Posts by Dr. Boli

ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT.

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Our friend Father Pitt tells us that Google Photos loves to remind you of your most precious memories from years gone by. Above the endless scroll of pictures will be “Recent Highlights,” “1 year ago,” “2 years ago,” and so on.

How does Google guess which memories might be most precious to its users? We have no idea. We suspect Google has no more idea than we have. But Father Pitt notes that, out of literally hundreds of pictures he took on a day out on the town, the one Google selected was this one. It depicts the floor, wall, baseboard heating, and part of a seat of a 4200-series streetcar on the Red Line, with Father Pitt’s own bedraggled old Florsheim prominently featured in just the right spot to make a pleasing composition according to the Rule of Thirds. (He would normally have been wearing breeches tied below the knee and a pair of well-fitted hose, but the Port Authority was celebrating Modern Dress Day.) So clearly some intelligence has gone into picking, out of hundreds of pictures, the only one where the shutter accidentally fired while the photographer was adjusting the camera.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

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Sir: Today I bought a 12-pack of beer made in Wilkes-Barre, even though I live in Scranton and some of my neighbors might consider it unpatriotic, but anyway when I got it home I noticed on the side it said “12 16-ounce cans = 16 12-ounce cans.”

Whoa! Symmetry like that has to be more than coincidence, I thought. I mean, what are the odds? I bet it wouldn’t be like that if they were 24-ounce cans.

But I got out my pocket calculator, which was in my pocket, because that’s where I keep it, and I did the math, and you know what? Sixteen 24-ounce cans would be the same amount of beer as twenty-four 16-ounce cans!

Okay, but I also had some of that Irish beer that’s brewed by a German company in Scotland, and it comes in 14.9-ounce cans. Got you there, I said to myself. But no! It turns out that 12 14.9-ounce cans is the same as 14.9 12-ounce cans!

This is just too weird, and the more beer I drank the weirder it seemed. I kept calculating. Did you know that 48.3 13.7-ounce cans is the same as 13.7 48.3-ounce cans? Or that 53.264 27.1438-ounce cans is the same as 27.1438 53.264-ounce cans? It just blows my mind.

So my question is this: Why is there no Nobel Prize in mathematics? Cause I totally deserve it for discovering what I think I’ll call the Commutative Property of Beer.

——Sincerely, Bernie Riemann, Scranton.

DAILY AFFIRMATIONS FOR PIGEONS.

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That truck will stop coming toward me long before I have to open my wings and fly away.

Every little old lady with a bag is my friend.

What this statue needs is more of the old Jackson Pollock touch.

If I follow that attractive hen-pigeon from a distance of six inches for the rest of the day, she is bound to notice my admirable qualities.

Humans operating under divine direction have built this city for me, God’s favored creation.

God favors the stupid and unambitious.

That cigarette butt probably tastes like corn.

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Collectors & Hobbyists! Build wooden models of famous plastic models. Send for catalog today. Model Modeling Corp., Woodville.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

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SIR:

WHY ARE THERE SHIFT KEYS ANYWAY? WHAT’S THE POINT? HUH?

I MEAN, THE FIRST TYPEWRITER HAD CAPITAL LETTERS, AND THAT WAS IT! THE CARRIAGE DIDN’T MOVE UP AND DOWN! THAT WAS NOT IN GOD’S PLAN FOR THE TYPEWRITER!

CLASSICAL WRITERS DIDN’T USE LOWER-CASE LETTERS! THE INSPIRED AUTHORS OF SCRIPTURE WOULDN’T BE CAUGHT DEAD USING LOWER-CASE LETTERS! THEY HADN’T BEEN INVENTED YET! LOWER-CASE LETTERS WERE AN INVENTION OF THE DARK AGES! IGNORANT MONKS INVENTED THEM TO FOOL US INTO THINKING THE MEEK WILL INHERIT THE EARTH! WELL, I’M HERE TO TELL YOU THE MEEK WON’T INHERIT THE EARTH! YOU KNOW WHY? BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO MEEK, THAT’S WHY!

SO I JUST TAPED DOWN MY CAPS LOCK KEY, AND NOW I DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING! SOME PEOPLE SAY IT LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SHOUT? PEOPLE HEAR YOU, THAT’S WHAT! DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT? EVERYBODY IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD HEARS ME, ESPECIALLY WHEN I TALK TO THE POODLES!

SO I SAY DO AWAY WITH THE EFFEMINATE LOWER CASE! KILL IT NOW! CAPITAL LETTERS WERE GOOD ENOUGH FOR CICERO, AND THEY’RE GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU!

OH, AND !!!!!!!!!

SINCERELY, E. E. CUMMINGS

APOLOGY.

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The management of Heptagon Gardens would like to extend its sincerest apologies to Miss Alexandra Polkska, the famous ballet star from Poland who performed last night. Upon mature reflection, we agree that we ought to have expected that advertising her as a “Pole dancer” might be susceptible of more than one interpretation. At any rate our advertisements seem to have attracted the wrong crowd. In fact, we’ll go ahead and say that some of those people owe Miss Polkska even more of an apology than we do. According to her manager, she is still pulling dollar bills out of her leotard. This is not the sort of behavior we expect in the Cultural District, now is it? You should be ashamed of yourselves.