Posts by Dr. Boli
WHERE WE WENT WRONG WITH PENNIES.
The penny question has agitated many of Dr. Boli’s acquaintances. On the one hand, some thought the decision to stop minting pennies was long overdue, since it cost much more than a penny to make a penny. On the other hand, some thought it was the Beginning of the End. The latter have been more agitated than the former, and thus more vocal.
Now, Dr. Boli does not follow social media, and he has been meaning to catch up on the news but still seems to be stuck somewhere about the Eisenhower administration; so for all he knows everything he is about to say has been said over and over ad infinitum, and you might as well just go look at pictures of flowers.
Dr. Boli perfectly understands the people who feel cheated by the disappearance of pennies. Your bill comes to $19.82. You hand the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. You get a dime and a nickel back. Where are my three cents? your well-trained capitalist mind is screaming.
But let us take a long view of the question and see where we stand in history, and then perhaps Dr. Boli’s solution to the problem will seem obvious.
American currency is decimal, ascending by powers of ten:
mill ($0.001)
cent ($0.01)
dime ($0.1)
dollar ($1)
The “eagle,” a ten-dollar gold coin, is often mentioned as one of the original basic units, though the Coinage Act of 1792 specified “that the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars or units, dismes or tenths, cents or hundredths, and milles or thousandths.”
You will note the presence of “mills” in the list—a unit still in use in property taxes and gasoline prices, but one for which no coin was ever minted, on the reasonable grounds that it would be silly. Most prices have always been expressed in cents as the lowest unit; in other words, with two digits after the decimal point, not three.
The value of money went up and down through the nineteenth century before settling on a remarkably steady downward course after the First World War, and of course the things we buy now are greatly different from the things we bought in 1792; so it is a little hard to make exact comparisons. But it would be very reasonable to say that a half-penny, the lowest denomination authorized in 1792, was worth more then than a dime is now.
And that brings us to our obvious and straightforward answer to the penny problem, which—as we hinted earlier—is mostly a problem of psychology. The difference between what we paid and what we owed is eighteen cents, and we get only fifteen cents in change. We’re being cheated!
Do you see where we went wrong? Our error was not in eliminating pennies. It was in keeping nickels.
We have already learned to do without the third place after the decimal point. Simply cut off the second, and the psychological difficulty disappears. Remember that a dime now is worth less than the smallest possible denomination when our currency was established.
As long as we have nickels, we need that second digit after the decimal point. As long as it exists, sales taxes and suchlike percentage calculations will cause that digit to mock us with numbers that are not multiples of five.
But take that digit away, and the nickels with it, and the mockery goes with them. Once again we have a coinage that perfectly matches the bills we pay with it. Instead of $19.82, the price you owe, if it is more than $19.8, is $19.9. Your change is one dime.
Doubtless millions would rise to defend the nickel instinctively, unable to face a future in which the face of Thomas Jefferson would not wink at them from their change purses. But if we can weather the penny protests, the nickel protests should be simple. Tell your congressional representative that we need to shave one decimal place off the usual expression of monetary value. Explain the mathematical principles involved if your representative is a bit fuzzy on them. And then relax in the knowledge that you have done your duty as an informed citizen. You may even take credit for the idea if you like; Dr. Boli has nothing to gain from it, and offers it only as a public service.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
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THE ROYAL ROAD TO ESPIONAGE.
You probably have to work up a cover story, order a fake ID from the Section of False Documents, put on a disguise, travel to the site, worm your way in somehow, and surreptitiously take several rolls of 16-millimeter film with your little Minox.
Wouldn’t it be more convenient if you could just sit in your comfortable government-issue desk chair and see, without going anywhere, exactly what was going on at those coordinates?
Of course it would be. And there’s wonderful news! Thanks to the science of Coordinate Remote Viewing—or CRV, as it is known to the cognoscenti—you can do exactly that. You can sit in your own chair, psychically tune in on those coordinates, and see and hear eight people slumped in their chairs snoring loudly while a ninth drones on about the substandard materials used in the resurfacing of the 1400 block of Beechwood Boulevard, because those are the coordinates of the City-County Building, and Pittsburgh City Council is in session.
How do you learn this wonderful remote viewing? It’s really quite simple. And because the CIA produced a working paper in 1985 outlining the training method, you can follow along at home and be a CRV professional in just a few easy steps.
We begin, as we did above, with just a set of coordinates.
In Stage I the viewer is trained to provide a quick-reaction response to the reading of geographic coordinates by the interviewer. The coordinates are expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds when possible. The response takes the form of an immediate, primitive “squiggle” on paper. This “squiggle” is known as an ideogram. The ideogram captures the overall feeling/motion of the gestalt of the site (e.g., fluid/wavy for water). This response is kinesthetic and not visual.
These ideograms are accompanied by (A) a “feeling/motion” and (B) an “automatic analytical response.” Or perhaps more than one of each, as in this sample illustration:
As you see, we’re already getting somewhere. Our site at these coordinates is either land or water or rock. Already we have eliminated the possibility of void.
Dr. Boli will not presume to teach the art of CRV when the CIA’s manual is both thorough and accessible. But the potential of the technique should be obvious. Your enemies cannot keep a secret if your agents can simply sit in their offices in Langley and see any arbitrary location in the world.
By Stage VI of the training, the viewer trainee is ready to be issued his modeling clay (or cardboard, or whatever he prefers to work with) and can start constructing a three-dimensional model of the site, using mostly the sense of touch.
That was the stage the research had reached by the time the working paper was produced. But the eye-opening Chapter 10, “Future Stages,” reveals the full brilliance of the scientific minds behind this program (even if they couldn’t spell “affect”).
STAGE X REMOTE ACTION (RA) Stage X would be mind-over-matter, also known as psychokinesis (PK). We have very little understanding of PK, but we do know it exists. If Stage IX is telepathic signals which effect people, it is logical the next stage would be RA signals which effect “things”.
STAGE XI ALTERING THE DIMENSIONALITY AT THE SITE This is the most difficult stage to understand. Time is considered another dimension, but there may be many more. Mathematically it is considered that there are infinite numbers of dimensions. Stage XI would be broken into at least two phases:
PHASE I would be altering time at the site. Time could be frozen, moved forward, or moved back. The implications of this are mind boggling. I believe this is the first stage where we could truly effect (alter) the future (as well as the past and the present).
PHASE II Maybe by the time we reach Stage XI we will understand enough about alternate dimensions to use this phase. I believe there would probably be an additional phase for each additional dimension we discover.
“Mind boggling” indeed! Yet, if you can believe it, the unpatriotic spoilsports in the Clinton administration canceled this mind-boggling program, simply because (according to Wikipedia) “evaluators concluded that remote viewers consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence information.” The super-secret training techniques for CRV were actually released to the public, so that our enemies now have as much information about it as we ever had.
Still, there is a silver lining. If our government gave up on the program, the release of the working paper at least gave private individuals a chance to pick up where the CIA’s research left off. Using the techniques he learned from the working paper, Dr. Boli decided to try an experiment. At the moment this working paper was being compiled in the CIA, what was going on in the KGB? Having looked up the coordinates of KGB headquarters, he used the most advanced techniques to project himself back to those coordinates in February of 1985, and he began to receive strong impressions almost immediately of a man in his early thirties convulsed in his chair with uncontrollable laughter. There was also a sound associated with the vision: something like poutine, which may refer to something the man had been eating, or may be related to the man in some other fashion.
IN THE NEWS.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
NOW IN PRESS.
The Dilliad, by Irving Varnderblock-Wheedle.—Dictated over the course of one drunken weekend at the author’s country estate, this epic in 24 books celebrates dill and other herbs of the family Umbelliferae. “We may truly say that this latest work is equal to Homer’s in the number of books into which it is divided.” —Journal of Classical Herbal Studies. “The book devoted to Conium maculatum made my hair stand on end.” —Armitrage Bittle, author of Little Poems for Little Minds. “I will never look at fennel the same way again. In fact, I may never look at fennel again at all.” —Johnny Carawayseed, host of “Johnny’s Apiaceae Garden” on YouTube.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
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LAST POEMS BY JANE GREER.
Nearly a Caress is made up of the poems Jane had been gathering for her fourth collection—the third in her late-life creative burst. It may be odd to say that someone died too young when she exceeded her allotted threescore and ten, but these poems make it obvious that the poet was always refining her art, and she would have kept refining it and astonished us with next year’s poems.
Two things set Jane Greer apart from the usual run of current poets.
The first is that she made adroit use of meter and rhyme: she knew not just how they worked, but what they meant. Some critics have compared her to Robert Frost, but to this critic’s ears her meters and rhymes are more interesting, and more surprising, than Frost’s. Would Frost have written a perfect triolet? If he did write a perfect triolet, would his first line be “The triolet is such a bore”?
The second is that she was religious in a way that seems unique in our modern world. She was religious the way King David was religious: she fought with God and sometimes berated him, the way a child fights with a parent, because real children of God can do that. Any hypocrite can praise God; you have to be a real believer to call God a big meanie.
We should add that Jane Greer could be ferociously funny. Her sense of humor may seem gentle sometimes, but that is the lion toying with its prey. When she is gentle, you may be sure that she is about to turn your life upside-down, or at least make you examine your conscience thoroughly.
So here are the last poems by Jane Greer—and yet we cherish the hope that, just possibly, they may not be the last. She left at least two haikus and one original epigram in comments on this site. If she dribbled out poetry wherever she went, how many poems by Jane Greer are waiting to be discovered and collected?
Order Nearly a Caress direct from the publisher, or find it at Amazon.
And for the curious, the original epigram on this site by Jane Greer was in response to this definition from Dr. Boli’s Unabridged Dictionary:
Dark Ages (proper noun).—In Western European history, a time of barbarous ignorance, superstition, and brutality that succeeded the civilized ignorance, superstition, and brutality of the Roman Empire.
Jane’s response:
And ah! for that golden Roman time
that was civilized, brutish, well-lit, sublime.