Our friend Father Pitt has been compiling a great big list of buildings and architects, which, with his commendable eye for the practical, he has named Father Pitt’s Great Big List of Buildings and Architects. It is doubtless a great help to other obsessive local historians, but what Dr. Boli has noticed is that it is a gold mine of character names. Specifically, if you are writing a farce, and you need a good name for your villain, you have only to turn to this list. It is essential that the villain in a farce should have a name that evokes aristocratic disdain and an excessive sense of his own dignity, so that when the pies start flying we feel satisfied that the villain deserves every blob of custard cream that lands on him. Here are just a few suggestions:

Thorsten E. Billquist

Chauncey W. Hodgdon

Theophilus P. Chandler, Jr.

Sidney Winfield Foulck

Adolphus Druiding

Ulysses J. L. Peoples

Maximilian Nirdlinger

Robert Swain Peabody

Ellsworth Dean

Titus de Bobula

Dr. Boli wishes he had made every one of those names up, but they are all ready to hand in the Great Big List. If you run across someone with a name like Thorsten E. Billquist (the E is for Elnar, by the way), then really the only merciful thing to do is to turn the Marx Brothers loose on him to knock the starch out of his collar. He will thank you for it eventually.