Posts by Dr. Boli
LET’S VISIT CANADA.
Part 1.—What to Bring with You.
When planning a visit to our friendly neighbor to the north, you will make your trip much more enjoyable if you stock up on a few essential supplies before you leave.
Money. Canada’s economy is based on a modification of the capitalist system, in which a socialist paradise for Canadian citizens is funded by selling souvenir keychains to American tourists. You should also be aware that Canadians use cartoon money—bills in bright colors and dollar coins called loonies. You will feel much better having real American money in your pocket.
Comfortable clothes. Except in the large cities, Canadians disapprove of uncomfortable clothes.
A curling iron, in case you wish to participate in the Canadian national sport of curling.
A pair of xylophone mallets. You will understand when you get there.
A nice gift for Queen Elizabeth. The Governor General will make sure it gets to her. She likes hats.
Snowshoes. They will give the border guards a good laugh.
Weather. Especially in the winter, most of Canada’s weather escapes across the border to the United States, creating a serious and at times worrying weather deficit in Canada. Canadians will be glad to have some of their weather returned, and may even buy it back from you at inflated prices.
Bacon. Canadian “bacon” is a completely unsatisfactory bacon substitute. Real American bacon can often be used as currency when purchasing souvenir keychains from the bacon-deprived natives.
AN OBSERVATION.
Go to any of those sprawling office parks that infest the generic suburbs of North America.
Find the headquarters of any company that has a mixture of “blue-collar” and “white-collar” employees.
Note that the great majority of male “white-collar” employees park head-in, whereas the great majority of male “blue-collar” employees back into their parking spaces.
Formulate a sociological theory that accounts for this cultural phenomenon.
Now you have a hobby. You’re welcome.
IN ARCHITECTURE NEWS.
Controversy surrounded the unveiling of the proposed design of the new Ed Wood Museum in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Designed by Los Angeles architects Nimby, Uhlrich, Thomas & Strauss, the museum is intended as “a tribute to America’s great film auteur.”
“It captures the spirit of his art and transforms it into space,” explained Roland Nimby-Thomas, one of the principal architects of the project.
At the public meeting, some residents expressed doubt that a building shaped like a giant octopus would fit well with the surrounding architecture in its prominent riverside site.
Others questioned the choice of materials. One woman who identified herself as a structural engineer questioned the choice of cardboard for supporting walls.
“It seems to me that one clumsy tourist could accidentally kick down the whole thing,” she said.
“Yes,” agreed Irene Thomas Strauss-Uhlrich, a partner in the firm. “In effect, we are creating an opportunity to live the Ed Wood dream, blurring the boundary between architecture and entertainment.”
One local preservation group has already filed a lawsuit, claiming that the building is “wilfully and egregiously stupid.”
But Thomas Uhlrich Strauss-Nimby, a partner in the firm, disputes that assessment. “They are confusing stupidity with suspension of disbelief,” he says.
COMPUTER SECURITY.
Choose a different password for each site. Passwords should be randomly generated and consist of at least thirty-two capital and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. Write all your passwords longhand in a memorandum book and store the book in a safe deposit box at a bank at least twenty miles from your computer.
Do not expose your computer to radio waves of any kind.
If you have a Windows computer, remember that certain kinds of programs can markedly increase your chances of infecting your computer with viruses or other malware. Among the programs you should avoid at all costs are Web browsers, word processors, email clients, spreadsheets, presentation programs, games, databases, text editors, appointment calendars, image editors, media players, publishing programs, drawing programs, and the operating system.
Ask a random stranger to pick a login password for your computer. Do not allow her to tell you what it is.
For secure deletion of data, dynamite is best, but good results may also be achieved with a shotgun.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
IN ENTERTAINMENT NEWS.
Studio insiders say that Disney has suspended its planned modern-day reboot of the Apple Dumpling Gang franchise. Filming had already begun, but an Internet petition campaign has been mounted against the title The Apple Crips, which a parents’ organization claims sends the wrong message to young audiences.
ABOUT THOSE MARBLED BACKGROUNDS.
In your innocence, you thought Dr. Boli was being facetious when he listed a number of upcoming articles whose topics sounded duller than anything even he would be willing to publish. Yet you underestimated him, in your innocence. Through the courtesy of the Bedfordshire Record Office, a short film from 1970:
And that says all there is to say on that topic. Yes, there are many, many videos on the Internet about marbling paper. But is there another with that distinctive produced-by-a-county-council-in-1970 aesthetic?
UNINTENTIONALLY DISTURBING METAPHOR OF THE DAY.
From this attempt at a Canadian social-networking site:
This site runs pump.io, the high-performance Open Source social engine. It pumps your life in and out of your friends, family and colleagues.
Advertisement.
OUR VALUED CORRESPONDENTS.
Our frequent correspondent “Greybeard” complains of a current science-fiction novel:
The author ruins a perfectly good story by inserting three must-haves of modern literature.
First, the characters must use crude language even if the objects involved are not anatomically capable of the actions attributed to them.
Second, the characters must take the name of a Christian deity in vain. Even though the novel is set in a distant future where all religion is viewed as a social construct and athiesim is axiomatically understood as the only true alternative, all surprises are met with the utterance of a name first introduced in the ancient Gospels. Why doesn’t anybody ever yell, “Oh Buddha!” when they hit their thumb with a hammer?
Third, characters must speak of the normality of all politically correct perversions.
Dr. Boli agrees that at least two of these three are sins against literary craft, but perhaps for different reasons from the ones his readers might expect.
1. It seems unlikely that we should even be able to recognize the crude language of the distant future. To take the mildest possible example of current vulgarity, what would a (presumably already surprised) time-traveler from 1950 make of the simple declaration “This book sucks”? Just to start with, such a traveler would be baffled by the intransitive use of a transitive verb. The best way to deal with a vulgarian as a character in a story of the future would be to have her spout random words in grammatically unlikely contexts (“Argh! Synergizing hammer! It hit my downsized thumb!”), and allow the shock and dismay of the politer characters to show us that we were hearing crude language.
2. In the case of the Christian deity, Dr. Boli can think of a historical analogue that gives the blasphemy a bit of plausibility. A pagan Roman of the sixth century, having seen his ancient religion thoroughly beaten down by Christianity, and knowing that paganism was destined for the dustbin of history, would be quite incredulous if he were told that, thirteen or fourteen centuries later, aristocrats in the far-off island of Britain would swear “By Jove!” at the drop of a hat. Yet it was true.
3. This one, however, is certainly an egregious sin against plausibility. If a thing is actually considered normal, we do not mention its normality. No one says, “Gee, walking down to the IGA to buy a quart of milk and some corn flakes sure is normal, isn’t it?” If we do speak of the normality of something, we speak defiantly, because we know that there is a considerable part of the population that still considers it abnormal. In 1855, one might have said (and in fact one did say), “It’s perfectly normal for free colored citizens to go to church with free white citizens,” but in saying it one knew that one was causing several million egregious bigots to succumb to apoplectic fits, thus reducing the manpower of the other side in the inevitable civil war to come. So if a writer of speculative fiction imagines a future in which interspecific marriage is really considered normal, the one thing none of his characters can say is, “Irv’s wife is a Bougainvillea in a hanging basket, which of course is perfectly normal.”