Posts by Dr. Boli

DIALOGUE OF THE SPIDER AND THE FLY.

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Said the spider to the fly,
“If you did not wish to die,
You should not have tapped ‘Agree’
On my site.”

But the fly said to the spider,
“I attached a little rider,
Which it seems you did not see
Or read right.

“By continuing to spin
This here web you caught me in,
You agree to let me go
On my way.

“So I’ve beat you fair and square.
Note the words I added there
With a Sharpie, don’t you know,
Plain as day.”

But the spider ate the fly,
And he gave his reason why
As the life began to ebb:
“Flies are fools.

“For consent’s a one-way street,
And the law’s quite plain and neat
That whoever owns the web
Makes the rules.”

TASTING NOTES.

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Blandville Coffee Roasters is your source for a broad selection of coffees for every budget and every taste. To help you decide, our professional associates have added their tasting notes to our price list. Try them all and throw a tasting party!

Tastes may vary. Obey all traffic laws. Do not taste coffee under water or in a burning building.

Single-Source Sumatran Extra-Long Sideways. Each bean is hand-shaped into the likeness of a well-known Indonesian politician. $18,945.99/lb.

Tastes like: Caviar, truffles, Château Margaux.

Quite Expensive 110% Arabica Blend of Ethiopian Origin. Hand-picked and guaranteed blessed by Ethiopian monks. $86.99/lb.

Tastes like: Mountain mists, stunning vistas, and chocolate, if chocolate tasted more like coffee.

Proprietor's Special Blend. Seasonally adjusted to the proprietor's violent mood swings. $18.95/lb.

Tastes like: Despair, joy, mania, and cold indifference.

Big Round Can Special Blend from Who Knows Where. $8.99/lb.

Tastes like: Coffee.

Dollar Store Bargain Shelf Coffee-in-a-Bag. $0.75/lb.

Tastes like: Old clothes, pickles, whitewash.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

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Sir: I read some time ago that our federal government plans to end hunger in the United States. This is a laudable ambition, but it is doomed to failure unless it addresses the one ruling cause of all hunger in our country. I speak, of course, of a lack of education. We can never eliminate hunger until the poor are properly educated. They must be taught the truth: that the only sure cure for hunger is food. If they ate food, they would not be hungry.

My complete plan for the reform of education in the poor neighborhoods has been forwarded to the Department of Education, with a carbon copy to the Department of Health and Human Services. (By the way, your readers might find it useful to know that carbon paper is still manufactured in Mexico.) Since it is 723 pages long, I shall only summarize the salient points here.

In the first stage, the poor are to be taught how to identify food. They will learn a visual system of identification (see the accompanying illustration), as my early experiments in teaching the poor to distinguish the edible from the inedible by taste led to some unfortunate results.

In the second stage, the poor are to be taught how to eat. The use of proper silverware is to be stressed, with a strong emphasis on the long-term advantages of sterling over inferior silver plate.

In the third and final stage, the poor are to become the teachers themselves, since it is a well-known educational principle that learning is best reinforced by teaching the lesson to others. The poor are therefore to be taught how to instruct their servants to prepare nutritious and palatable meals using exclusively food ingredients.

Naturally the full proposal is somewhat more nuanced, but I hope I have made the main points clear. Ending hunger is simply a matter of providing proper education to the hungry. Seen in this light, the problem becomes manageable, and if my own small contribution has been of service to my country, I shall accept that knowledge as the highest reward a true patriot could ask.

—Sincerely, J. Collingsby Popover III, Sewickley Heights.

From DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION.

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This illustration in the style of the Renaissance was created by a self-learning image generator trained on the collective visual experience of humankind, and is therefore your fault, not ours.

Archimedes. Among the inventions of the great Archimedes was a two-wheeled powered vehicle that would, he claimed, annihilate distance by making it possible to travel five hundred miles in a day. After his death it was found and brought to the victorious Roman general Marcellus, who tried the thing himself and immediately fell over. He therefore declared all two-wheeled vehicles useless and ordered the prototype to be thrown into the sea, and the idea would not come up again until 1507, when Leonardo exhibited a primitive form of Vespa.

HOW TO THINK LIKE A BUSINESS-SCHOOL GRADUATE.

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A few days ago, the building database Emporis, a community-compiled Web site that was the source of much of the information about prominent buildings cited by journalists and researchers, disappeared. In its place was a note from a managing director at CoStar Group, the company that bought Emporis two years ago:

Dear Emporis Community Members,

I am writing to let you know that we have made the decision to retire the Emporis community platform. This change will take effect on Tuesday 13th September 2022. Following the retirement you will no longer be able to access Emporis.

It is worth pointing out that this note was posted on September 14.

The note continues:

This decision was not made lightly. For more than twenty years, Emporis (and its predecessor site) has served as a platform for community members to share data, information and of course, great imagery of some of the tallest buildings and skyscrapers across the globe. I would like to thank you for your contributions over the years.

CoStar Group acquired Emporis in November 2020, recognising the truly global nature of the data in Emporis, and since the acquisition we have integrated much of that data into the global CoStar information platform for the benefit of our client base of brokers, owners, and lenders.

This is delightful news for Emporis contributors. Although they will no longer be able to access their own work, they have the satisfaction of being informed that their research and photographs, which they provided free of charge, will now be sold to brokers, owners, and lenders at whatever price CoStar Group sets on them. We recognized the value of your contributions, says the managing director. They are so valuable that we can sell them, and we can do it without paying you a dime for them. We will even sell them back to you if you pay us enough.

To think like a business-school graduate, you must be able to imagine the warm glow of satisfaction Emporis contributors feel on reading this announcement. You must be able to picture them smiling as they consider that the countless hours of work they devoted to compiling that database—for many of them it was a consuming hobby—will now enrich you, the managing director, personally. You must feel the warmth that pervades their hearts as they think of you sitting there, being rich, thanks to the contributions they made as part of a community effort that lasted for twenty years.

Then you can go stick your head in a bucket of cold water.

And now the punch line:

This is currently the first thing you see if you visit the Web site of the CoStar Group: