Included in the MJTT’s extensive library is a copy of The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. Usually regarded as nothing more than a children’s author reveling in nonsense and little girls, Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson [1832-1898]) was much, much more: an Oxford don, a mathematician and logician, and—I boldly aver—a visionary scientist whose fantastic tales disguise a sophisticated cosmological theory that is built on the premise that the universe is sinking.
 
I made this discovery after spending a day fishing in a dry riverbed on the outskirts of Large Southwestern City. Disappointed by my catch, which consisted of two minnows and a midget frog, I returned to headquarters and, after my dutiful assistant had plucked several bits of cactus that had been attracted to the nether regions of my flesh at the conclusion of a nasty fall, I repaired to our extensive library to sip a carafe of sherry.
 
While thus engaged, I happened to glance at the top shelf of books. Lewis Carroll’s works caught my eye. I rang for my assistant, who appeared instantly, along with a nurse. I waved off the nurse, protesting that the sherry was the only medicine I required. Then I instructed my lovely young assistant to retrieve the book that had caught my eye. She dutifully moved the available ladder to the appropriate place and climbed it. I noted that she was attired in a short dress, patent-leather shoes, and white anklets, a scene that, together with the carafe of sherry, elicited the unnamed muse that is the inspiration of all great scientists.
 
My lovely young assistant dutifully retrieved the book that had not five minutes earlier caught my observant eye.
 
“Thank you, Alice,” I said politely, patting her hand in a fatherly way.
 
She frowned. “It’s Lolita,” she reminded me.
 
“Ah yes,” I acknowledged, patting another part of her lovely prepubescent person in a fatherly way. I had forgotten the pet name I had bestowed upon her.
 
“Will that be all, Sir?” she inquired.
 
I frowned. “It’s Lewis,” I reminded her. She had forgotten the pet name I had suggested she bestow upon me.
 
“Whatever,” she said with a shrug of her lovely young shoulders, and left.
 
I gazed after her and fell into a muse. Shortly thereafter I recalled the book she had delicately placed upon my lap. I opened it to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and began to read the first chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole.”
 
“Here,” I thought in a fit of inspiration, “is the key to the theory of the shrinking universe.”
 
Delighted by the efficient working of my muse, I promptly fell into a deep sleep, confident that on waking, I would . . .

She finally looked up, resting her chin on her left wrist. “Mr. Budwieser,” she said abruptly.

Henry Constant used to call him Ed, and he called Henry Hank. He would come in and philosophize with Hank during his free hour; no appointment necessary. They’d sit there in the office with their feet up on that solid oak desk, he and good old Hank, drinking coffee and calling each other by their Christian names and wondering what the world was coming to. But a month ago, just before Easter, wise, dependable Henry Constant had passed away from a heart attack—possibly a complication from the cirrhosis—and the control tower downtown had replaced him with Ms. Mode, a freshly-minted young EdD who had got the job, as the Kirkland Buglereported, because of “her skills in personnel management.”

She whipped off her glasses and flashed a temporary smile.

He thought it appropriate to smile back.

She leaned forward. “I thought we should talk about the future,” she began.

He nodded and cleared his throat and began to search for a masterful sentence that would introduce the speech he had spent this past Memorial Day weekend formulating and revising and polishing and practicing in front of the bathroom mirror—the speech that would eloquently put forth his vision of the future for Language Arts at Sunset High; the speech that would begin with a declaration of his well-considered philosophy of education, formed by the experience of thirty-odd years; the speech that would subtly demonstrate his mastery of the Classics, those immortal works of outstanding merit, those monuments of the human spirit, those shining and infallible touchstones that had stood the test of time; the speech that would off-handedly remind her (in case she had not had time to look at his file) that he had spent ten long hard summers working on his Master’s thesis on Shakespeare’s tragic heroes; the speech that would proceed to inform her that with Henry Constant’s sage counsel, he had been grooming young Bob White to replace himself as Chairman of Language Arts in three years, when he would turn sixty-two and would finally be eligible for Social Security; the speech that would go on to recommend that Bobbie, despite being just fifty-one and having just a B.A. and being just a mite weak in Greek tragedy and Shakespeare’s later plays, as well as having just a slight stutter, was the perfect man (having spent the last five summers on his thesis showing the influence of Aristophanes’ The Clouds on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces) to step into his own shoes and continue the long venerable tradition that had made Language Arts the pride of Sunset High—in fact, the pride of the entire Kirkland School District, if they only had the good sense to recognize the gold mine they had on their hands.

​But that masterful first sentence would not come. It was a prisoner in his brain, tied up in a knot of words and parentheses and dashes and semicolons.

​Having solved the dual problems of (1) the depletion of the ozone layer above Antarctica and (2) the increase in the smog level across Southern California, the MJTT has not been resting on its laurels, as our plan to secure lunar power shows. We now turn our efforts to a problem that has just recently caught the attention of the world’s leading scientists: the phenomenon of the sinking universe.
 
The last century witnessed a scientific debate over whether the universe is expanding or contracting, or perhaps taking turns doing both. The current and bleakest view, of course, has been that the rest of the universe is moving away from us at ever-increasing speeds, thus eventually depriving future generations of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called “the starry skies above and the moral law within.” [There is some contention among scholars concerning the meaning of this epigram: did Kant mean to treat the stars and the moral law separately, or as inextricably intertwined? We at MJTT prefer the latter interpretation, and have assigned two of our best and brightest thinkers to make it irrefutable.]
 
Twenty-first-century cosmologists have recently had to consider the case of the sinking of ever-increasing portions of the State of Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. What, they have been forced to ask, is the implication of this phenomenon for the movement of the entire universe? For example, does Einstein’s majestic theory account for this event, which, on first glance, appears to bear implications only for a few thousand shrimp boat captains? Or are we as think tank specialists obliged to rethink the whole of 20th century physics?
 
In the following columns, we will address this important issue. MJTT has already sent half a dozen interns down to the bayous to learn pidgin Cajun in order to discuss this phenomenon with the locals. In the meantime, those of us who remain at our headquarters will devote ourselves to the study of this intriguing development in the behavior of the physical universe and its implications for the future of mankind, womankind, childrenkind, and their pets. While our interns are conducting empirical research, we will be making use of our extensive library and expensive toys, not to speak of the afternoon glasses of sherry that are the source of our scientific inspirations.

​We at the Myles Junior Think Tank (MJTT) are always on the lookout for significant, socially responsible problems on which we can exercise our not-inconsiderable intellects.
 
The contemporary art museum as we know it is an antiquated institution that is, among other faults, hard on the feet.
 
MJTT has devoted considerable thought to righting that wrong by envisioning a new form of art museum.
 
In the neo-modern museum, the pictures are all spaced the same distance apart, regardless of their size and aesthetic appeal. Ten feet distant from the wall runs a small solar-powered railroad track. On the track is placed a continuous set of chairs facing the walls at intervals of fifteen feet. The chairs are of course for the use of the patrons. This train of chairs will not move continuously but will start and stop every fifteen feet, for exactly one minute. Thus the patrons will be allowed to see each exhibit once, after which they will be swiftly moved to the next, so that no exhibit goes unseen by any art lover. Opera glasses are provided to each patron for a small rental fee for the purpose of reading the fine print on the wall explaining each exhibit. Alternatively: the patron may purchase a brochure with the same information. Or that patron may rent an earphones/recorder combo providing an aural explanation of each exhibit; this will save him/her the trouble of reading. The combo may be rented in four colors (mauve, forest green, gunpowder gray, forest-fire orange) and listened to in any of the six standard voices: soprano, mezzo, alto, tenor, baritone, bass, all recited by a singer who has performed a leading role at the Met a minimum of three times.
 
The chairs are equipped with a small foldout table for the use of those who have purchased foodstuffs from the museum cafeteria. Indeed, the cafeteria is to be the first stop on the line. Those who prefer not to eat while engaged in art-loving may rent a small TV set providing a full panoply of channels in order to dispose of the time others will be spending in the cafeteria. The set may also be retained, at a modest extra cost, for possible use within the museum proper. This is for the convenience of those whose tastes are repelled, for example, by the Late Impressionists or who are incapable of understanding why a large spray-painted canvas or a men’s urinal, however tastefully wrought, would be considered as art.
 
What about the problem of restrooms? Though the time it takes for the train to traverse the entire museum will be 75 minutes at the most, the MJTT takes into account the sudden urges to which a substantial majority of flesh is heir. Thus each chair comes equipped with a button that, when depressed, allows the chair and the patron it bears to leave the train and descend into a basement, which is occupied by a variety of restrooms, each of which is festooned with the early works of an up-and-coming artist. There are stalls at the door of each restroom. For a small fee, the patron may convey his/her chair to that stall. And of course the chair is also equipped with a button that, when again depressed, returns the patron to his/her proper position on the train. (The technical details of this arrangement are being outsourced to a group of brilliant but unemployed mechanical engineers.)
 
At the end of the line stands the art bookstore. It is here that the museum realizes a healthy cash flow. Each of the abovementioned chairs is equipped with a small computer that allows the individual patron to select from a menu of books he/she wishes to purchase; the decisions re purchases are to be made during the pilgrimage through the museum proper. The problem of overstocked books is obviated by the use of the print-on-demand technology, which allows the book to be printed immediately after the avid patron has placed an order.
 
The neo-modern museum is the answer to the prayers not only of the soft-footed, but of those who have learned to live and thrive in contemporary times while maintaining their taste for the exquisite arts.
 

A fellow theoretician associated with the JPL has pointed out a problem with our scheme. This problem has nothing to do with the plan to wrap “our” side of the moon with used tinfoil in order to provide reflected sunshine, thus solving, or at least alleviating, the problem of scarce energy sources that dogs our late-industrial society; the problem our man sees concerns the steady filching of the extra moons from the planet Jupiter.
 
Our colleague’s concern is eminently practical: what would half a dozen moons circumnavigating the earth do to our ocean tides? (Full disclosure: she and I are fellow fishermen, and many of our younger colleagues are ardent surfers.) Would all those extra moons cause huge or unpredictable tides, perhaps even the dreaded tsunamis that occasionally bash our coasts and disrupt our marine trade and cruise ships?
 
An afternoon at our computers alleviated our concerns about this potential hazard. Together, we were able to devise several alternative models of multiple satellite orbits (MSOs) that would allay all irrational fears.
 
These models are built on the simple idea that not all the orbits of our “borrowed” moons would be either (1) equatorially aligned or (2) perfectly circular. For example, as many as three moons could orbit our planet around the two poles; at least two of them could follow an elliptical orbit. With attentive fine-tuning, any and all of our models could even provide us with completely placid oceans, in which all tides would vary as little as 3.678 centimeters on a calm day. Not that this would be desirable, we were quick to point out to our young surfer assistants; only that it would be possible.
 
Next morning I awoke with a dreadful premonition that there was still a major flaw in our theoretical work. Tides, I reasoned, are caused by the gravity that the present moon exerts on the earth we have grown accustomed to call home. Would not a plethora of moons be unsettling to our current arrangements—for example, apples that fall from trees to the ground instead of leaping skyward?
 
That afternoon my JPL colleague and I held an extensive consultation over the net. We concluded that it was theoretically possible to continue our budding joint project, under the auspices of the U. S. Government, the United Nations, the Pan-Arab League, the International Olympic Committee, the American Farm Bureau, and the Eagle Scouts. We became convinced that our initial goal of providing lunar energy to the world would not necessarily be compromised by the problem of gravity. In fact, it was possible for us to concoct a multi-moon model that would both preserve the advantages of present gravity and provide extra benefits of which we are presently deprived.
 
Let a pair of examples suffice. With the proper alignment of half a dozen tinfoil-coated moons, apples would fall more gingerly to earth, thus avoiding bruises; and world records would be set in practically every Olympic event. (The major exception would be in downhill skiing, a sport that would have to change its emphasis from speed to grace, thus freeing the skier from the fear of disastrous tumbles and careers shortened by knee and ankle injuries.)
 
We believe our initial plan will make the world a better place in which to ski.