Posts by Dr. Boli
COMMUNITY BULLETIN BOARD.
The Port Authority has asked us to remind Red Line riders to show a little understanding as the agency transitions to its new name, “Pittsburgh Regional Transit.” The transition has made some drivers crankier than usual, but under state law the agency is not allowed to discriminate in hiring on the basis of rudeness.
St. Britney Church will be holding a special No-Holds-Barred Bingo Night this Thursday at 8 p.m. Prizes of up to $25 will be awarded, and paramedics will be standing by.
An inspirational quotation from our inspirational-quote-of-the-day calendar: “In the country of the blonde, the dirty blonde is queen.” We are not sure what our calendar is supposed to be inspiring.
The Blandville Area Concerned Citizens have petitioned city council to declare Bland Street a designated Urban Enterprise Zone, which entitles all small-business owners in the zone to free ice cream every Friday afternoon. Let Councilwoman Stacey Whatsername know your feelings on this important matter.
Have you been wishing you could communicate better with your Latin American neighbors? Yohogania Community College is offering a six-week immersion course in Latin. Sign up now and avoid the rush.
City police called this morning to ask us to remind residents that telephone scammers can victimize anyone. Local police will soon be calling residents to help them protect themselves against identity theft. Be sure to have your Social Security number and bank account information ready when police call, so that they can help you recover your identity if it is stolen.
POLICE BLOTTER.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
A NAME FOR EVERYTHING.
Long-time readers have probably already answered correctly that they are all places in western Pennsylvania.
We have not even ventured into the eastern half of the state, where we also find Dublin and Belfast and Bangor, and Lancaster and Reading and York and Shrewsbury, and Hanover and Hamburg and Heidelberg, and Bethlehem and Nazareth and Emmaus, and even the New Jerusalem.
Also in the east we find a Wyoming Valley. And it may surprise Westerners to discover that the state of Wyoming—this is absolutely true, and you can look it up for yourself—was named for the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, because their new home reminded the early settlers so much of Scranton. (It is an even more remarkable fact that the populations of the two Wyomings, the state in the West and the Scranton metropolitan area, are nearly identical, and you can look that up, too.)
This subject came up the other day when one of Dr. Boli’s frequent readers was remarking on the names of places in Pennsylvania. Her hypothesis was that the name of any conceivable place can also be found somewhere in Pennsylvania.
So far Dr. Boli has had a hard time disproving this hypothesis.
This is true in spite of Pennsylvania’s well-known habit of recycling names for townships. You must give the name of its county with the name of the township, so that when you mention Elizabeth Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, nobody thinks you mean Elizabeth Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There is also no rule against recycling names in city neighborhoods, so there is an Allentown in the eastern part of the state and an Allentown in Pittsburgh, and yes it does cause confusion every day.
It is also true in spite of the fact that Pennsylvania is notorious for names that occur nowhere else, and could not occur to a sane mind, from Acmetonia to Zelienople. A little education is a dangerous thing in a town founder. What shall we call our new oil boomtown? think the fathers of a new settlement. There is already an Oil City in the Pennsylvania oil country—but there is no Oleopolis. Well, there is now! And now that those two names are both taken, well, there’s always Petrolia.
And it is also true in spite of the Pennsylvanian predilection for abstract concepts as names of towns. Industry, Economy, Prosperity, Amity, Freedom, Harmony, Pleasant Unity—all these abstractions are also places in western Pennsylvania.
In spite of all these things, Pennsylvania is stuffed with familiar names in unfamiliar contexts. The graduates of California University and Indiana University will tell you that they always have some explaining to do. When Pennsylvanians want to make distinctions, they have to be very specific: for example, Pittsburghers will refer to Washington, Pennsylvania, as “Little Worshington” to distinguish it from the District of Columbia. (On the other hand, once you get close enough to Little Worshington, then it is just Worshington, and the District of Columbia is Big Worshington.)
This seems like a good project to turn the readers loose on. Get out your maps. Which famous cities and places can you not find in Pennsylvania? And which names pop up that you didn’t expect to find there? And finally, what is your favorite unlikely Pennsylvania name, and can you do better than “Punxsutawney”?
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AN UPDATE ON COMMENTS.
A week ago, Dr. Boli decided to try the experiment of simply deleting the entire list of disallowed words. So far the result has been that the anti-spambot algorithm continues to work. In fact no spam comments have got through at all, but no legitimate comments have ended up in the trash. It seems reasonable to say with some confidence that the blacklist is not necessary, and the algorithm is sufficient. Dr. Boli therefore hopes there will be no more embarrassing incidents, and in the future regular commenters should be able to say what they like without worrying that a random phrase will dump the whole comment in the trash.
It is important to note that the anti-spam algorithm does not send your data to any outside server. All the work is done here at the site by our own gnomes.
Of course, by blocking all the spam, we do miss some exceptional poetry. Fortunately the spam goes into its own special slops bucket, where it can be consulted until we delete it. Here are some of the things readers have missed because they did not make it through the spam blocker, and in passing we might note how many of them are offering professional writing services:
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FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I am incandescently furious. I thrive on outrage, and I have just been pushing the “Random article” button on Wikipedia for three hours to find things to be outraged about. I am angry that a student newspaper called the Daily Nexus prints once a week. “Daily” is in your name, people! I’m really peeved that Scotland no longer has a Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning. What, I’m just supposed to stop learning after 2007? I’m mad as all get out that Thorbjörn Fälldin was prime minister of Sweden from 1976 to 1978, because I hate all diacritics, but especially diaereses. I am absolutely livid that there is a species of catfish called Rita rita, because those blasted ichthyologists stole the title of a song I wrote in seventh grade. I’m also furious that these fish have a single pair of mandibular barbels, an elongated Weberian apparatus firmly sutured to the basioccipital and the sensory canal on the posttemporal enclosed with bone, because I have no idea what any of that means, and people should speak English for Pete’s sake. I am trembling with rage that King Ssuna of Buganda attacked the king of Buzongola in 1856. I just learned that Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland, was involved in the Highland Clearances, and I want to punch her in the nose. I am just sick that there is a village in Cuba called Guatemala, which is obviously just a commie Castro plot to confuse us. I’m angry that the railway station in Trimbach is served by local trains only—what, you have to get to Bern that quickly, you self-centered Zurichers? Anyway, I forget what the point of this letter was supposed to be, but it’s my invariable policy to write a letter to the editor whenever I get mad, so here you go. —Sincerely, The Man Muttering to Himself While Riding the Red Line Car Back and Forth Between Castle Shannon and Allegheny.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
