Posts by Dr. Boli

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

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Sir: It is the duty of every patriot to identify our country’s enemies and work for their defeat. In the case of external enemies, we can rely on them to show their hostility by overt hostile actions, such as electing governments we disapprove of. But internal enemies often disguise themselves as normal Americans, and it takes a keen and observant mind to ferret them out. Fortunately I have just such a keen and observant mind, and facts that might elude most of your readers are obvious to me.

Thus it is clear to me that good people, as a class, are the most damaging enemies we have in these United States. Good people obey the laws, and thus get in our way when we want to get through a school zone in a hurry. Good people protect the rights of others even when they disagree with them, and thus bog us down with nuisance lawsuits when we try to get rid of people who annoy us. Good people research and manage infectious diseases, thus reminding us that there are infectious diseases, which we do not want to think about.

Clearly we must get rid of the good people if we are to prosper and move forward as a nation. Now, if it were up to me, I would just kill them all and solve the problem permanently. But some people might object to that strategy, although I should let you know that if you’re one of those objectors you’ve just put yourself on my suspect list. But I think we can reach a pragmatic compromise. We can simply deport all the good people to a known enemy nation like Canada or Denmark. And I don’t want to hear any sniveling about how those countries can’t handle a massive influx of refugees. There can’t be more than a few dozen good people in the United States, so the countries we deport them to will hardly even notice. —Sincerely, Artemus Garter III, Point Breeze (not North Point Breeze).

ASK A MICROSOFT-CERTIFIED WINDOWS TECHNICIAN.

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Q. I just got an email saying that support for Microsoft Publisher in my Microsoft 365 account will be ending on October 1. But I can still open my Publisher files in the old version, right?

A. No. Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher.

Q. Then what can I do?

A. Many common Publisher scenarios are already available in other Microsoft 365 apps such as Word and PowerPoint.

Q. So I can open my Publisher files in Word or PowerPoint?

A. No. That won’t work.

Q. So there’s no way to open my Publisher files after October 1?

A. You can export them as PDFs before the October 1 deadline, and then open them in Word.

Q. I have more than thirty years’ worth of documents created in Publisher. Exporting them all would take weeks, and even then the formatting wouldn’t be preserved if I opened them in Word. There must be hundreds of thousands of users in the same boat. Aren’t you going to provide some way forward for people like us?

A. At a recent meeting of the Leadership Team of the Marketing Department, it was decided that we don’t care.

Q. I’m through with Microsoft. I’m canceling my subscription, I’m installing Ubuntu, and Microsoft will never get another dime from me again.

A. Good news! At that same meeting, we calculated exactly how many subscribers we can alienate and still make obscene profits. Bye.

ASK DR. BOLI.

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Why is this car not going as fast as the driver would like? It is missing one essential thing.

Dear Dr. Boli: I understand the basic principles of internal-combustion engines: they operate by exploding, and as long as we pray hard enough, the explosions don’t kill us. I even have some acquaintance with electric motors, which operate by magic. But the thing I don’t understand is racing stripes. Whenever people want a car to go fast, they put racing stripes on it. They put racing stripes on racing cars. They put racing stripes on expensive sportscars, so that they can make it to the red light at the end of the Liberty Tubes before anybody else. Just this afternoon I saw racing stripes on a Honda Odyssey, and the woman who was driving it certainly acted as though she was on her way to a fire, or from a fire. So what is it about racing stripes, anyway? Do they really make cars go faster? —Sincerely, Bicycles Are a Mystery Too, but No One Wants to Talk About It.

Dear Sir or Madam: Racing stripes do indeed make cars go faster, but there is no mystery about it. It is simple physics. At high speeds, the single thing that retards the progress of a vehicle most is air resistance. Left to themselves, air molecules will just stand around in front of the car waiting to see what will happen. This creates resistance. It is desirable, therefore, to make the air less resistant, which is best done by making it move easily along the length of the car. Now, air molecules are simple souls, with a limited vocabulary, and it is not easy to make them understand us if we try to express what we want from them in complex sentences dripping with relative clauses. Yet they are not unwilling to please us—quite the contrary, in fact. What they need is for us to be simple and direct with them, and therefore visual communication is preferable to verbal. The racing stripes point the direction of desired air flow along the vehicle in a way that even the simplest air molecule can understand. Many mysteries have similarly simple explanations once you understand the physics of them. To balance a bicycle, however, requires divine intervention, which is a very complex subject indeed.

MEMOIR OF THE LATE GEORGE WASHINGTON,

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By an Associate.

Concluding the narrative that began here.

A Brief Afterword, Written in the Year 2020.

This Memoir, though in its day it was much read, never had the success of Weems’ Life of George Washington, and by the time of the Civil War it had been largely forgotten. When it was decided to investigate the unusual phenomena at Washington’s tomb, however, this book seemed to be the only one that offered any clues that might eventually point to a solution of the mystery. Since copies of the original are now scarce and expensive, it was thought that making it available in this economical form might encourage further research.

The grave of Washington was measured many times in the nineteenth century, and the measurements vary by no more than an inch. In all cases, they document a ledger, inscribed with the simple epitaph george washington slept here, that was approximately twenty-five feet long. The earliest photographs of the tomb confirm the measurements, at least as well as we can judge by comparing the ledger with other objects in the tomb.

Some time after the First World War, however, visitors to Mount Vernon began to notice that the ledger did not seem to be quite as big as the guide books said it ought to be. By the 1950s, the shrinking had attracted the attention of a few researchers, but the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association was reluctant to allow any examination for fear of damaging the precious relics. The shrinking accelerated in the late twentieth century, however, and by the twenty-first it was so rapid that the Ladies’ Association finally decided to allow a scientific and archaeological investigation, in the hope of stabilizing the structure.

The investigators could not find anything to account for the shrinking. They could only report that the grave was covered by a ledger that appeared to be made of native stone with no unusual properties; that there was nothing to indicate that the stone had been replaced; and that the tomb, when opened, proved to contain the skeletal remains of a male approximately four feet nine inches in height.

the end.