Posts by Dr. Boli

SEPARATE OWNERSHIP.

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Our old friend Father Pitt provides this picture of a porch pediment in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh, showing the effect of separate ownership of rowhouses on a Victorian streetscape.

HOW TO STAY SECURE ON LINE.

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The Internet Archive has been taken off line for days by a hacker attack. This is a useful reminder to the rest of us to tighten our security on all our devices.

1. Always make sure your software is up to date by turning on automatic updates. This gives North Korean hackers a chance to compromise your computer or phone by hijacking the update process, and it is considered sporting to give hackers a fair shot.

2. Keep a hatchet or axe next to your device at all times for use in case of emergency.

3. Avoid elementary security mistakes. The most elementary mistake you can make in managing any device is to connect it to the Internet, and yet an estimated 100% of Internet users have made that very blunder.

4. Print out a list of all your usernames and passwords and register it with the U. S. Copyright Office. Then it will be illegal for hackers to steal your login credentials.

5. Make sure you have something plugged into every open port on your computer or phone, including the headphone jack. Hackers often access your data through “security holes,” but you can thwart them if there are no holes.

6. Always take advantage of two-factor authentication, in which you must respond to a text message on your phone in order to access a password-protected site. That way a hacker cannot breach your security unless you lose your phone, which never happens.

7. Keep your phone and computer in a lead-lined bag. Place the lead-lined bag in a lead-lined safe. Ask a random stranger to change the combination on the safe without telling you the new combination, and then kill the random stranger. Now you are secure until the next burglar with a scrap of ambition notices that you have a large safe sitting around and wonders what’s inside it.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

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Christopher Columbus thinking thinky thoughts

On this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus made his first landing in the Americas on San Salvador Island. “The natives,” he wrote back to his sponsors Isabella and Ferdinand, “are intelligent, sweet-tempered, gentle, and peaceful. They would make great slaves. How many would your majesties like?” Columbus himself took a few of the people to paste in his album, and the light of European civilization shone brightly in America for the first time.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

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Sir: I have been listening to political speeches lately, and I think all our politicians could use some practice in elementary rhetoric. But I think, as a start, they could make an improvement by adopting one simple rhetorical technique. What is this technique of which I speak? Epanaphora! Epanaphora would give their periods rhythm. Epanaphora would give us a reason to sit up and listen. Epanaphora would give the proper emphasis to the main point of their discourse. Epanaphora would be the one rhetorical technique I would recommend that our politicians adopt forthwith. But not antistrophe. I do no wish to hear any antistrophe. I cannot abide antistrophe. I think they should at all costs avoid antistrophe. Epanaphora is the way to go. Epanaphora, and not antistrophe. —Sincerely, M. T. Cicero, McKees Rocks.

POLICE BLOTTER.

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The entire membership of the Blandville Odd Fellows was arrested last night and charged with vandalism, public intoxication, and resisting arrest. It is asserted that police responded to a 9-1-1 call, and when they arrived on the scene, the men were busy smashing windows at the lodge of their inveterate enemies, the Even Boys.

AN ENIGMATIC ADVERTISEMENT.

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In a magazine from 1911, we found this advertisement among the usual promotions for correspondence schools and manuals of sexual relations from a physiological standpoint.

This young lady is going boating. Before leaving she sent for a bound volume of “The Caldron,” the magazine of disdelusion. All wise people take this little magazine with them when they go on an outing.

To approach an outing in a disdeluded state sounds like a reasonable precaution. But under what delusions might we suppose this young lady would otherwise be laboring? The delusion that the weather will always be fair? The delusion that she will not have to walk home when her gentleman friend rows her out to the middle of the lake? The delusion that her posture is natural? Dr. Boli thought it would be entertaining to read a few numbers of this magazine and become disdeluded, but it was not to be found in the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, or Google Books. Perhaps that is how the disdelusion is accomplished. You send your dollar for a year’s worth of the Caldron, and no magazine ever appears through your mail slot, and you are cured of the delusion that advertisers in the backs of magazines are fundamentally honest.