Every era has its shibboleths—the little phrases and ideas we are required to repeat to prove that we are good and worthy. In every era, Dr. Boli has enjoyed poking at those shibboleths and watching people tie themselves in knots over them.

Racism and racial identity seem to be today’s most fruitful source of anxiety among people who wish to be known as enlightened. The subject is a minefield of contradictions: scientists will tell you that race is impossible to defend as a scientific concept, and so the enlightened writer or speaker must endorse and amplify that conclusion; yet the enlightenment also requires us to affirm that racial distinctions are vitally important to our identity, which is a term so indefinable in modern discourse that Dr. Boli has taken the trouble to prohibit it.

Dr. Boli does not find it necessary to repeat the shibboleths, because he has discovered, over the course of a long life and much experience, that there are no Gileadites waiting to kill him if he says the wrong thing.

All of which brings us to the picture at the head of the article. It is an illustration of Die fünf Menschenrassen (The Five Races of Man) by G. Ellka from a book of the early twentieth century. Dr. Boli has no idea what the book says; he assumes it is full of the sort of nonsense that inevitably came out when people of the era discussed race, which was different from the sort of nonsense that inevitably comes out when people of our era discuss race. The idea that there were five races—Caucasoid, American Indian, Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid—was one of the standard scientific dogmas of the time. It is nonsense in our age of gene sequencing, but at least it was an attempt at science, and the idea itself—as opposed to much of the rubbish built around the idea—was not inherently cruel or destructive.

Nevertheless, the mere existence of evidence of an outdated race theory triggers the shibboleth instinct in some people, and on the discussion page for this picture at Wikimedia Commons, someone felt compelled to speak out. Under the heading “This picture is very racist,” the commenter wrote,

This picture is White Supremacy at its best. Every race has good-looking people, but in this picture, the Asian guy, the African guy, and the Aboriginal Australian guy all look very ugly, the American Indian guy looks ordinary, not handsome but not too ugly, only the European guy in the centre looks handsome, gental, and very elegant.

And now Dr. Boli will apply some critical race theory to that comment, because the comment represents White Supremacy at its best. The commenter’s identity is only a number, but nevertheless Dr. Boli is confident that the person is of White European ancestry.

Of course the European illustrator’s unconscious assumptions must have been embodied in the illustration. But it seems clear that an honest attempt was made, not to draw caricatures of imaginary stereotypes, but to depict real models, probably from photographs. Yet the 21st-century commenter finds that “only the European guy in the centre looks handsome, gental, and very elegant.”

Does anyone besides Dr. Boli think the comment tells us far more about the commenter than about the artist who drew the illustration?

To Dr. Boli’s eyes, these are all fine faces. If he had to pick one as the most elegant, handsome, and gentle, it would be the American Indian. But the Australian looks deeply thoughtful; the African looks like someone we would instantly trust; the Chinese man has a faraway pensive look that suggests an active imagination. Only the European, to Dr. Boli’s eye, is dull; one suspects that his was the only portrait drawn from the imagination rather than a photograph.

Yet the stereotypical European ideals of good looks are so deeply embedded in the commenter’s mind that he takes them for universal aesthetic principles. It does not even occur to him that the Australian might be looking at the European in the center of the picture and thinking, “What a pasty-faced rube.”

We do not mean to shame a commenter whose heart is undoubtedly in the right place. Stupid race theories have done more damage to humanity than any other mistake of science. But we would encourage the commenter to think deeply about what racism is. The real damage is seldom done by overt racists these days. It is done by our hidden prejudices and assumptions, so deeply hidden that we mistake them for virtues. The commenter would doubtless have been pleased if the illustration had shown all the different races of man as more or less Northern European, but with different skin colors. But God’s taste is superior to his, and so humankind has been created in such a range of different forms and colors that we can never tire of the variety.

Now, you may be wondering what caused Dr. Boli to be thinking about the “five races of man” in the first place. The answer is in a school built in the 1930s, still standing and in use on Lemington Avenue in Pittsburgh, where a colorful terra-cotta frieze of the “five races of man” decorates the cornice—a daring assertion, considering the era, that this school was for everybody. Our friend Father Pitt pointed it out and provided these pictures. You will note that all but one of the five races is shown as dignified and respectable. The African:

The American Indian:

The Asian:

The Australian:

These four all keep their innate dignity, in an illustrated-Sunday-supplement sort of way. But when we come to Caucasoid Man…

…he looks as though someone just stuck a pin in him.

Evolution has wisely provided us with two hands because dilemmas have two horns. Without the requisite number of hands, we should all be at a loss for illustrative gestures when we discussed the important questions of the day. Of course, the process of evolution is messy, and doubtless many one-handed or three-handed creatures perished miserably because they could not say “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”; but Nature is prodigal, and the end result has been our own perfect adaptation to binary divisions.

The penny question has agitated many of Dr. Boli’s acquaintances. On the one hand, some thought the decision to stop minting pennies was long overdue, since it cost much more than a penny to make a penny. On the other hand, some thought it was the Beginning of the End. The latter have been more agitated than the former, and thus more vocal.

Now, Dr. Boli does not follow social media, and he has been meaning to catch up on the news but still seems to be stuck somewhere about the Eisenhower administration; so for all he knows everything he is about to say has been said over and over ad infinitum, and you might as well just go look at pictures of flowers.

Dr. Boli perfectly understands the people who feel cheated by the disappearance of pennies. Your bill comes to $19.82. You hand the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. You get a dime and a nickel back. Where are my three cents? your well-trained capitalist mind is screaming.

But let us take a long view of the question and see where we stand in history, and then perhaps Dr. Boli’s solution to the problem will seem obvious.

American currency is decimal, ascending by powers of ten:

mill ($0.001)
cent ($0.01)
dime ($0.1)
dollar ($1)

The “eagle,” a ten-dollar gold coin, is often mentioned as one of the original basic units, though the Coinage Act of 1792 specified “that the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars or units, dismes or tenths, cents or hundredths, and milles or thousandths.”

You will note the presence of “mills” in the list—a unit still in use in property taxes and gasoline prices, but one for which no coin was ever minted, on the reasonable grounds that it would be silly. Most prices have always been expressed in cents as the lowest unit; in other words, with two digits after the decimal point, not three.

The value of money went up and down through the nineteenth century before settling on a remarkably steady downward course after the First World War, and of course the things we buy now are greatly different from the things we bought in 1792; so it is a little hard to make exact comparisons. But it would be very reasonable to say that a half-penny, the lowest denomination authorized in 1792, was worth more then than a dime is now.

And that brings us to our obvious and straightforward answer to the penny problem, which—as we hinted earlier—is mostly a problem of psychology. The difference between what we paid and what we owed is eighteen cents, and we get only fifteen cents in change. We’re being cheated!

Do you see where we went wrong? Our error was not in eliminating pennies. It was in keeping nickels.

We have already learned to do without the third place after the decimal point. Simply cut off the second, and the psychological difficulty disappears. Remember that a dime now is worth less than the smallest possible denomination when our currency was established.

As long as we have nickels, we need that second digit after the decimal point. As long as it exists, sales taxes and suchlike percentage calculations will cause that digit to mock us with numbers that are not multiples of five.

But take that digit away, and the nickels with it, and the mockery goes with them. Once again we have a coinage that perfectly matches the bills we pay with it. Instead of $19.82, the price you owe, if it is more than $19.8, is $19.9. Your change is one dime.

Doubtless millions would rise to defend the nickel instinctively, unable to face a future in which the face of Thomas Jefferson would not wink at them from their change purses. But if we can weather the penny protests, the nickel protests should be simple. Tell your congressional representative that we need to shave one decimal place off the usual expression of monetary value. Explain the mathematical principles involved if your representative is a bit fuzzy on them. And then relax in the knowledge that you have done your duty as an informed citizen. You may even take credit for the idea if you like; Dr. Boli has nothing to gain from it, and offers it only as a public service.

The Web browser Firefox just updated its terms of use, apologizing to users for making the agreement longer than it was, but “The content wasn’t comprehensive enough for a modern browser like Firefox,” and “Today’s laws expect software providers to spell out a lot more details—even the seemingly obvious ones.”

So we brace ourselves for the usual novella-length cataract of legal jargon, with pages’ worth of fat grey paragraphs in SCREAMING CAPITAL LETTERS.

But there are no paragraphs in all caps (bold is used for emphasis instead—fancy that!). The new terms are presented on a clean-looking page with clear subheads to lead you through them. And with the copious subheads, the Terms of Use amount to 871 words.

Even when lawyers are involved, if succinct and transparent terms of use are the goal, they seem to be possible.

The privacy notice is longer—5,266 words, including subheads. But once again, the subheads that guide you through it are a big part of the word count, and many of the other words are clear explanations of how to turn off features you might not like if you want more privacy.

Could these terms and privacy notice be adopted by all browsers, as we have suggested in this space, to create a universal agreement for Web browsing?

Well, probably not. A big part of the business model of Chrome or Edge is selling you, the user, as a product to people who want to know what you do on line, so the agreements would probably have to be longer—although, without the opt-out instructions, they might also lose a few words, so perhaps it would balance out.

But, at any rate, we have found an example of terms and conditions expressed in fewer than a thousand words. It can be done. But how?

Probably just by stating the correct goal.

Let us suppose you have developed a new squirrel-counting app for Android phones. Right now there is a terrible dearth of squirrel-counting phone apps, and countless millions of squirrel counters are waiting to pay you the very reasonable $12.99 to be able to automate the counting process. But to make sure you are not liable for users’ stupidity or malevolence, you need some terms and conditions.

If you tell your corporate lawyer, “We need terms of use for our app,” the lawyer will want to do a good job. Most employees want to do a good job until you beat the desire out of them. But what is a “good job”? You haven’t defined it!

So your lawyer does the natural thing: she works hard to come up with the most unlikely scenarios she can think of and take them into account. She thinks of every illegal use to which a squirrel-counting app could be put, and she specifically prohibits each of them individually and in detail. She measures her progress by pages of text, probably written in Microsoft Word, and at the end she hands you a PDF, which she expects you to distribute as your Terms and Conditions in spite of the fact that it cannot be read on a phone screen.

That is one possible definition of a “good job.” But suppose you told your lawyer this: “Your job is to compress the absolutely necessary legal terms into the smallest possible space, while still making sure that the average reader can not only interpret them but also understand the reasons for them.”

Well, this is a challenge. You have just made your lawyer’s life fun. The assignment isn’t just useful drudgery anymore: now it’s an intellectual puzzle.

But is there any good reason why we, the corporation specializing in animal-counting software (makers of the popular MooseMate), should care whether our terms and conditions are friendly to users as long as they protect us from liability?

Well, yes, there is. It sometimes seems as though the law is a magic spell activated by speaking the proper incantations. But when it is working right, the legal system is our best attempt at making sure that everyone is treated fairly, and good judges interpret the law with that goal in mind. Some day, someone is going to convince a judge that “agreements” that no user can ever possibly read are not binding. When that happens, the 871-word terms and conditions are likely to stand while the 26,000-word terms and conditions fall.

So if you can’t make your terms and conditions short and easily understood because it’s courteous and the right thing to do, then do it because it’s the most reliable way to get what you want out of the suckers who buy your services.

Easter was established as a moveable feast to accommodate the Easter Bunny’s arcane and whimsical vacation schedule.

For three years straight during the Depression, the Easter Bunny sold colored eggs from a tin cup in front of Frank & Seder’s department store.

Attempts by Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to share data on naughty children have so far run aground on the rock of incompatible databases.

Though it was previously believed that the Easter Bunny’s given name was Bernard, recent research has established with near certainty that it is in fact Reginald.

To avoid recognition during the off season, the Easter Bunny frequently travels disguised as a fox squirrel.

When he reaches the end of his useful existence, the Easter Bunny is regenerated like the phoenix, except that the process is a bit messier.

The next time you decide to bake fortune cookies, you may wish to include a few of these wise and inspiring sayings on the little slips of paper inside them.

Tomorrow will be filled with laughter and joy, which will help you brace for the day after tomorrow.

Scan QR code on reverse to see your fortune on our new nearly trojan-free site.

WARNING: Fortune in next cookie contains spoilers.

Fortune favors customers who buy Lucky Dog Brand fortune cookies, but those who buy from our competitors invariably fall into wells.

Folk wisdom will guide you well; folk science will probably kill you.

A period of healing is near. A period of serious injury is nearer.

When one door closes, another door opens, usually with a tiger behind it.

Would you visit this location? We believe Mr. Cole Porter wrote a song about it once, if our memory serves us correctly.

To set up a meeting with your broker through Calendly: More than 15,000. We say “more than” because the site designer has cleverly made some of the words, especially the ones in all capitals, inaccessible to copy and paste, so we could not get an exact count. “By proceeding, you confirm that you have read and agree to Calendly’s Terms of Use and Privacy Notice,” says the site.

The Terms of Use contain this provision in all capitals, indicating, of course, that it is not important at all and you should ignore it. They could not be copied by normal means, but optical character recognition made them accessible:

READ THESE CUSTOMER TERMS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE SERVICES AS USE OF THE SERVICES INDICATES THAT YOU HAVE BOTH READ AND ACCEPTED THESE CUSTOMER TERMS. THESE CUSTOMER TERMS CONTAIN A DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND ARBITRATION PROVISION, INCLUDING A CLASS ACTION WAIVER THAT AFFECTS YOUR RIGHTS UNDER THESE CUSTOMER TERMS AND WITH RESPECT TO DISPUTES YOU MAY HAVE WITH CALENDLY. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU ARE ENTERING INTO THESE CUSTOMER TERMS VOLUNTARILY AND NOT IN RELIANCE ON ANY PROMISES OR REPRESENTATIONS WHATSOEVER EXCEPT THOSE CONTAINED IN THE CUSTOMER TERMS THEMSELVES.

So, as you see, you are agreeing, by scheduling an appointment with anyone who uses this service for appointments, not only that you will not object to the terms, but that you have actually read them. You “indicate” or “confirm” that you have spent more than an hour reading legal slop that would have made your eyes roll back in their sockets to protect themselves if you had actually spent more than five minutes in it. A commonly accepted figure for the average reader’s silent-reading rate is 238 words per minute, and 15,000 words would thus take you a bit more than 63 minutes if you could read them at the normal reading rate—although, as Dr. Boli has pointed out more than once, you could not read the words at your normal reading rate, because they are words like these:

If you are an Entity purchasing licenses for your Authorized Users, you may provision or deprovision access to the Services, manage permissions, retention and export settings and transfer/assign accounts as described in the Documentation. As such, you will (a) inform Authorized Users of all Entity policies and practices relevant to their use of the Services and of any settings that may impact the processing of Customer Data; and (b) ensure the collection, transfer, and processing of Customer Data under the Customer Terms is lawful. If any terms in the Industry-Specific Supplement (“Industry-Specific Terms”) apply to you (e.g. Customer is a U.S government entity), those terms are also incorporated by reference herein and you agree to fully comply with the applicable Industry-Specific Terms. To the extent any such Industry-Specific Terms conflict with the terms below, the Industry-Specific Terms shall take precedence.

(We remind our readers and any guest attorneys present that these quotations are used for the purpose of criticism, and constitute a tiny portion of the more than 15,000 words under discussion, both of which considerations put us safely within the limits of fair use.)

Clearly you did not spend 63 minutes reading terms and conditions to make an appointment. And neither did anyone else who uses Calendly. But you all made a legal assertion that you did. With trivial exceptions, everyone who uses Calendly has committed the crime of perjury. This is not libel. It is cold fact. To live in the modern world, you must be a criminal perjuror. An American criminal lawyer could tell us whether this crime could be prosecuted under the laws of the land, but that it is a moral crime no one with any moral sense would deny.

We could solve this problem. Do we have the will to do it?