If you were advertising a car, was it better to show a picture of a car, or of a pretty woman? If one was selling shirt collars, was it better to do so under the headline “Murder!” or the headline “Quality Shirt Collars”? To make a long story short (and to skip over the proto-pataphysical techniques by which Nixon established what we might call a “science of irrelevancy”), Nixon found that “irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention and hold interest longer than do relevant ones.” 8 Which is to say: systematically doing violence to sense raised revenue. This could be proven in his laboratory. Would it be wrong to say that we live, in many respects, in the world evolved from that finding?