﻿T-BONE SLIM SKEPTIC 
 
If Anton Flettner took his idea for “rotor-sails” (including positive and negative pressure) from “theories” respecting antics of aeroplanes (that they are “sucked up”— word making it clear—) may I not suggest that a revolving baseball traveling “on a line” is sucked to one side or another depending on -the- direction it is “revolved,” (spinning) — up, down, or sideways with equal facility—since the augmented speed of Flettner’s Rotor Ship, equals the “off-set” in the “curve” travelled by the ball, app. 20 per cent—baseball being handicapped (being ta[pp]red at the extremity points of “suction,” causing vacuum to get a “mouthful of air” instead of ball) whereas Anton’s sawed-off “column” conserves the full force of vacuum (?). 
Tho principle is even the same as being hit by a car: The positive pressure of the air in front doesn’t hurt you as much as the negative car—in that ease, in that ease, to be sure. 
And now, since it is finally decided that labor “ain’t gonna organize” for more gjng-seng, I suggest we challenge Capitalism to a game of baseball, crap, or pool—or rummy. 
Forgive me T. P.—I don’t believe a word Flettner says.  
—Flettner’s “rotor sails” would be more “efficient” still, if they were modeled after a lady’s corset: It would have a tendency of creating a regular “pocket” of suction that would stay by the ship till the last sailor had starved to death munching sea-biscuit and salt horse — or had choked to death over vacuum created by plumi-duff, once n week — on Thursdays. 

Even in the case of ordinary sails, the suction is there—but it “drifts” off to one side being unable to “make fast” to the belly of the sail, which is rounded like a sailor’s on “shore leave.” Hence, applying Flettner’s principal to canvass, all you have to do is “poke the belly in” and carry it aft of the line of gravity between the crow’s nest and the tallow bucket beginning, (below) forward of an imaginary line between port and starboard rat lines— I hope I’m clear— thus creating, or helping the negative pressure to aide in the “hollow” of the sail and pull the ship while the wind would push “on the belly”—thus, performing for all the world like two cops grappling for a Indiamans timberman” —one pushing and one pulling. 
Let us sing: 
Brightly beams our father’s mercy 
From the beer sign on the shore 
Old Manhattan and New Jersey— 
Sandy Hook and Mission floor 
Etc. . . . 
T-b. S.