Sometimes one finds oneself stuck in a public place where a television is droning to itself, as it must do even if no one else is in the room, because it is defended by large, unfriendly signs that say DO NOT TOUCH TELEVISION. As a good citizen, of course, one always obeys regulatory signs, so one is forced to sit and think about the television. Among the thoughts one thinks is the question, Would a brick count as “touching” the television if it were heaved from across the room? We didn’t touch the television ourselves; if you want to hold the brick responsible, that’s between you and the brick. But after that thought has entertained us for a while, we begin to think that, if there must be televisions in public places, then we need better game shows.

The premise of almost every game show on American television is that it is infallibly entertaining to watch other people win large amounts of money. To Dr. Boli, nothing could be duller than watching some waitress from Connecticut jump and squeal because a board behind her has a big number with a dollar sign in front of it. Even if the television handed him ten-dollar bills at irregular intervals on condition that he watch the program, Dr. Boli’s attention would wander. Money does not entertain him.

But monetary prizes do not have to be he only attraction of a game show. In fact, why do there have to be prizes at all? Dr. Boli’s first rule for devising an entertaining game show will be that no prizes will be offered. That will force us to think up something genuinely amusing. We cannot hope to create excitement just by adding another zero to the jackpot.

Our next rule will be that our contestants must be clever. They must be people with amusing things to say, not people who exhausted their mental resources picking out the right T-shirt slogan to wear on TV.

We probably need a host or master of ceremonies—someone who can keep the show on track, mostly by making sure that each of our contestants has an equal chance to be clever.

Finally, we need something amusing for our contestants to do. This criterion rules out guessing the price tags of home appliances, to take one example at random.

What amusing tasks could we assign to our guests? Perhaps they could be required to come up with amusingly clever solutions to everyday problems. Back in the heady days of glasnost, there was a game show on Soviet television that asked teams of players to compete in solving problems from everyday life. For example: you are the manager of a hat factory. How can you increase your personal income without getting fired for corruption? One team earned much applause by suggesting that the manager should take the hat off his head, turn it over, and beg. That was an entertaining game show.

One task we might assign to our American contestants: You are in a public place, and there is a television droning with nobody watching it. How can you silence it without attracting a stern lecture from the keen-eyed receptionist?

Word games are also entertaining when the people playing them are amusing. “I Can Give You a Sentence” kept the Algonquin Round Table going and added some immortal wit to our treasury. The key to making word games entertaining for an audience is to make sure they are creative rather than mechanical. We don’t need to watch a crossword ace solve the Tuesday puzzle in the New York Times; we want funny stories and outrageous puns. The game itself should be only the conversation-starter.

Once we have picked clever contestants and given them some excuse for being clever, we have probably done all we need to do. We can let our contestants take it from there, and we have no need of a catchy gimmick. In fact, gimmicks are likely to get in the way. The more time our guests spend guessing the prices of major appliances or spinning giant vertical roulette wheels, the less time they have to be witty.

The final stage in our plan, then, is to get the show on the air. This probably requires a deep-pocketed sponsor. Dr. Boli might suggest that the manufacturers of televisions themselves could sponsor the program. You can imagine the favorable impression it would leave: “This actually entertaining game show is brought to you by DuMont, makers of the televisions too nice to heave a brick through. Wouldn’t you like to have a DuMont at home?”

So there we have our plan for mitigating the evils of televisions in public places. We shall call it Plan B. Plan A is still a brick.

Hey Bob: My car has a fast-charging port, but my phone won’t charge from it, even though it charges normally from the charger at home. I’ve tried multiple cables, but no dice. However, my wife’s phone charges just fine from the same cable in the same port in the car that won’t charge my phone. What can I do? —Sincerely, Flummoxed in Finleyville.

Dear Flummoxed: You will never figure out what the problem is. You will ask AI bots, and they will tell you to check the cable. You will ask the phone’s manufacturer, and you will get an AI bot telling you to check the cable. When you tell the AI bot that you’ve used multiple cables, and anyway the cables all work with a different phone, you will be told that most cars don’t have the right voltage for charging phones, even though you already specifically said that your car has a fast-charging port labeled “fast-charging port.” Hundreds of thousands of people have this same problem, and they never get an answer. Your best bet is to throw your phone away and get a new one, and if that one doesn’t work, throw it away and get a new one, and keep doing that until you find one at random that does what it’s supposed to do. Hope this helps.

If you wrote down just one good idea for improving the world we live in every day, then at the end of a year you would have 365 (or, in lucky years, 366) good ideas, and you would be a crank.

More than forty years after the Macintosh keyboard was introduced, Windows may be getting a sane way to produce an em dash. According to an article in The Register, the perennially snarky tech-news site, there is now a way to make an em dash on a Windows keyboard that is somewhat more efficient than holding down the alt key and typing 0151 on the numeric keypad (not on the number keys at the top of the keyboard, because that would be cheating, and Microsoft hates cheaters).

So at last Windows has an em dash! But only for special people.

Right now, the article explains, em dashes are still an experimental feature. Microsoft is not sure that all the bugs have been worked out yet; who knows whether a Windows-generated em dash might suddenly turn into an ampersand or a guillemet or a less-than-or-equal-to sign? You have to be a Windows Insider to have access to the experimental em dashes, and you have to have the right Windows Insider build, and even then you have to download a special program that allows you to change certain invisible settings in the Insider build of Windows, and then run that program, and then look in the obscure settings and find the one that allows you to type an em dash by typing shift-windows-hyphen.

But if the beta-testing gods send favorable omens, the em dash will eventually make it into the standard builds of Windows. With this amazing innovation, Windows users will at last be able to counter the long-resented Mac-user boast that Apple has superior em-dash technology.

Still no word on when Windows users will have access to proper apostrophes and quotation marks, but Microsoft moves deliberately.

Also no word yet on when the new em-dash capability will be removed in a mandatory Windows update.

At any rate, it is probably a bad idea for Windows users to place too much faith in a Microsoft em dash. If Microsoft invents an em dash, we can expect it to be bloated, inefficient, and unreliable, taking up most of your computer’s CPU cycles, with a significant chance of catastrophic data loss. Windows power users will continue to use their own kluges to produce em dashes; Linux users will continue to use their own homemade keyboard layouts, because the keyboard layout is just a text file. Meanwhile, the publishing industry will continue to prefer Apple, because Apple at least makes elementary concessions to typography.

This boarding passenger is about to ask, “Does this bus go downtown?” Later he will tell Google all about the response he got.

On the subject of smoking, our correspondent “von Hindenburg” asks,

Well, how else does one get company-permitted 15 minute breaks throughout the day?

This is indeed one of the great incentives to beginning a habit that otherwise would seem to have nothing but disadvantages. Dr. Boli has spoken with many in the working classes who tell him the same story: they started smoking because the place where they worked allowed smokers frequent time off throughout the day, whereas no such provision was made for any activity other than smoking.

Is smoking, alone among vices, regarded as so virtuous that employees who smoke ought to be encouraged with special privileges?

Incidentally, if our readers will pardon a digression, the managers who permit smoking breaks have come perilously close to making a paradigm-shifting discovery. They allow the breaks because experience has taught them that their smoking employees are generally no less productive than their non-smoking employees. But they close their eyes to the obvious conclusion: that most employees produce as much benefit to the company whether they are working or not. You may make of this digression what you will; now back to the main subject.

It is well known that smoking shortens the productive life of workers, but since there is no long term in American business, employers do not care whether their employees live beyond the end of the current quarter. We may therefore remove health from the potential arguments against smoking in the workplace. However, it is true that smoking costs employees a large part of their paychecks, which in turn might induce them to demand higher paychecks. That is the sort of risk an American business-school graduate can understand. Therefore, it would be to the advantage of most businesses to eliminate the privileged status of smoking, if not the habit itself.

Dr. Boli has two suggestions for managers. The first is to count the hours in a day the average smoker spends not working because of the tobacco habit. Let us say that the breaks add up to an hour and a half a day. Then we simply make a policy that is fair and equal to smokers and non-smokers. You may take your smoking breaks throughout the day, or you may leave an hour and a half earlier in the afternoon.

But that would strike most managers as drastic. The idea of giving employees more time at home with their families, even if it could be proved that it would make them more productive when they were working, would cause the average business-school graduate to break out in hives. So we have an alternate suggestion. Employees who do not smoke may be permitted an equal number of breaks to indulge in some other vice of their choice. We might call them “booze breaks,” although we would not force employees to drink alcoholic beverages if they have no taste for them. Some employees might use the breaks for online gambling; others might read comic books; others might try to sell each other Amway distributorships. Whatever vice they came up with, it would probably not be as destructive as smoking; and thus by being equally hospitable to all vices, we eliminate the incentive to indulge in one in particular.

Dear Dr. Boli: I’ve never smoked cigarettes, and in fact I’ve never held a pack of cigarettes in my hand, so forgive me if this seems like a stupid question. A lot of the people I work with smoke, and when they go out on their smoke breaks, they have a ritual: the first thing they do when they take out a pack of cigarettes is bang it repeatedly as hard as they can. Why are they doing that? What do they hope to accomplish? Is tobacco activated by percussion? —Sincerely, A Non-Smoker Who Feels Left Out.

Dear Sir or Madam: Cigarettes, as you are doubtless aware, take years off the average smoker’s life; moreover, they make a drawn-out and unpleasant demise far more likely. If that were not enough, they cost absurd amounts of money that the average working smoker can ill afford. They banish their users to the outer darkness away from polite society. The stench of stale tobacco makes the smokers’ own families avoid them. Most of those smokers you see have tried to quit smoking multiple times, but the cigarettes have always got the better of them in the end. And all this goes to enrich a small number of obscenely wealthy executives who thrive on the misery of hundreds of millions, and who lie, cheat, and bully to keep their trade in vice profitable. Considering all those known facts, it is not surprising that cigarette smokers give way to violence against the only part of the whole sordid business that is momentarily in their control: namely, the single pack of cigarettes they are holding right now. They know that the cigarettes will win seconds later; but for the moment, at least, they can have the symbolic satisfaction of giving the tobacco industry a good spanking.

Found on the Web site of the Pittsburgh New Church, a Swedenborgian congregation:

Clearly the Swedenborgians are only the vanguard of what will become the dominant trend in theology as our century progresses. The Anglicans will soon have an Archchatbot of Canterbury. The Vatican will adopt the new technology within a few years, and the next pope will have a name like code-pius-0013. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be replaced by a large language model, and no one will notice.

Thus progress marches forward in religion as in other human endeavors, and at last we begin to see the true meaning of the quotation from Swedenborg engraved over the entrance to the New Church in Pittsburgh: “Nunc licet intrare in arcana fidei”—“Now we may enter into the hidden things of the faith.”