Posts by Dr. Boli
IMPROVE YOUR PENMANSHIP.
Perhaps you have been thinking to yourself, “I, too, should like to celebrate International Steel-Pen Appreciation Month, but my penmanship needs work before it can show itself in public.”
If that is so, dear reader, you are probably wondering to yourself right now, “Whither shall I turn for help in improving my writing?”
But you may already have surmised that Dr. Boli has the answer to your question. In fact, Dr. Boli’s Eclectic Library has a whole page devoted to penmanship methods and studies of historic styles. The page will continue to grow, but it already has a wide enough variety that you are bound to find something to your taste. Just an hour of writing a day, and you will soon far surpass your peers in handwriting.
If you have not visited the Eclectic Library recently, you may wish to set aside a few hours of your time. It grows every day, and every day becomes more eclectic.
MEMORANDUM.
TO: All Employees
FROM: The President
RE: Our Facilities
All of us here at the Schenectady Small Arms & Biscuit Co., Inc., share the goal of making our Company a pleasant and fulfilling place to work. If we have been able to reach that goal, it is in large part because of the excellence of our facilities. Good facilities are essential to a productive workplace. They create synergy, and I am sure you all know that synergy is a very good thing for a business to have, even if you do not know what it means, which of course I do, but I would much rather you develop your own minds by looking up the word yourselves.
Our Erie Boulevard campus has long been the envy of all other manufacturers in the small-armaments and processed-snack-foods industries. In particular, whenever administrative facilities are mentioned at industry conventions and trade shows, our Building 3 is always singled out for especial praise. My father J. Cyrus Pinckney hired the fourth-best industrial architect in the Capital District to design a building that, by the standards of its time, was both functional and aesthetically unobjectionable. For more than forty-five years, Building 3 has continued to serve our administrative needs, and many of us have decades of fond memories invested in it. I myself remember sitting in this very office when I was a mere lad of twenty-three, and my father allowed me to announce my very first round of layoffs. A mist of nostalgia descends over my eyes as those fond recollections rise up before me, and I dab a tear with a tissue from a tastefully designed ceramic nose-shaped tissue dispenser that was given to me by my late secretary just days before I had to fire her for a chronic heart condition.
Nevertheless, it sometimes becomes necessary to adapt to changing conditions, even in the best facilities. When my grandfather J. Hasdrubal Pinckney took over this company from his father before him, all our synergies were steam-powered. But Grandpa Hasdrubal had the foresight to foresee that mule-powered synergy was the way of the future. Times and conditions change, and the facilities that served us well yesterday may not meet our needs adequately today.
The immediate intent of this memorandum, therefore, is to inform you that the north end of Building 3 is on fire. If you have a meeting scheduled in Building 3 today, you should regard it as postponed indefinitely. If you are currently in Building 3, may I suggest that you finish whatever task you are currently engaged in, and then calmly walk (do not run) to the nearest marked exit? And do not forget to record any idle time spent standing around in the parking lot watching the flames on your timesheet. Use code 183, “Vacation.”
Yours sincerely,
J. Rutherford Pinckney,
President
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: My English teacher wants us to write a poem. It’s supposed to be about something that’s personally meaningful to us, but other than that she didn’t tell us anything except that it’s due Wednesday. She showed us some poems other students wrote, and from those I don’t even know how a poem is different from an essay, except that the lines are shorter. So what is a poem, and how do you write one? —Sincerely, Emily, Mrs. Prong’s Eighth-Grade English Class.
Dear Miss: As so often happens, there are two different answers to your question: the real answer, and the answer that will bring you success in school. In the real world, a poem is “a metrical composition,” as our old friend Dr. Johnson would define it. Meter is what makes a poem. It is possible to write a poem without a regular meter, as Walt Whitman did so well; but if you do so, you had better have a sense of rhythm as perfectly developed as Walt Whitman’s, or what you have is not a poem but a prose composition hacked into short lines.
The “poem” your English teacher desires you to write, however, is a prose composition hacked into short lines. You will often find that what you are taught in school is the exact opposite of reality, but as you grow older you learn to adapt to it instinctively. The good news for you is that a school “poem” is much easier to write than any other form of composition. It requires no research: in fact, research is frowned upon, because, as you mentioned, the poem is meant to be “personally meaningful,” which you may interpret as “made up out of your own head.” You may be confident that you are doing something wrong if this homework assignment takes more than ten minutes of your time.
As for the specific content, remember that you will be graded on your sincerity. This is, of course, a trap, because if you write down what you sincerely think and feel, you will probably be suspended if not expelled. So it is important that you simulate sincerity effectively. Write about finding a dead bird on the sidewalk and how sad it made you feel. That pretty much always gets you an A.
INTERNATIONAL STEEL-PEN APPRECIATION MONTH.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Today is the last day of International Typewriter Appreciation Month, so we give you a Hermes 3000 with an unusual script face to appreciate.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
On this day in 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (the spelling by which it would later be known) played “Livery Stable Blues” as loud as possible (because the Original Dixieland Jazz Band played everything as loud as possible) into a great acoustical horn at Victor’s studio in New York, producing the most important recording in the history of music.
A SPLENDID TITLE PAGE.
If more books had title pages like this, there would be more books, because even the illiterate could not resist them.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
