Posts by Dr. Boli
IT’S A PUN, YOU SEE.
HAPPY BASTILLE DAY.
What can be done with a building like this? It is a work of unusual architectural merit, but it was designed for one purpose, and perfectly adapted to that purpose alone. Our friend Father Pitt, who provides these pictures, suggests that it would do well as the mansion of an eccentric supervillain, but where will we find a supervillain eccentric enough? Perhaps Vladimir Putin will be available soon.
The only other use Dr. Boli could think of was as a film studio. The various parts of the building would make fine fantasy castles, palaces, Bastilles, etc., and the more prosaic sections could be adapted as soundstages.
But it occurs to him that his readers are full of good ideas. If you were the state of Pennsylvania, what would you do with the Western Pen? Where would you look for a buyer who would be willing to preserve the architectural features of the buildings while adapting them to creative new uses? Where would you place the advertisements to attract the attention of eccentric supervillains?
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I am writing to protest appallingly slipshod work by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. The secretary (it does not specify which secretary, but it may have been Reginald in the typing pool) has issued an order, and the Board claims to have complied with it. Yet I shall produce evidence that compliance has not been achieved. I hope you will excuse some offensive language, but it is necessary to make my point.
I quote from the front page of the BGN Web site:
In accordance with Secretary’s Order 3404 the BGN has approved replacement names for all official features that included the word “Sq___” in their name. The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has been updated to reflect these changes.
You will notice that the text is in bold, indicating that this is an important initiative. Yet it has not been carried out uniformly, if indeed it has been carried out at all. I was just downtown today having lunch on the Diamond, and do you know what the street signs still say? I will tell you what they still say, though I caution readers with delicate sensibilities: they still say “Market Square.”
Is this not exactly the sort of offensive terminology that Reginald, or whichever secretary it was, intended to replace? No true Pittsburgher can walk by those signs without a feeling of shame and loathing. Every native Yinzer knows that the proper name for the square in the center of a city is “diamond,” and this attempt to mold us into prissy monocle-wearing Boston Brahmins by changing the name to “Market Square” is deeply offensive to everyone whose blood runs black and gold. Yet the BGN has left this work undone. One knows not whether to attribute it to deliberate insult, or mere lazy callousness ’n’at.
Nor is the Diamond the only example of unfinished business around here. I don’t care how much of the center of old Allegheny was blown to bits in the urban-renewal area: there is no such street as Allegheny Square. It is Diamond Street, because there was a diamond on the North Side, too. To be specific, it is East Diamond Street, the only remaining segment of the streets that were once called North Diamond Street East, North Diamond Street West, East Diamond Street, South Diamond Street East, South Diamond Street West, and West Diamond Street. Surely that is not too much to sort out. Well, it is, but anyway all the others are gone, so this one can just be Diamond Street, and not Allegheny Square.
And there is a whole neighborhood in the East End marked “Regent Square,” and you can’t tell me that’s a real place. It’s cobbled together from pieces of four different jurisdictions.
So I should like to draw the attention of the secretary, whichever one it is, to the fact that there are gaping holes in the implementation of this order. I should not like to see my federal government getting into the habit of sloppy work. Who knows where that sort of thing might lead?
Sincerely,
Arbuthnot Squint III
Squatters Run
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SPEAKING OF COOLIDGE…
Our friend Father Pitt put some effort into restoring this image, which was found in a microfilm copy of the newspaper.
IS THIS FUNNY?
Dr. Boli was browsing through the digital collections at the Library of Congress, and he found the use of this picture to illustrate this collection very funny. But he was not sure that anyone else around him would see the joke. Is this funny to anyone else?
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ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: I bought some organic whole flax seeds at the grocery store yesterday, because the last time I bought flax seeds they were made of aluminum, and they were too crunchy. So I got the package home, and I noticed it said this on the back:
Each of our Simply Nature products is free from over 125 artificial ingredients and preservatives.
I can’t stop thinking about this. I thought I understood math, but this just blows everything I thought I knew out the window. How do they count the ingredients that aren’t there? This has been driving me nutso. I’m thinking of throwing away the bag, because every time I look at it my brain spins in loops. Please help me, or call Western Psych and tell them it’s an emergency. —Sincerely, A Woman Who Wonders Why She Needed Flax Seeds in the First Place.
Dear Madam: You have no need to worry. The fundamental laws of mathematics are still operative, but so are the fundamental laws of marketing. You will note that the marketers have employed one of the most useful terms in marketing, namely the word over.
The word over has many uses. One of the most common is to say, “Here comes a number.” But another common use is to protect the consumer from numbers too large for her comprehension.
Marketers are keen students of psychology. They know that the human imagination is limited when it comes to quantities and magnitudes. Numbers in the dozens strike us as large. But we cannot imagine very large numbers. Thousand, million, billion—those are all the same to the human imaginative faculty, and they are all meaningless. It is not known exactly where the line is between large and meaninglessly huge, but current marketing research indicates that it is probably somewhere a little below 150.
Now, obviously, there are many more than 125 potential artificial ingredients—that is, substances that can be produced by chemists in a laboratory and added to food products without immediately killing the consumers thereof. But 125 hits your imagination as a large number, whereas an actual count of currently available artificial ingredients would simply wash over you as an incomprehensible parade of digits. Therefore, by saying “over 125,” the marketer engages your imagination and allows it to picture a large number of ingredients that are not present in your flax seeds.
We hope this explanation obviates the need for a call to the Western Psychiatric Institute.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: They called me mad, but my years of dogged experimenting have finally paid off. Actually, they still call me mad, but you know how it is when you have aunts. After years of failure and discouragement, I have finally discovered a color halfway between orange and teal that will revolutionize the movie industry, and my question is this: When I register a trademark for it, should I call it “Oreal” or “Torange”? —Sincerely, “Mad” Matt Madjczwrcktz, Portvue.
Dear Sir: You might want to name it something that has no reference to the color combination itself. There are sound marketing reasons for this advice. If the fashion for orange and teal fades, then you are stuck with a product no one will buy if you have called it any name that recalls both those colors. But if you give it a snappy nonsense name, like Smirt! (with the exclamation point, to draw attention to the fact that this is a very exciting innovation in chromatic technology), then, when fashions change, you can keep your reputation and goodwill by introducing a Smirt! 2.0, and sell some color halfway between sepia and blue, or whatever prevailing Hollywood fashion dictates, to customers whose trust you have already earned. The ultimate achievement in marketing is to establish a brand identity so valuable that the product itself is irrelevant. Once you have done that, your success is assured, even if you are mad.