Posts by Dr. Boli
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THE ADVENTURES OF SIR MONTAGUE BLASTOFF, INTERPLANETARY SPACE DRAGOON.
ANNOUNCER. And now Malt-O-Cod, the only malt food drink flavored with real cod-liver oil, proudly presents…
(Music: Fanfare)
ANNOUNCER. The Adventures of Sir Montague Blastoff, Interplanetary Space Dragoon!
(Music: Theme, in and under for…)
ANNOUNCER. Tonight we find Sir Montague with Colonel Wilhelmina Darling in New York of 1836, with picturesque carriages and sumptuous costumes and other things that cost a lot less on radio than in the movies.
SIR MONTAGUE. Well, Colonel, here we are—thanks to our earlier perfection of time travel—in November of 1836, just in time to prevent the election of Martin Van Buren as President of the United States and assure a Whig victory.
COL. DARLING. But I still don’t see why we had to come all this way to interfere with a minor historical figure in one of those forgotten backwater countries that used to infest the earth before the Interplanetary High Commission sorted everything out.
SIR MONTAGUE. My dear Colonel, the misery wrought by the Panic of 1837 led to untold—
SIR MONTAGUE (distant). Oh, I say! There you are!
COL. DARLING (distant). Wilhelmina! Wait for us!
COL. DARLING. Look, Monty! It’s us!
SIR MONTAGUE. I say! Is this another hiccup with the machinery?
SIR MONTAGUE (approaching). Not at all. I came looking for you, actually. Jolly good thing I found you, too. I’ve come to tell you to turn back before it’s too late. It turns out that the consequences of a Whig victory in 1836 were nothing short of appalling.
SIR MONTAGUE. Really?
SIR MONTAGUE. Indeed. The effect on contemporary interplanetary culture has been simply devastating.
COL. DARLING. Look at these uniforms we have to wear. Polyester velour!
COL. DARLING. Ew!
SIR MONTAGUE (distant). Just a moment there!
COL. DARLING. Look! It’s us again!
SIR MONTAGUE (approaching). Good thing we caught up with the four of you! It turns out that Martin Van Buren must be stopped after all. By a series of events too complicated to explain right now, his election led to a complete collapse of the Interplanetary Union shortly after the second pair of you left.
SIR MONTAGUE. My word! That’s awkward.
SIR MONTAGUE. It certainly is. So the mission is on again, eh?
SIR MONTAGUE (distant). Not quite, I’m afraid!
COL. DARLING. It’s two more of us!
SIR MONTAGUE (approaching). After a round of jolly complicated calculations by the boffins, we’ve discovered that it was actually the election of Richard M. Johnson as vice president in 1836 that led to all the troubles down the road, so to speak.
COL. DARLING. So we have to prevent Richard M. Johnson from being elected, but not Martin Van Buren?
COL. DARLING. Yes, to prevent polyester.
COL. DARLING. No, I’m afraid the polyester will happen anyway. The boffins couldn’t calculate a way around it.
COL. DARLING. But I hate polyester! It doesn’t breathe!
COL. DARLING. Actually, a few of us have taken to wearing a cotton-polyester blend. It’s against regulations, and who knows what would happen if we were caught, but—
SIR MONTAGUE (approaching). I say, do any of you fine ladies and gentlemen know which way it is to 1841?
COL. DARLING (approaching). Monty, I think you forgot to reset the temporal coordinates.
SIR MONTAGUE. Oh, that must be it. Sorry, everyone. Obviously Colonel Darling is correct; I simply forgot to reset the dial thingy after coming here to tell you all that it was John Tyler who had to be stopped, not Richard M. Johnson.
SIR MONTAGUE. But you haven’t told us anything of the sort.
SIR MONTAGUE. Really? Well, we should be along any moment now.
SIR MONTAGUE (distant). I say, everyone, wait just a minute! It’s not Johnson or Van Buren at all! It’s Tyler!
SIR MONTAGUE. Ah, there we are now.
SIR MONTAGUE (approaching). One pair of us has got to get to March of 1841 and slip President Harrison some penicillin.
COL. DARLING. We’ll go, won’t we, Monty?
COL. DARLING. No, don’t bother. We can take care of it.
COL. DARLING. Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.
COL. DARLING. If neither of you want to do it, I’m sure we could manage.
COL. DARLING. You actually look rather fetching in polyester velour.
COL. DARLING. Do you really think so? Don’t tell anyone, but it’s a cotton-polyester blend.
(Music: Theme, in and under for…)
NARRATOR. Will Sir Montague and Colonel Darling make it to 1841 in time to stop President Harrison from kicking the bucket? Don’t miss next week’s thrilling episode: Sir Montague Blastoff and Article 2, Section 1, Clause 6 of the United States Constitution! Until then, kids, remember to whine frequently until your parents bring home the Malt-O-Cod, the only malt food drink with the rich, satisfying flavor of real cod-liver oil. For a limited time only, you’ll find a little packet with more Malt-O-Cod in it inside each specially marked package of Malt-O-Cod. So remember that name, kids: Malt-O-Cod, the malt food drink that’s brain food.
(Music: In full, then out.)
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
A VALENTINE.
STUDIES IN ON-LINE BEHAVIOR.
This seems like a very esoteric subject to engage the interest of someone in France for three hours. Perhaps it was an expatriate dead Pittsburgher who was feeling nostalgic for home. But we need not presume such coincidence: the simple fact is that the Web has an attractive power that may be compared metaphorically to that of a black hole, from which neither thought nor time can escape. We click our way to a completely irrelevant site, and something there attracts our attention, and before we know it three hours have passed, though to our perception it seemed to be mere seconds.
For example, right now, at this moment, Dr. Boli has open in another browser tab a facsimile of the 1598 quarto edition of Richard II. Why? He was looking for something else entirely, and it came up in the search results. And once it came up, he started looking at it. And now here it is, quite some time later, and he has read a considerable portion of the introduction.
Is this a bad thing or a good thing? It is, Dr. Boli says without hesitation, both. It takes us away from productive work, and it inspires us to produce work we had never thought of producing. Perhaps the best way to express it is to say that the Internet has encouraged procrastination to an unheard-of degree, and has made procrastination more productive than it ever was before.
(Before you begin to worry that Dr. Boli and Father Pitt know entirely too much about your browsing habits, we hasten to assure you that we have only a very general knowledge. We know how many page views there were in a day, how many individual visitors came in, how many page views came from each country, what links have been followed, and roughly when spikes in readership occurred. There were exactly four individual visitors to the Pittsburgh Cemeteries site yesterday, which is not unusually low for such an esoteric site; but there were 92 page views, of which 89 came from France. The spike in readership happened over the course of about three hours. In this highly unusual circumstance, it was easy to make some deductions about one individual reader, although not to identify the person.)
A QUESTION FOR READERS.
The number of robot spam comments this site receives is fast approaching two hundred a day. You never see any of them—nor does Dr. Boli, thanks to a clever Ukrainian plugin called Anti-spam, which Dr. Boli earnestly recommends. He knows the figures only because the latest version of the plugin has added a count to the comments page.
The count began at 0 a few weeks ago.
Obviously, someone finds it profitable to bombard the Internet with comments in which links to “louis vuitton sale” are embedded in otherwise irrelevant or meaningless verbiage.
But how is it possible that anyone anywhere ever makes money this way? Intelligent people are not likely to click on a link in an obvious spam comment. Stupid people are not likely to be able to pick out the link in the mass of irrelevant verbiage. Perhaps it is possible to imagine some forlorn soul whose monitor has gone black sitting in his lonely room randomly clicking here and there out of sheer nostalgia for the experience of surfing the Net, but short of such an unlikely situation it is hard to imagine how anyone ever follows those links.
So here is the question: Has anyone here ever spent any money as a result of a spam link in a blog comment? Even one reader here answering in the affirmative would be enough to show that spam comments can be profitable. Are you that one? What were the circumstances? Did you get the thing you paid for? Would you buy it again?
ON SELF-AWARE MACHINE INTELLIGENCE.
Typewriter: Hermes 3000.
The article is transcribed in self-aware-machine-readable form below.
DR. BOLI’S NEXT PREDICTION.
Contrary to what seems to be the orthodox futurological opinion, self-aware machine intelligence will not take over the world and destroy us all.
Why does Dr. Boli say that?
The answer tomorrow in this space.
LET’S VISIT CANADA.
Part 9.—What to See in Ontario.
Ontario is Canada’s most populous province, although, as with Quebec, we must remember that the “populous” part is crammed into an area about the size of New Jersey, leaving an area about the size of China to the wandering moose.
The main thing to see in Ontario is Niagara Falls, which was cleverly created by God (a notorious Canada-sympathizer) to suck U. S. tourists across the border to buy souvenir keychains. The thing about Niagara Falls is that you can hear it from New York, but you can really see it only from Ontario. Millions of tourists who say they have been to Canada have never stepped outside the part of Niagara Falls devoted to the themed-indoor-miniature-golf industry.
That is a pity, because if they stepped even a few yards out of that zone, they would discover that much of the rest of the Niagara peninsula is filled with memorials (such as the Brock Monument, above) to Canada’s glorious victory in the War of 1812. Now, every American schoolchild knows that the War of 1812 was really a glorious victory for the United States, in the sense that we did not actually lose anything other than human lives and the city of Washington, which are both expendable; but the polite visitor will refrain from disillusioning his Canadian neighbors. A drive along the border will open the tourist’s eyes to the remarkable number of fortifications that were erected for the purpose of keeping out Yankee invaders. Most of them have now been repurposed as souvenir-keychain emporia.
Toronto is the greatest metropolis in Canada, notable especially for its streetcars. Seven cities in North America never entirely abandoned streetcars (the others being Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, New Orleans, and San Francisco); in Toronto’s case it was thanks largely to one stubborn transit official, who wielded such power in his domain that he could resist the diesel tide that overwhelmed other municipal transit systems. This is a strong argument in favor of the feudal system. Toronto is also the home of the CN Tower, the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere (sorry, New York), which is placed so as to give the Toronto skyline the look of a Star Trek matte painting.
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, and is therefore most notable as the best place to see majestic herds of members of Parliament in their native environment. Be sure to stop in and say hello to the Governor General, dropping off any hats you may wish to forward to Queen Elizabeth. The Governor General will of course present you with a challenge to prove your sincerity, which is why you brought those xylophone mallets.
The Thousand Islands are severely undercounted.
SPEAKING OF “NEVER SWAT A FLY”…
Here is a first-rate jazz version of the tune by McKinney’s Cotton Pickers:
The vocal chorus is by the forgettable Bill Coty, but in compensation we have a trumpet solo by the unforgettable Joe Smith.
You can probably ignore the visuals, or switch to another browser tab while the music plays. The pedantic instinct will not allow Dr. Boli to leave you, however, without mentioning that the lobby poster for Just Imagine shows Maureen O’Sullivan and John Garrick, not Maureen O’Sullivan and El Brendel.