Dr Know It All can answer any question. He just happens to know everything. Dr Know It All selects a few questions each month. Readers may send the Doctor a question at the Town Crier (becky@towncrier.com). 

Dear Dr Know It All:

I’ve tried every diet there is and I still can’t lose any weight. Do you have the answer?

— Benedict

Certainly. In fact, I have several options and they always produce results. 

First, try becoming deeply “depressed.” You can achieve this condition and dietary cure by taking advantage of any number of horrible life situations. Just focus and obsess on some extreme personal bummer: poverty, shingles, your lack of a love life, etc., etc. Work on it until you are thoroughly depressed with a seriously suppressed appetite. How long you follow this diet will depend on how much weight you need to lose.

Another option is to become ill and develop a healthy “fever.” You know, “Feed a cold, starve a fever.” The trick is to develop a fever from a moderate illness; definitely not small pox or rickets but something like a serious case of the flu or measles. Make sure it gives you a substantial fever, not just a bad cold. (If you only catch a cold you’ll have to “feed” it). Get just properly sick and the pounds will fly off.

Dear Dr Know It All:

It’s recently occurred to me that the world may not be round. Of course I notice that everywhere I look, the vista seems curved. When I look at the horizon line or lie on my back and look up at the sky, all the edges of my vision are circular.

Then it came to me. My eyeballs are round, too. So maybe it’s all just an optical illusion caused by the shape of my eyeballs. I might be seeing things all wrong and the world is actually flat. What do you think?

— Twila

Not everyone knows this. We can keep this as our little secret until the word gets out. The world is indeed flat, but the trick is that it’s flat on all sides. We’re living on a cube. We don’t notice it when we get to the edges because of the cubular nature of the gravitation fields that modify themselves at each corner, influencing and bending our physical senses so that we don’t see or feel anything as we step over a sharp edge. From the Space Station, the Earth still looks round but that’s simply because the entire universe is also a cube. And so forth and so on.