It’s already been proven that a stopped clock is better than an inaccurate one, since the stopped clock is exactly right twice a day. It’s also been proven that toast cannot be cooked—if you try, you’ll either be toasting bread or burning toast. I think it’s high time to add another rule to this list. I am insisting, ladies and gentlemen, that a bag with a hole in it is more useful than a hole with a bag in it.

Before I get into that old debate, I need to find out how valuable an empty hole is compared to an undamaged bag. According to the Microsoft® Encarta® Dictionary, a bag is a “container made of a nonrigid material”, while a hole is “a cavity in an object or area”. It would seem that a bag is better, since a bag is “nonrigid”, whereas a hole is a “cavity”, a word some of us associate with nasty things like tooth decay.

Now, this raises an interesting question on all of our minds. Can we really trust the Microsoft Encarta Dictionary? We all have heard some of Microsoft’s notorious history, creating a monopoly and violating the privacy of its users. For example, if Microsoft Office is used fifty times without being registered, it won’t work until Microsoft is called and told what they want to know. Even their dictionary isn’t compatible with their word processor: I quoted the word “nonrigid” above, but Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word. The only logical conclusion is that Microsoft can’t be trusted. I’ll say that a hole and a bag are of equal value, because the only piece of evidence that they aren’t equal comes from a company with a criminal record.

Let’s examine a bag with a hole in it. First, how did the hole get there? Quite simply, whoever made the bag put it there. It’s not really a bag if there’s no hole in the top. What’s the point of having a bag if you can’t put anything in or take anything out through the hole? I can’t think of one, and therefore, there are none.

How does a bag get into a hole? It’s possible that someone put it there, but it’s more likely that the bag was blown there by the wind. This is sort of good, because one more bag in a hole means one less bag floating around and littering our world. But if there’s a bag in a hole, the hole is defiled. It’s no longer a pure hole. And what purpose does the bag serve? None. You can’t put something in or take something out of a hole through the bag on the top. The hole serves the bag by storing it, but the bag doesn’t give anything back in return. The bag is a parasite.

But suppose the bag is in a hole in a bag. That would be pretty useless, as the bag would be pinched to fit into the hole in the bag, and the hole would be torn bigger. But what if the bag was in a hole in itself?

No, that would be useless too.