Ask Marlowe: Deepakfake Edition

Philip Marlowe, PhD*

Look. This column isn’t here to tuck you in or tell you what you want to hear. It’s here to tell you what’s true, or close enough to keep you out of worse trouble. I’ve walked enough dark streets to know that most problems don’t start big — they start small, with a bad hunch ignored and a cheap promise taken seriously. If your conscience is knocking and you don’t like the sound of it, you can slide your problem across the desk. I don’t promise any miracles. I promise honesty, poured neat. Nothing less. Nothing more.

Dear Marlowe,

I’m considered the father of geometry and one of the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, but very little is known about my life. After the Bible, my Elements has been the most frequently translated, published and studied book in the Western world’s history. So why is it, detective, that whenever I meet a compatible woman who seems to be on a parallel line with the path I am travelling, we never actually touch? They say they like me as a friend but always want to diverge toward rivals like Archimedes or Ramanujan. Is there no end to this purgatory of love triangles where angles fear to tread? — Euclid

Dear Euclid, I’m no good at being Nobel, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three zero-dimensional vertices don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now. Here’s looking at you, clid.

Dear Marlowe,

Not many people remember me today, but I was the second Toronto Maple Leaf, after Frank Mahovlich, to score 40 or more goals in a season. I potted 43 in the 1975-76 campaign, when I was on a line with Lanny McDonald an Darryl Sittler. In fact, I was on the ice on Feb. 7, 1976, the night Sittler set an unbreakable NHL record with 10 points (six goals and four assists) in a game against the Bruins.

But I’m not hear to talk hockey. You see, ever since I ditched my cringey afro, I’ve been haunted by a suspicion that we can’t assume the sun will rise tomorrow simply because it has always done so in the past. Our only basis for thinking things will continue to happen as they have in the past is that this is how things have worked in the past. A textbook case of circular reasoning! The more I think about it, the more it seems no form of justification can rationally warrant any of our inductive inferences. A puck might as well fly up instead of falling down when a referee drops it at centre ice. Lanny thinks I’m nuts and Darryl turns off his hearing aids whenever he sees me approaching him at the mall. Am I really nuts … or simply being logical? — Errol Thompson

Dear E.T., Phone Hume.

Dear Marlowe,

My movie career has cratered, my ex-wife won’t talk to me since I fathered a son with the housekeeper, fellow Republicans avoid me like the plague since I endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election — and to top it all off, I recently had a pacemaker fitted. So now part of me really is a cybernetic machine. It pumps me up.

And speaking of parts, I just wish there were one for me in a new Amadeus sequel. After all, I have the perfect accent for it. Can you do anything to lift my spirits, girlie man, the way I used to bench press 525 pounds? — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Dear Arnie, Ja. You’ll be Bach.

Dear Marlowe,

You’ve got to help me! My reputation as a sage and a spiritual healer is in the toilet now that all those pervy, adolescent email exchanges between Jeffrey Epstein and me have gone public. I’ve made an insane fortune out of claiming to offer hippie-dippie suckers a path to transcendence, healing and the divine, but now I’m being called out as a wellness-industry grifter and a disgusting hypocrite. Oprah won’t return my calls. Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil are both pretending they don’t know me. What can I do to regain quantum consciousness? Is there anywhere I can hide till this brouhaha blows over? — Deepak Chopra

Dear Guru Technobabbler, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give ashram.

That’s all for now, pilgrims. Keep your eyes open, your stories straight and your expectations low — they’ll surprise you less that way. If you want advice, send your troubles, typed or legible, to:

Philip Marlowe The Night Desk 317 Harbor Street, Suite 904 Los Angeles, California

No stamps for regrets. I’ve already got plenty.

* Private hardboiled Dick