Posts by Dr. Boli
Advertisement.
THE POWER OF THE INTERNET.
Another victim sinks into the tomb,
Struck by Consumption,s dire
unering dart again fond friends
are call,d to bewail the doom of
one whom love had link,d to
many a hart.
This was the epitaph on the tombstone of a young man who died in 1830 at the age of nineteen. Our friend Father Pitt found it in the old Bethel Cemetery, and it immediately struck him that it was probably not an original composition. It looks like a semiliterate transcription of a published poem. But where was the poem published? asked old Pa Pitt. It took exactly twenty seconds to type the first line into Google and come up with the answer:
It is from The Casket, a popular American magazine of the day; click on the image above to be taken to the full volume in Google Books.
Twenty seconds, and we have the answer. Think about that for a moment. How long would it have taken a mere quarter-century ago? Dr. Boli suspects that it literally could not have been done. The poem was, as far as he knows, never reprinted after its initial appearance; it can be found only in the June, 1830, issue of The Casket. Probably half a dozen libraries in the world, at the very most, have copies of that magazine in dusty bound volumes somewhere. The odds are pretty well stacked against stumbling across one of them by accident. It might occur to one in a brilliant flash of insight that the poem had come from a current magazine; but even then, to search through all the extant magazines published in 1830 in all the libraries in North America would have been such a daunting project that one would almost certainly not have begun it.
Every once in a while, when we wonder whether the Internet is good for anything but YouTube comments and quack cancer cures, we can remind ourselves that it makes whole species of knowledge possible that were not possible before.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
THERE’S GLORY FOR YOU.
From an article at the end of a long stream of clicks:
So ended one of the most notorious (and mostly unknown until now) chapters in NFL history.
This is a sentence that leaves one staring into the screen in puzzlement. Dr. Boli has not run into this meaning of “notorious” before. But it is an adjective, after all, and as a certain Mr. Dumpty once said: “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
YOU MAY NOT BE AS AUTHENTIC AS YOU THINK YOU ARE IF…
…you are the man on the store loudspeaker singing a country song about how much more real your life is in real America with your forty acres of corn and your tractor and your barn and your little white church where your daddy and mama got married and your beat-up old Ford and your dog named Bud, and you are using pitch correction.
BOOK REVIEW: ROBUR THE CONQUEROR.
This is a short review of Robur-le-Conquérant by Jules Verne, which appeared in La Nouvelle Revue when the book came out in 1886. Dr. Boli has hurriedly scribbled a translation from the French, for no other reason than that nobody else would do it.
The work of Jules Verne, which has numerous enthusiasts, certainly has its detractors as well. They accuse it of mixing up fantasy too intimately with science, and of troubling young intellects with ideas that are false, or incompletely true, about the phenomena on which modern science has still shed little light. Either way, no one can deny that the ingenious and audacious author has marked out a new territory all his own in our contemporary literature, and that is certainly a kind of talent that is not without merit. His new work is no less original and no less bold than its predecessors. Again an engineer is the hero, but this time it is the immensity of the heavens that is the theater of his adventures and experiments. Robur the Conqueror is the inventor of an aerodrome with seventy-four helices and two propellers: the Albatross, which guarantees him the empire of the air. Alone, convinced that each invention must come at its proper time, and that science ought not to outstrip morality, he disappears, taking with him his secret that could change the social and political conditions of the world. But he announces that he will return the moment humanity is knowledgeable enough to profit from that secret, and wise enough not to abuse it. Of course, as in all his novels, M. Jules Verne has added a considerable amount of humor and gaiety to Robur the Conqueror, and his innumerable readers will once again pass some delightful hours in enjoying these marvelous and entertaining adventures.
—
The book is available on Project Gutenberg:
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: Two of my colleagues were arguing about something the president was doing. One of them said it was unconstitutional, and the other said it was just as constitutional as all get out. I couldn’t follow either argument. Can you explain the United States Constitution to me? —Sincerely, U. S. Representative Michael F. Doyle.
Dear Sir: Your confusion arises from the fact that the document you were probably shown in civics class as the “United States Constitution” is not the “constitution” your colleagues were debating. The written document is a useless fiction. The real constitution of the United States is, like the British constitution, unwritten. It consists of only two brief sections, and curiously enough it always speaks in the first person singular.
The first section categorically prohibits the President of the United States from doing anything of which I disapprove, and grants him near-dictatorial powers to accomplish things that benefit me.
The second section, also known as the “First Amendment,” guarantees my right to make you listen to any ill-conceived natterings I may wish to express and prohibits you from stopping your ears or contradicting me with reasoned counterarguments.
Now that you understand the unwritten constitution of the United States, you will understand any American political argument in which the participants are raising questions of “constitutionality.”
Advertisement.
SORTING THROUGH THE RUBBLE.
Sometimes one brings the entire Internet down on one’s head, and then one can only pick through the rubble. Dr. Boli has just done that twice in one week, so there is quite a lot of rubble to sort through.
First, there was the article about slavery. After thousands of words in the article and comments, Dr. Boli has only succeeded in obscuring his thoughts rather than elucidating them. He has seen traffic coming in to that article from what seem to be Southern-apologist sites, which irks him to no end, because he meant it to show why radical abolitionism—a demand that slavery be ended everywhere at once and not simply mitigated here and there—was the only sound intellectual position in the time of Robert E. Lee. When it becomes impossible for even a reasonably good man to act on his better instincts, then it is time to turn the world over and give it a good shake.
Here is what Dr. Boli meant to say: If you think that, in the same situation, you would have been a better person than the average Southern slaveowner, you are deluding yourself. You would have fallen down into the same slough of evil. That’s it. Don’t judge the past from a lofty peak of self-righteousness, and you’ll understand both history and yourself a lot better. You will also understand that the fight against evil did not end with a resounding victory in 1865.
Then there was the question of the cranky Web site that proves, beyond all possibility of doubt, or even of reading to the end of the argument, that the Catholic Church apostatized fifty years ago. This brought up an acrimonious debate on the subject of Church history, which Dr. Boli now feels obliged to sort out. It is worth noting, by the way, that the author of the Web site that started it all responded to being called a “crank” with more charity and civility than the rest of us could muster, which made Dr. Boli a little ashamed of himself.
Here is the history of the Christian Church to Constantine’s time, as Dr. Boli sees it, in one paragraph.
The Christian movement began with Jesus and his small rabble of mostly low-class followers, but already by the Acts of the Apostles we see it grown so large that it needs layers of authority. There were heresies from the beginning, but it was always clear from the numbers alone that they were heresies, and that there was a main stream of Christian thought. In fact, many or even most of the heresies gloried in their exclusivity—they were the chosen few, unlike the rabble who didn’t get it. This was, of course, what led to their ultimate extinction in the Darwinian world of Roman religions: you need the rabble if your religion is going to make it to the big time. So by the time of Constantine, the Christian hierarchy was recognizably similar to what we see in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, and similar branches of Christianity today. Constantine made no serious change to the structure of the Church; it had the same leaders before and after his conversion. But he made it a lot richer.
What Constantine did invent was politically weaponized Christianity. The Eastern Church regards him as a saint. The West…well, not necessarily.
Incidentally, the sincerity of Constantine’s conversion is much debated, but Dr. Boli thinks Constantine was absolutely sincere, for the simple reason that he delayed his baptism until he was near death. It would have been trivially easy to have himself very publicly baptized if he thought it was a lot of superstitious nonsense that was demographically useful. But he took the washing away of sins seriously, and he had a lot of sins planned for the future.