Posts by Dr. Boli

CAPSULE REVIEWS

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By Our Roving Critic.

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The so-called Moving Sale at No. 1721 Featherstone Avenue in Dormont was—there is no kinder way of putting it—a disappointment. The goods on display were pedestrian and unimaginative. The cookware section was typical: granted that some of the items, notably the sauté pan with lid, were useful, where was the emotional impact? We looked in vain for any trace of a pattern in the boxes of VHS tapes, but they seemed to have been thrown together at random. The children’s clothes on sale had the same old story to tell: once our children were small, and now they are bigger, and their clothes no longer fit—there is not a triter trope in the book. The blandly adequate furniture spoke of no tragedies; there was no hidden sadness in the garden tools. In short, the sale was not moving at all, and to advertise it as such straddles the line between hyperbole and consumer fraud.

TWO-COLOR WORLD.

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Garden at the Vanderbilt mansion, Hyde Park.

Garden at the Vanderbilt mansion, Hyde Park.

Do you wish the world were more like an old postcard? Then you will want to visit Father Pitt’s new Two-Color World, a silly photographic experiment in which every picture is presented in old-fashioned two-color printing, like an old postcard or a two-strip Technicolor movie from 1929.

Update: The site has moved and converted to simple HTML, so the text below no longer applies.

You may notice from the URL that our friend Bozar the Clown has graciously donated Web space for this enterprise, and in fact we are interested to see how his Web host responds to the demands of running WordPress. Mr. Bozar’s site uses a tiny and simple blogging script that places very few demands on the host, but WordPress takes some oomph.

ASK DR. BOLI.

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Dear Dr. Boli: Google has changed its brand identity. How will I continue to live? —Sincerely, Despondent.

Dear Sir or Madam: You could always use Bing.

Ha ha ha! But seriously, you’ll get used to the new look. Google changes its logo once every couple of years or so. But while it is true that each of the logos has been ugly in a slightly different way, they do all have a certain aesthetic in common. That is to say, they all look like something designed by a five-year-old who has just discovered that you can highlight the individual letters in a word and make each one a different color. The current generation of five-year-old has also discovered how to make different pieces of the same letter different colors, and you can see the obvious appeal of that discovery to the five-year-old demographic. So you will very quickly become comfortable with the new “identity family.”

And if not, there’s DuckDuckGo.

SAINT-HIPPOLYTE, HAUT-RHIN.

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Someone needs to revise the Wikipedia article on Saint-Hippolyte, a town in the Haut-Rhin department of Alsace. But before that happens, someone needs to preserve the text the way it appears now, because it is, in its own way, beautiful. A small sample, which is quoted under Wikipedia’s standard Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License:

Witch-hunt

Among on 1560 and 1600, Alsace had to regret a real witch-hunt. Only in Colmar, Turckheim and Sélestat one had sent to the wood-house 42 accused women of witchcraft. They had admitted under tortures the worst misdeeds. The plague touched Bergheim a little later when a gigantic lawsuit appeared 35 women accused of witchcraft native eight of which of Saint-Hippolyte and two of Thannenkirch. One blamed them for having asked in Satan to bring down the hail and to have so been responsible for the devastation of her vineyard. The other one was accused for having made rot grape just before grape harvests. The others were still accused for having made turn wine and to make him unfit in the consumption or for one other one to have made die one cow. Under her torture one admitted to these poor women of the improbable scenes. Some of them admitted to meet themselves the night together with devil which had taken a human shape, with which they ate, drank, sang and danced and were also accused for having maintained with him devil a carnal business. Certain living “witches” Bergheim, Rorschwihr or Châtenois admitted to have got some money or donations in kind. They told to have been transported by a goose, a goat or a broomstick somewhere near ” Landgraben ” or the mill say ” Bruchmühle ” or still to Kleinforst in Saint-Hippolyte. On the 35 women accused of witchcraft, the only one liked head the indicters. She died under the torture. At the time of paying, one sparrow penetrated into the premises and stands out there rashly. The judge following this event asserted that devil had tried to get back the soul of her witch. Most of the time the so-called witches were simple women, credibly tramps or Bohemian which had managed to extort money and from donations in kind to a little bit gullible inhabitants.

ELEVEN SPIRITUAL TERMS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

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Vibration. All matter is energy, but not all energy matters. Matter is made up of particles like electrons, quarks, baking soda, and dust mites, all vibrating at a specific frequency. We are now awakening to the need to raise our vibrational frequency in order to function at an energetic level that only dogs can hear.

Vibrational Density. The speed of your vibration is called your vibrational density. The denser you are, the better you will understand these spiritual terms.

Energy is the blue glowy stuff usually added in post-production.

Higher Self. Your higher self is that part of you that is vibrating at a higher frequency. Have you ever done that thing where you breathe in some of the helium from a balloon and your voice gets all squeaky? That is because helium is a spiritual element that gives you direct access to your higher self.

Shadow Self. The shadow self is that part of your soul that is vibrating at a lower frequency. It sounds a bit like a foghorn.

Dimension. A dimension is like a great big thing with stuff in it.

Multidimensional. Having more than one dimension. If you have only one dimension, it’s like your soul is living in a dorm room. Two dimensions are like a one-bedroom apartment, and so on, up to fifty-dimensional celestial mansions of the soul, which, you know, look great, but getting good help is a nightmare.

Soul. The soul is the part of you that responds to Jelly Roll Morton but not to Guy Lombardo.

Karma. Newton’s Third Law of Special Thermodynamics states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Karma is the application of Newtonian principles in the ethical world, so that if you do something really, really mean, the Universe gets really, really mad and says, “Whoa, not cool, dude.”

Chakra. A Chakra is a center of energy in your body. You can use your chakras to recharge your batteries, so to speak, but not the regular alkaline kind, because they might blow up.

Awakening is the process of coming to understand that you need to pay $1200 for a weekend-long retreat to improve your vibrational density.

 

SONG OF SOME OTHER GUY,

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By Irving Vanderblock-Wheedle.

—

I celebrate and sing some other guy,
Some guy who is doubtless just as good as I am, but not quite.
Some guy who has the same molecules, the same atoms,
The same subatomic particles,
But not quite as much poetic sense
Because he is not a Poet.

At all times I am surrounded by other people,
And I am filled with admiration
For the endless countless myriads of other guys
Who are almost as good as I am.

A child said Why are there so many people?
And how could I answer?
I do not know calculus.
I guess it must be because there were people before them,
And they had children.
I guess it must be because of the procreant urge of the world,
Which was just about the finest euphemism I could come up with
On a moment’s notice.

And lo! every single one of them is an Other,
Because every single one of them is not I.
I am not the Other,
But sometimes the Other is the Other,
And sometimes it ain’t.

A street-sweeper leans on his broom,
A Buddhist priest mutters a prayer,
A school-board member misspells “curriculum,”
A waiter drops a tray full of glasses,
An engineer designs a new flashlight that will be sold at the dollar store for $1.

And they are all the Not-I.
But I also am the Not-They.
They look at me and say, “Not I.”
All day they look at me.
All day they are saying, “Not I.”
I think I shall go mad.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
I am a little out of sorts.