Warning:  Images of partial baldness and baldness angst. May trigger pre-baldness anxiety. Warning:  Casual, even provocative usage of Italian and gratuitous references to nudist classical painters with a glaring fetish for muscular dudes. May trigger dramatic romance language insecurity and the uneasy feeling that you are just not smart enough for this thing. Warning:  Massive

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We’ve got a situation here, Rutherford, and we’d like you to relay it to the rest of your office. We’ve received feedback from several of our retail clients stating that they are dissatisfied with the performance of our chemtrails, which directly affects their profits and return on investment. As a government branch, they expect our chemicals to be potent and us ourselves to be precise, accurate, and expedient. For many of them, this is obviously their first time working with the government.

“Mommy, fourth grade is so boring! Why do I have to go to school anyway?”

“That’s a very important question, honey! Let’s play a little game, okay?”

“I like games!”

“Okay, repeat after me: Would you like fries with that?”

 “I don’t get it, mommy.”

“That’s what the people who work at Burger King say. They’re working at what’s called a poverty-wage job.”

Dear students,

In light of the recent severe drop in temperature, we here at the university are quite worried that you might freeze to death. We want to make sure that you don’t. And we are going to do that by telling you not to.

Alfred Thayer Mahan is the kind of historical figure who proves that fame and aptitude are not always bedfellows. By the late nineteenth century, he was the undisputed authority on naval history, the man who coined the term “sea power” and lent it enough gravitas to send Congress scuttling toward new battleships. His seminal work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, was the TED Talk of its era—if TED Talks were 500-page treatises on naval strategy, dense with charts, footnotes, and historical examples. Mahan became the intellectual godfather of America’s rise as a global maritime force.