Posts by Dr. Boli
TRIBUTE TO A WELL-INFORMED PASSENGER ON THE STREETCAR.
How delightful to have met you, Mrs. Whortle!
How informative your conversation is!
Why, you’ve mastered every factoid that you oughrtle,
And at jumping to conclusions you’re a whiz!
Say, I never knew vanilla was leguminous,
Or that cocoa butter came from cocoa nuts;
Or that “anthrax” was the same thing as “bituminous,”
Or that Fiji natives lived in Quonset huts.
I had no idea Japan was in Malaysia;
Or that Thackeray wrote Shakespeare’s best-known play;
And I didn’t know that Princess Anastasia
Is alive and lives in Dormont to this day.
Now I think I’ll go on home and hit the borttle,
Since there’s really nothing left for me to say.
How delightful to have met you, Mrs. Whortle!
And when next you see me coming, stay away.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
CHRISTMAS GHOSTS.
The Ghost of Christmas Past reminds you of what Christmas once meant to you and of how much you have lost by becoming a cynical miser.
The Ghost of Christmas Present takes you to see the Christmas celebrations of people whose decorations are much more tasteful than yours.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows you how much merrier Christmas will be without you.
The Ghost of Alternate-Universe Christmas shows you Christmas celebrations in a strangely different world in which chaser lights and giant inflatables were never invented.
The Ghost of Christmas in Czechoslovakia has been unemployed for about thirty-one years now.
The Ghost of Christmas Dinner Past usually surfaces about three hours after Christmas dinner to remind you that you shouldn’t have had so much pie.
The Ghost of Christmas Dinner Yet to Come builds culinary anticipations that can never be matched by the disappointing reality.
The Ghost of Christmas Gifts Past works the returns counter at Walmart.
The Ghost of Charles Dickens tries to collect royalties for parodies of his most famous work, but always fails.
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THE MELTING POT.
At first we were not sure what he was talking about. There were many place names that the spelling-checker did not recognize, but that was hardly surprising. How many people in the world ever have to spell “Zelienople”? Roughly none outside of southwestern Pennsylvania.
But then we noticed the amusing thing.
LibreOffice has deployed some algorithm to identify words in foreign languages and offer the opportunity to mark them as being in the identified language. For example, if you use the word “ombres,” then in the context menu LibreOffice will offer the options “Word is French” and “Paragraph is French.” At least it did the first time we tried; the second time we tried the word in a French phrase, LibreOffice suggested Catalan instead of French.
At any rate, we can use this clever algorithm to probe the wonderful ethnic diversity of the founders of Pittsburgh neighborhoods and the surrounding boroughs. According to LibreOffice, here is a list of the original languages from which certain local place names are derived:
Aliquippa—Latin
Ambridge—Danish
Bedford—Danish
Beechview—Luxembourgish
Beltzhoover—German (Germany)
Blairsville—French (France)
Brookline—German (Germany)
Carrick—Manx (United Kingdom)
Charleroi—Manx (United Kingdom)
Coraopolis—Catalan
Dormont—French (France)
Dutchtown—Low German
Ebensburg—Luxembourgish
Edgewood—Afrikaans (South Africa)
Edgeworth—Mapuche (Chile)
Ellwood City—Welsh
Emsworth—Upper Sorbian
Freeport—Ladin
Greensburg—Luxembourgish
Homewood—Afrikaans (South Africa)
Ingomar—Frisian
Larimer—Catalan
Lawrenceville—French (France)
Leetsdale—Estonian
Lyndora—Spanish (Spain)
Masontown—Esperanto
McKeesport—Ladin
Millvale—Estonian
Monaca—Catalan
Munhall—Nyanja
Natrona—Irish
Schenley—Manx (United Kingdom)
Sewickley—Mapuche (Chile)
Sheraden—Swedish (Sweden)
Tarentum—Latin
Vandergrift—German (Germany)
Wilkinsburg—Uzbek Latin
Zelienople—English (USA)
ASK DR. BOLI.
Mention of books, and movies, makes me wonder — which of your books, Dr. Boli, would make the best film? Galahad? but the movie Galahad might employ nuggets from the Encyclopedia of Misinformation (each introduced with “I was just reading in the Encyclopedia that [etc…]”) so you might get compensation for TWO books in a single movie.
In Dr. Boli’s opinion, the book that would make the best movie would be the one for which a Hollywood studio would be willing to pay the most money. But we must admit that there is a bit of petitio principii here, since one must have sound marketing reasons to persuade a studio to pay for the movie rights, which is to say that one must be able to articulate why a particular book would make a good movie, and so we are back where we started. Another frequent correspondent, “RepubAnon,” suggests,
The movie version of Devil King Kun would be a suitable commentary on the superhero genre.
In fact the story of Devil King Kun was conceived as a 1930s movie serial in thirty episodes, though by doubling up on episodes it could be reduced to a more manageable fifteen. That would certainly be a good candidate for a forward-thinking producer with ambitions to revive the movie serial as a genre. It would probably not, however, fit well as a superhero movie. The only extraordinary power its hero possesses is the power of extreme cleverness, which is not appropriate for the superhero genre.
Dr. Boli’s first instinct was to say that his Encyclopedia of Misinformation would make the best movie, but then Occasional Correspondent beat him to that idea. Dr. Boli’s implementation of the idea would have been different, however. We imagine a protagonist (of any gender you like, but we shall pick one and say “she”) who works at the office of a well-known encyclopedia, and whose job is to perform exhaustive research and write articles on fossil clubmosses and extinct congressmen. Her drudgery earns her no respect, and she despairs of being able to have any romantic life at all, until she discovers that she can greatly improve the readability and entertainment value of her articles, and make room for a fulfilling personal life, by simply making up the facts. To pad out the running time, there would also be a villain who wants to blow up the earth.
The real answer to the question, however, is the same as the answer to the question of which book Dr. Boli thinks is his best. The answer to that is always the same: the one that hasn’t been written yet. Dr. Boli has written some books with which he is moderately pleased, but the next book is always the one that will top them all. That remains true until the book is published; then it will be the book after that. Since it will be the best book, it follows by reasonable inference that it would also make the best movie.
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A CAROL FOR THE HEROES WHO FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS.
Let’s reject their greetings with a righteous sneer.
Let’s be clear that we won’t stand for any jolly days.
Let’s be dour and sour, just like we are all year.
(It keeps the Christ in Christmas.)
Let’s insult some random strangers on the internet.
Let’s be mean to people we don’t even know.
Out on social media, let us spread our winter net:
When we trap those sinners, how our hearts will glow!
(With righteousness, of course.)
Let us bait our traps
And set ’em.
Soon or late our traps
Will net ’em.
They may hate our traps,
But let ’em
All berate our traps.
We’ll get ’em.
When we get a card that tells us “Season’s Greetings,”
Let us stamp it down into the roadside sludge.
Let’s recite a list of traitors at our meetings:
For ’tis after all the time of year to judge.
(It’s what Jesus would do.)
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
