman Conquest never happened.