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Gates’ Paradox: People know that Microsoft Windows will frustrate them, cost hours of lost work time every day, and eventually destroy their data, yet they still choose it as the safe alternative.

The Gasoline Fallacy: Gasoline prices are always posted in figures ending in nine mills, even though, logically, if such a convention were genuinely usfeul in marketing, it would have been adopted for every other product.

The Trolley Conundrum: Even though the streetcars run on a regular and predictable schedule, the answer to the question “When does the next car leave?” is always “Thirty seconds before you get to the stop.”

The Paradox Paradox: Intelligent readers will peruse a list of paradoxical human behaviors on the Internet and nod sagely, and then go back out into the world and continue committing all the same fallacies and absurdities.

Boli’s Disappointment: People know the punch line will not be a sufficient reward to compensate for the effort, yet they still read the joke through to the end.

Q. How can I make the taskbar smaller so it doesn’t take up so much room on the screen? I used to be able to do that, but now I can’t find the setting.

A. You can’t. We took that option away.

Q. How can I pin a file to the taskbar, like I used to be able to do?

A. You can’t. We took that option away.

Q. How can I make the clock in the taskbar display the seconds?

A. You can’t. We took that option away.

Q. How can I make searches from the taskbar open in my default browser instead of in Edge?

A. You can’t. We took that option away.

Q. Well, guess what, Microsoft! I found a neat little utility that restores all those capabilities. Now I can do all the things I want to do with my own computer.

A. Thank you for informing us! We just updated your operating system. Now you can’t, and the programmer who created the utility has died in a mysterious accident.

The Stan Grivens Memorial Lecture Series at Blandville Community Library will be hosting a lecture by that guy, you know, who talks about the stuff that,—well, that is, the things that, you know,— His name is something that starts with a K, or maybe a B, and he looks a lot like that actor who played on the show about the whadayacallit, and he has something he’s going to say about, you know, the thing that’s right on the tip of our tongue, it’s not the orange-juice-and-pork-rinds diet, because we had that guy in here last month, and everybody is pretty sick of pork rinds by now, but this next one is going to talk about that thing, you know, that happens when you get to be a certain age, and you can’t— Memory loss! That’s it. The Stan Grivens Memorial Lecture Series will be hosting a lecture by that guy who talks about memory loss. It will be 8 p.m. tonight in the library basement, unless it’s 7:30 this time, because we said something about moving it earlier so people wouldn’t be out that late, but did we ever make that decision? We’re not sure.

Dear Dr. Boli: So many of my correspondents add little faces to the end of every sentence that I have to wonder what’s wrong with them. With the correspondents, I mean. I already know what’s wrong with the little faces. First of all, I’m over 35, and my vision, while good, is not perfect, and I can hardly distinguish one emoji from another. Second, even when I put on my reading glasses and magnify my email or text messages, the emojis are seldom more than tenuously connected to the sentences they follow. Nine out of ten of them are variants of a happy face, and the tenth is usually some expression of frustration. But shouldn’t I be able to tell by the words you write whether you’re happy or frustrated? Why the little picture? What information does it add? —Sincerely, E. A. Wallis Budge.

Dear Sir: The emoji does not add information. It is the written equivalent of a nervous chuckle at the end of every sentence. Its message is this: “Please take my unworthy expression in the spirit in which it was intended, and please don’t hurt me even though I’m weak and nervous and would blow away in a stiff breeze.” Now that you know the psychological source of these little faces, you will of course refrain from telling your correspondents, “If you send me one more happy face, I will crawl through the whole series of tubes from one end of the Internet to the other and throttle you.” That would be wrong.

Dear Dr. Boli: Electric engines are much more efficient and deliver much more torque than gasoline engines. Yet, among my acquaintances, the ones who talk the most enthusiastically about powerful cars are the ones most opposed to electric cars and most stuck on internal combustion. Why is that? —Sincerely, An Avid Bicyclist.

Dear Sir or Madam: Because there’s no fuel like an old fuel.

You have probably never seen a serving size expressed in these measurement units before…

…unless you do your chocolate shopping at IKEA.

Dear Dr. Boli: I was in my local bagelorium for lunch yesterday, and they asked me what kind of bagel I wanted for my Lox de Luxe Combo, and one of the choices was “ancient grains.” And I was wondering what “ancient grains” meant, but the teenager behind the counter was stuck in trying to figure out what “lox” meant, and I didn’t want to burden him any further. But what do they mean by “ancient grains”? It sounds wonderfully intriguing and mysterious.

Dear Sir: It is not as mysterious as all that. “Ancient grains” is a marketing term for what the bakery trade used to call “day-olds”: that is, items that were baked yesterday but did not sell and are being offered today. It used to be regular practice to offer them at a discount, but the intriguing and mysterious term “ancient grains” has eliminated the necessity for such drastic measures.

Every parent has experienced that difficult moment when an innocent child asks a question that requires extreme delicacy in the answering. You are walking through the park, and you stop at a food cart, and suddenly little Algernon asks, “Daddy, where do pitas come from?”

After much hemming and hawing, you give the only answer that comes naturally to a parent’s lips in such a situation: “Ask your mother.”

But now, thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and the generosity of our friend Father Pitt, you can answer that awkward question in sixteen seconds. That is all it takes to watch this candid yet tasteful video of the miracle of pita birth, as it takes place every day at Pitaland in the Brookline neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Little Algernon’s laudable curiosity can be satisfied without embarrassment to his parents and without trauma to his young sensibilities. And it is important to note that sixteen seconds keeps within modern educators’ guidelines for the attention span of an average American child, with four seconds to spare. Here is the film Father Pitt, with his usual flair for colorful description, calls “Pitas leaving the oven at Pitaland, Pittsburgh.” Visit the hosting page at Wikimedia Commons to see it in full HD resolution.

Dear Dr. Boli: People keep telling me I should get a hybrid to replace my 1973 Chrysler Newport. But I don’t want to get one until I know what a hybrid car is and how they pollinate cars. —Sincerely, Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of Energy.

Dear Madam: The sexual reproduction of motor vehicles is a branch of biology outside Dr. Boli’s field of expertise. Fortunately, however, it is irrelevant to your question, because the word hybrid here is used in a metaphorical sense.

A hybrid vehicle is a failed attempt at a perpetual-motion machine. The turning of the wheels generates power, and the vehicle uses that power to turn the wheels. If perpetual motion were allowed, that would be the end of the story. But in spite of the best attempts of various legislators to repeal the laws of thermodynamics, they are still on the books; and therefore perpetual motion is not an option. Power must occasionally be injected into the system to keep it running, and thus your hybrid vehicle, which desperately wants to drive on electric power alone, also has a gasoline engine. This is the sense in which the word “hybrid” is used: a hybrid is like an electric car crossed with a gasoline-powered car by some ambitious technician at the agricultural extension agency.

It is not, however, necessary to use the gasoline engine all the time, or even at all. There is a source of unlimited energy into which all vehicles can tap, and it does not live under the feet of greedy foreigners who hate us. Gravity is freely available to all. As long as you drive downhill, you can make use of this free energy indefinitely. This one weird trick eliminates the need not only for the gasoline engine, but for the electric motors as well.