Dear Dr. Boli: Why is whole-wheat bread more expensive than bread made from more thoroughly refined flour? And why is unrefined sugar more expensive than refined sugar? And why is unsalted butter more expensive than salted butter? Shouldn’t the product that requires less labor sell for a smaller price? Please answer quickly, as I am losing my faith in the efficiency of capitalism. —Sincerely, A Nascent Socialist.

Dear Sir or Madam: All these things are readily explained once you know how these commodities are produced.

Butter, for example, is commonly sold with salt added. For those persnickety consumers who desire unsalted butter, vast workshops are filled with mostly immigrant laborers, who painstakingly remove each grain of salt with a very fine pair of tweezers. Even though these poor laborers work for a miserable pittance, they nevertheless must be paid something, and that cost is reflected in the price of the unsalted butter they have prepared. If you have any concern at all for the ethical implications of your purchases, you may wish to avoid unsalted butter in the future.

Whole-wheat flour and unrefined sugar are similar cases. In the processing of wheat flour, the germ, the bran, the chaff, the soil, the small insects and spiders, &c., &c., are all removed. Likewise, the refinement of sugar involves removing much of what is technically termed the rubbish. Consumers who wish to have the insects and spiders added back into their wheat or sugar are understandably in the minority, and must pay for the privilege.

This is the only reasonable explanation for the phenomena you describe, and Dr. Boli is determined to stick with it. The alternative explanation—viz., that the capitalist system is riddled with fundamental absurdities—is simply too horrible to contemplate.

No. 19 in a Series of 253,486.

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JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE (Helianthus tuberosus).—A cursory perusal of botanical literature will reveal that every botanical writer keenly feels the necessity of assuring his readers that the Jerusalem Artichoke is neither an artichoke nor from Jerusalem. Few readers, however, know the dramatic, and indeed tragic, historical events behind these dry statements of fact.

When, after the Viking explorations of North America, rumors reached Western Europe of the girasole or sunflower (called girasole because, like the sun, it orbits the earth once every twenty-four hours), the forces of popular etymology set to work immediately, corrupting girasole into the more familiar Jerusalem, and adding artichoke because the word had just become available, having only recently been released from a five-year contract with General Foods. It was the time of the Crusades, and by some process of mistransmission, the rumor spread that in Jerusalem there was a Holy Artichoke, which had been captured by the Saracens and subjected to all the indignities an artichoke can be made to suffer. Some said that it was an artichoke blessed by St. James the Less, which miraculously never lost any of its bulk no matter how many of its succulent bracts were consumed by the faithful.

As the rumors spread, popular enthusiasm frothed up into the kind of frenzy for which the age of the Crusades is justly famous; and one Brother Rupert, an itinerant preacher, began to demand an immediate expedition to reclaim the sacred relic, gathering great and enthusiastic crowds by offering them ale brewed by sympathetic local monks.

From all over Europe, unruly mobs began marching toward Constantinople, eventually pitching their tents below the mighty walls of that greatest of cities. The wily emperor Constantine XXXVIII, however, suspecting that such a rabble might momentarily turn against him, secretly arranged to sell the Crusaders as slaves to the Saracens, who—in a strangely ironic twist to our tale—put most of them to work in the artichoke plantations of North Africa, where at last they learned the difference between the true Artichoke and a mere sunflower usurping the title.

Astrologically, the Jerusalem Artichoke is governed by a committee of minor comets.

IN ANY GIVEN population in any given part of the world, roughly 8% of adults carry the gene that, left to its own devices, would turn them into ichthyologists.

More than 50% of people worldwide are of below-average intelligence. Statisticians are unable to explain this mathematical anomaly.

At least 83% of statistics, according to a recent Chatham University study, are just made up.

The most recent estimates suggest that 41% of the words on an average Web site are superfluous. The number of superfluous words rises with the perceived intellectual level of the Web site. In his celebrated Magazine, Dr. Boli has made it a point to eschew all words of any significance whatsoever.

As a general rule, statements that claim to be true 99.9% of the time are incorrect 99.9% of the time.