Advice just for you, doll — sex mannikins, cow farts, and other cranky counsel to ease you through at least six more months of Donald Trump.

Who, moi? 

Back from the hospital with a mechanical doohickey made of titanium, ceramic and nylon under his skin where his left hip used to be, The New York Crank is now in a fine feverish fettle, furiously solving the problems and answering the questions of America’s confused citizenry. Be sure to send in your own urgent queries. Meanwhile, we have these.

“Yeah, but will she love me for my mind?”

Dear Crank,

What’s the point of being single if I can’t go to a singles bar? Covid-19 struck two days after I broke off with my girlfriend. Now I have no girlfriend and no way to meet a new girlfriend without taking a chance that I’ll die on a ventilator. And please don’t tell me about swiping right. I can swipe to my heart’s content, but nobody will come out of the house. Thanks to Donald Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic, there’s no end in sight. What’s a guy to do?

Yours truly,

Infuriated Incel

Dear Infuriated,

I have wonderful news for you! Sex with other people is now so yesterday. On Hollywood sound stages, virus-wary actors are currently making love to sex dolls while shooting movies and soap operas. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. 

In substituting latex-and-silicone mannikins for women in syndicated TV shows like The Bold and the Beautiful, the good old U.S.A. has pretty much one-upped  the latest high-tech bordellos in France.  There you can walk in, choose your doll, take her up to a room, and go at it to your heart’s content, confident that she won’t be watching the clock or thinking about getting her nails done. And when the action’s over, just dunk her in a big pail of Lysol and she’s good to go for the next customer. I’d be curious to know what sex workers think about getting scabbed on by a bunch of dummies, but so far there’s not one peep out of them that I can find. Oh wait!

So I’d advise you to stop feeling sorry for poor little you, all alone in your room with nobody for company. Your American passport will no longer get you into France where you can rent doll sex by the hour, thanks to Trump’s incompetent handling of the pandemic. But not to worry. You can also own your very own personal sex doll. Whip out your credit card and send for the doll of your choice.

But if I eat lemon grass

who’s gonna cut the cheese?

Dear Crank,

I just read that the people who make the Big Decisions at Burger King have become alarmed that consumers are getting alarmed that farting cows are futzing up the environmental methane level. So the Big Decision Makers have experimentally begun feeding some cows lemon grass. This reportedly reduces the cows’ bovine digestive gas emissions, without negatively impacting the taste of the beef they produce. 

The lemongrass cowburgers are being sold in only five markets. So the gas your hamburger emitted when it was still alive may vary. My question is, if I eat lemon grass Burger King burgers, will that reduce my own susceptibility to a certain kind of gassy embarrassment? 

Yours curiously,

Gassy Gus

Dear Gassy,

Lemongrass-fed beef is a perfect example of too little, too late. While Burger King people mess with lemongrass, and the environment continues going to hell in a hand basket, vegetable-based meatless hamburger "meat," like Impossible Burger, is eating their lunch. Turns out that the dominant flavors in most chain restaurant hamburgers are those of ketchup and salt, followed, more or less, by the taste of hamburger buns, pickles and, if you insist (ugh!) mayonnaise.

What it boils down to is, you could probably put salt and ketchup on a foam rubber couch cushion and it would taste like a hamburger. But don’t worry, cows aren’t going to become an endangered species any time soon. However, the news is less optimistic for people, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, global warming, and other forms of life-ending phenomena caused by gross political negligence. (See Trump, Donald.) 

My advice to you is to lock yourself in the bathroom, light a match, and, um, well, you know.

Main Street — It’s not for

shopping any more

Dear Crank,

As of early July, nearly 66,000 small businesses had bitten the dust, thanks to the very stable genius of Donald Trump and his management of the health crisis. But that’s only according to Yelp data reported by the New York Times. Some researchers at Harvard said it was worse, that somewhere around 110,000 small businesses had ceased to conduct commerce among us. So when I walk down Main Street, there’s nothing to see except boarded up stores and restaurants. What’s the point?

—   Hopeless

Dear Hopeless,

Obviously, you haven’t been paying attention. The point is, Hillary’s Clinton’s e-mails. Also Barack Obama, something something something. And furthermore, everybody was unduly mean to Roger Stone just because he committed five piffling felonies. Now get back to work. This economy needs your output before you keel over and die.

Your money or your life?

Dear Crank,

I just read that Gilead Sciences make a drug called Remdesevir that has been approved for treatment of COVID-19. Now hang on for a humongous slew of confusing numbers.

Gilead will charge $2,300 for a course of treatment for some lucky patients, and $3120 for the rest of us. What the drug does, according to a study by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is cut recovery time from 15 days to a snappy 11 days, after you take the magic pills for ten days in a row. In case you don’t recover, you’ll be one of the unlucky 7.1 percent instead of the 11.9 percent who received a placebo “but the difference is not statistically significant.” 

All these numbers make my head spin. But investors aren’t dizzy, they’re furious, starting with an investment analyst named “Geoffrey Porges. I quote: “In a series of notes to investors, SVB Leerink analyst Geoffrey Porges recommended buying Gilead shares and said that he believed annual sales of remdesivir could reach $6.7 billion next year. Porges assumed prices of $5,000 per course in the U.S., $4,000 per course in Europe, and $2,000 per course in other markets.”

I know I wasn’t exactly a math whiz in high school, but given all these numbers, what should I do?

—   Confused

Dear Confused,

Wear a mask, wash your hands, stay indoors, and don’t come out until it’s time to vote for Joe Biden.

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