Today I was surfing Wikipedia about television shows I liked. Short list. I saw a link for “TV Guide’s Top 50 Worst Television Shows of All Time,” which I clicked. Many of the shows listed didn’t register, since I have never been a huge television fan. If I had to cite my favorite show growing up, it would probably Monte Python’s Flying Circus or NBC’s Major League Baseball Game of the Week with Kurt Gowdy, which Dad and I watched every Saturday all summer long.

One bad show oddly stood out, not because I watched it, but because I thought it would be funny to reference it. The show was called “Holmes and Yo-Yo.”

The deal was that our drum majors in the junior high were some guy named Brian, and a beautiful dark-haired girl named Karen Holmes. (Sidebar: those white boots with the purple tassels she wore resound in my depths to this day.) I decided it would be funny to call them Holmes and Yo-Yo. Brilliant.

My invention? An app that will erase my past, or at least all those awful mistakes I made. It’s a pretty big app, and it takes a while to run, but in the end, all the stupid things I said, especially to girls, are undone, and I am lifted up as having been mysterious, and, if the code is well-written, good-looking.