Are they cute and harmless denizens of the peaceful forest, or diabolical furies from the depths of Tartarus? Examine this unretouched photograph and decide for yourself.

Keep the teapot on the other side of the room.

Instead of making a left turn, make three right turns. You will burn three times the calories turning the steering wheel, to say nothing of applying pressure to the brake and accelerator alternately.

If your office is on the third floor, instead of taking the elevator all the way up, change elevators on the second floor.

Sneeze. Sneezing uses many otherwise idle muscles in the upper body. Alternate hands when you cover your mouth, so as to exercise your arms evenly.

Prefer comedies to dramas on television. Laughing uses many of the same muscles exercised by sneezing.

Instead of large chips, eat chips of the smallest size you can find, and eat them one at a time. You will raise your hand to your mouth two or three times as often, burning calories each time. Popcorn is an excellent snack for this sort of exercise.

Train your dog to be in the way, so as to prevent walking from one place to another in a straight line. This is one of the easiest tasks for a dog to learn.

Yell a lot. Yelling burns much more energy than ordinary talking.

Find a popular text on ergonomics that shows how to arrange your workspace to make everything you do as easy and efficient as possible. Then do the opposite of what the book says.

No. 23 in a Series of 253,486.

Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare). The word “daisy” is a corruption of “day’s eye,” so called because daisies are the ever-watchful secret police of the Composite family. Wherever you see daisies, you may be sure that they also see you, and that they are keeping track of your activities and reporting their observations to their superiors in the family Compositae or Asteraceae. If those superiors deem it necessary, enforcers, such as ragweed or thistles, will be sent out to bring you back into line by any means necessary.

There is little you can do to avoid the surveillance of daisies during the day. At night their activities cease, and you may consider yourself off the hook for a few hours. What exactly the Compositae want from us is not easy to determine. We know that they disapprove of lawn mowers; but, on the other hand, many noted environmentalists, whom one would suppose to be great friends of the plant kingdom, have been ruthlessly plagued by ragweed. The best one can do under the circumstances is keep the daisies in mind and live a life of the strictest virtue, avoiding all but spinach salads (lettuce being another member of the Compositae) and thinking only wholesome thoughts. It may also help to be too lazy to do much yard work.

Astrologically, the entire Composite family is governed by Jupiter under a League of Nations mandate.

My dear Dr. Boli: I keep wondering about that ugly-sounding hybrid word bromance. What is it implying? That men no longer have friendships unless they are somewhat romantic? Is there a sister word, too, like sistmance, or can women have friendships but men cannot? Is friendship a dying art? —Sincerely, D. King’s Daughter.

Dear Madam: “Bromance” is used to describe friendships only between creatures called “bros.” Though they can hybridize with Homo sapiens sapiens, they are not strictly speaking men. As Mr. Salvatore Magundi has explained elsewhere, the difference between a “bro” (or “guy”) and a “man” is that the masculinity of the former is conditional. Thus when a “bro” sees two others of his own kind forming a deep friendship (admittedly an unusual occurrence), he believes that they have lost their masculinity, and that only a vigorous response characterized by taunts and insulting names can prevent the infection from spreading to himself. This is more a religious belief than a pseudoscientific one: the “bro” sees the friendship as a kind of ritual uncleanness that can be contracted by contact or even proximity.

Men, on the other hand, seldom worry about their masculinity. Dr. Boli is of the opinion, in fact, that any man who worries excessively about his masculinity would be better off without it anyway. Men are as free to form friendships as women are, and there is therefore no similarly insulting term for friendships between members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens.