Vice-President Harris is not third in line to the throne of Romania, as the Dispatch wrongly stated in an editorial Monday.
The number of teenage poets sharing their work through Instagram was incorrectly reported yesterday. There is no correct number, such poets being, of course, innumerable.
The statement “Everybody loves chocolate” on the front of the Thursday food section was ill-considered and intemperate.
The Dispatch is not “the city’s favorite source for news and information.” According to a recently released Gallup poll, the city’s favorite source for news and information is that guy at Krzrnsky’s Café who knows everybody.
Mount Everest has not been sold to a reclusive Indonesian billionaire. The buyer is Malaysian.
The laws of thermodynamics are not a Communist conspiracy, as incorrectly reported in Thursday’s “Science Today” column.
The Dispatch regrets these errors and has issued a formal apology to its legal department for making them stay till 5:15 on a Tuesday evening. Would you like us to come home with you and fluff your pillows for you, too?
Your site should be hand-coded in minified HTML, with minified CSS and as much use of JavaScript as possible for ordinary functions that could be done with HTML and CSS. This will guarantee your loyalty to your current Web designer.
Always separate content from presentation. Then throw the content away.
When you place a slider at the top of your home page, carefully time the animation so that the information in any one panel cannot be absorbed before it dashes off to the left. This drives engagement. Specifically, it drives engagement with Dr. Boli’s site, which does not use sliders. Thank you very much.
Advertisements should be targeted specifically to viewers who have just bought one of the thing being advertised and have no need of another one.
Words in paragraphs should be too small for the eye to read, and words in headings should be too big for the brain to process.
Make sure to buy expensive software to make your site meet accessibility criteria. Make sure the software is not written by anyone with a disability. When people with disabilities complain that they can’t use your site, dismiss them as cranks.
Images should be inserted with no dimensions specified, and there should be large numbers of them, so that as the page loads the text hops around like sparrows under a café table. This turns reading your pages into a sort of arcade game, and your visitors will thank you for the entertainment.
Dear Dr. Boli: Can you explain professional sports to me? In my neighborhood right now, thousands of people are crammed into the bars on Carson Street watching grown men play football, which implies that you have to get drunk to watch football. But do you have to watch football to get drunk? Is there no other way? And why would anyone want to watch other people play games? I mean, wouldn’t you rather play the game yourself? Why would you pay somebody else to do it for you? Do you pay people to eat ice cream for you? Do you pay people to get drunk for you, if that’s your thing? So I can’t figure out professional sports, and I was wondering if you could explain them to me. —Sincerely, A Man Who Can’t Figure Out Professional Sports.
Dear Sir: Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal, by which he meant an animal that forms a πόλις, or city. The word “civilization,” by which we designate all the accomplishments we consider most indicative of our superiority over the beasts, means the formation of cities. Now, a cursory glance at the history of civilization will show us that the main activity of human beings once they have formed a city is to go to war against that other city over there. The civilizations of ancient Sumer, of Greece of the classic age, of Renaissance Italy were all formed by incessant war between cities.
Our modern civilization has formed larger empires and national units that include many cities, so as to enjoy certain economies of scale. Imagine the ruinous expense, for example, if London, Liverpool, Norwich, Canterbury, Edinburgh, Belfast, Toronto, Vancouver, Melbourne, Belize, and so on each had to support an entire royal family, instead of sharing a royal family spread out among fifteen countries, each an agglomeration of cities.
The instinct for war between cities, however, is set deep in human nature, and it cannot be eradicated by rational considerations of economy or national unity. Thus professional sports are necessary to keep the tradition of interurban warfare alive. The main difference is that professional sports, which require whole neighborhoods to be bulldozed for the construction of billion-dollar stadiums and arenas, are generally more costly and more destructive than an average interurban war.
Teach Yourself North Frisian with a Saterland Frisian Accent, by the Foreign Tongues Department of the American University of West Frisia. Astonishingly, this is the only book of its kind for English-speaking students. Available now in paperback, hardcover, or printed on loose-leaf salami from Runcible Publishing & Finer Meats.
“For all students of Frisian languages who wish to be taken for students of other Frisian languages attempting to communicate in a language with which they are not wholly familiar, this book provides a solid foundation.” —Journal of the Academy of Shady Linguistics.
“The figured pronunciations will provide hours of amusement to the dozens of North Frisian speakers who know English and relish the subtle comedy of a funny accent in their own language.” —Humorous Mispronunciation Daily.
“Hey, this is just the kind of book for my Uncle Lou.” —Quarterly Compendium of Books My Uncle Lou Might Like.
