Dear dumb guy: My aunt Helen has trouble sleeping at night. Is there anything I can suggest, short of prescription medicine or sleeping pills? - Concerned niece in Newport

Dear Newport: Your timing is superb, because just last night I stumbled upon the answer to this question, a question I hadn’t even thought to ask. I was at dinner with some friends - tearing it up, let me tell you! - and I came up with the single greatest culinary invention ever.

Think about this. What are the two best foods in the world? Fried chicken and cake. Damn straight, no room for argument. Fried chicken and cake. Now, let’s take it a step further and analyze those two things.

1. What’s so great about fried chicken? The breading.
2. What’s so great about cake? The frosting.

I think you see where I’m going. If you take the two best constituent parts of the two greatest foods in the world - chicken breading and cake frosting - and put them together … God help us, you’ve got the single greatest thing in the world you can eat. Frosted chicken skin. Who’s your daddy? I am!

So anyway, about your aunt Helen … maybe get her to eat some frosted chicken skin before bed each night? Hell, I don’t know. I’ve never even met your aunt Helen. You wanna know what I do to fall asleep at night? I hit the gym and shred my delts. Maybe Helen could try that?

Dear dumb guy: How do they manage to fit so much information onto a DVD, when a CD is the same size and it doesn’t hold nearly as much? - Computer Newbie in Newport

Dear Newport: Tough question. I actually had to do some research on this one, and here’s what I came up with: there actually is no difference at all between CDs and DVDs. They can both hold the same amount of stuff, provided it’s the same kind of stuff.

What do I mean? Well, music takes up more space than movies because of all the different instruments involved. They’re a lot bigger. Movies, on the other hand, are just pictures, so they don’t need as much room. But you think about a CD of a symphony orchestra playing - that’s huge! It needs a ton of room to store all those instruments. As opposed to the typical movie, which only has 8 or 10 people in it. So you can see, common sense says you’re going to fit a lot more on a disc that just has movies on it, than on one that has music.

Dear dumb guy: What should we call our new blues-metal band? - Ready to rock in Denver

Dear Denver: Fist Hammer. End of discussion.

Dear dumb guy: Who invented the rubber chicken - and why? - Culinarily Curious in Cleveland

Dear Cleveland: Like most of society’s great inventions - the light bulb, the blender, the internal combustion engine - the rubber chicken was invented by accident. Had it not been for the fumbling fingers of John “Harshbottom” Sebastapool, we might not have the cultural touchstone that is the rubber chicken.

Sebastapool (whose nickname is a story unto itself, and frankly not one that is safe for work), a large and burly man of Nordic origin, worked in a butcher shop in Brooklyn in the 1930s. His skill with the cleaver gained him some regional attention, as he was able to completely butcher a chicken in under 20 seconds. In time, this became an attraction, as people drove from all over the country to watch him through the glass window of Bruegger’s Butcher Shop.

Bruegger’s, you say? Why yes, and thank you for paying attention, for the owner of this butcher shop was none other than Sydney Bruegger, the Swiss tire magnate.

I’ll save you the gory details of what happened that hot August night in 1939 - a vulcanization plant, too much whiskey and a mad Nordic butcher. In retrospect, how could it have gone any other way? When it was over, Sebastapool’s career as a butcher was over, owing to the loss of his right hand - but while a hand may have died in that fiery furnace, the rubber chicken was born!

Here’s another thing you may not know about the rubber chicken: In 1982, a rubber chicken was briefly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. Nicknamed “Chicken McThomas” by a laughing bunch of congressmen, the faux critter served 18 hours before being unseated by the narrowest of voting margins.

Dear dumb guy: I’ve been hearing the name Susan B. Anthony a lot lately. Who was she, and why was she so important? - Studying in Seattle

Dear Seattle: Susan B. Anthony is a woman whose name should be known by all of us, because of the enormous debt she paid for society. In the 1970s, she was one of the cast members of the groundbreaking television show “Three’s Company,” the first network TV show to feature a racially integrated household.

The show was controversial and polarizing, and Anthony never realized her dream of a career in NASCAR. She did record one album of original folks songs (Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes and You) and today she works as a fifth-grade teacher in her native Wisconsin.