Knicks Morning News (2025.07.27)

I am now reading the Phantom Tollbooth to my 8 year old and when I realized/remembered/read there is a character in it named Alec Bings I laughed out loud and then moved on quickly rather than explain to my daughter why this was funny

an unseasonably humid morning in smudgeville, the home of the largest regional printing outfit just three hours northsouth of dictionopolis, led to a hardly noticeable inking ambiguity lurking within a supposedly homogenous shipment of third edition phantom tollbooth hardbacks. the very fortunate and unfortunate nature of this particular adulteration was that it affected only the instances of typeset that produced the very particular sequence a-l-e-c- -b-i-n-g-s, rendering it a rather lightly constrained rorschach blot to unsuspecting readers.

an urgent recall was considered, but reconsidered. the assistant to the deputy mayor of indexical locating services almost belatedly realized this as the golden opportunity it was to inject ambiguous alec bings into the most imaginative and literate minds in the land, like a metaphorical but rather nearly actual iodine-123, finally allowing the five cabinet members of king azaz to test their long held theory that this whole rigamarole of branching the wavefunction was in fact pure semantics.

the idea was to meticulously trace the dozens upon thousands of reasonably possible alecbingsian instantiations across whatever path they might take in the wisdomverse and license the results to waze to offer an ad supported tier of it entry level map of actualities to a less archaic map of counterfactuals. alas, having failed to consult with digitopolis, the cabinet predictably failed to appreciate the combinatorial enormity of this endeavor which, buoyed by the surprising stamina and perhaps lack of standards of a certain class of umarell reader, led to a crescendo of alecbingsisms that threatened to erode the norms of civil society.

the project was unceremoniously quashed and the assistant to the deputy was quietly reassigned to moderating the youtube comment sections of chess influencers. but years later an intern discovered the paper trail of the incident in the indexical locating archives and, in a pique of insouciance, thought it blithely diverting to conjure a few well placed tollbooths on obscure unpaved backroads that would be visible only to those who had unknowingly traced through one particular starting branch of the long disowned alec bings ambiguity, and permanently trap them together in a remote lingual cul de sac, sentenced to forever loop in a circle of jointly deluded possibilities.