Posts by Dr. Boli
WORD PROBLEMS.
Alphonso has three elephants. We don’t know where he got them. We think Alphonso may be a little bit odd. Each elephant eats five bales of hay per day, plus seven medium-sized saplings, a 40-pound sack of raw peanuts, and a can of sliced peaches. One of the elephants also drinks coffee, but the others do not. If the three elephants eat this exact diet every day for a month, how long will it take the train to get to Perth Amboy?
Your cousin Ferdinand thinks that The Da Vinci Code is twice as bad as Irene Iddlesleigh, but you think that Irene Iddlesleigh is three times as bad as The Da Vinci Code. Solve for X on a pocket calculator.
You are a lobbyist for the artificial-lemon-flavoring industry, and your assignment is to persuade Congress to ban lemon oil as a dangerous hallucinogenic drug. In your research, the only fatal accident you can find involving lemon oil occurred when a drunken teenager drove into a tree while carrying a bag of groceries that included lemon oil in the trunk. Your research has further shown that there are about twenty million teenagers of driving age in the United States. When you face the congressional committee for the lemon-oil hearings, what percentage of teenagers do you tell them are killed or maimed in lemon-oil-related accidents every year?
Mrs. Quetzal assigns her fourth-grade math class fifty word problems for homework, due tomorrow, no exceptions. How long will it take the janitor to find where the students have hidden Mrs. Quetzal?
WINNER OF THE CAPTION CONTEST.
The caption contest was a great success, in that it made Dr. Boli’s readers work much harder than Dr. Boli. A great deal of entertaining cleverness was on display, and Dr. Boli has begun to wonder whether, for the sake of the Magazine, he ought simply to let the readers take over.
The judging of the contest, however, did constitute real work, and for that reason Dr. Boli decided to have it done by somebody else. In fact he left it up to the loyal reader who had suggested the contest in the first place. She did not look at the comments as they came in, and so had no idea who offered which caption; she was given a numbered list of entries with no other identification, and picked her favorite without prejudice. Here, then, is the winner:
The book will soon be on its way to “Bill,” with Dr. Boli’s personal thanks for his contribution. And since the contest is over, Dr. Boli can now reveal the caption he had prepared before his loyal reader suggested a contest:
IN THE NEWS.
The sewage backup that paralyzed the Pentagon for three days has finally been traced to a rest room in the hall next to the office of the Secretary of the Air Force. Military plumbing specialists reported that someone had attempted to flush 2.4 billion dollars down the toilet in the third stall from the left. President Obama is reported to have spent half an hour this morning with the outgoing Acting Secretary, who emerged from the Oval Office with visible facial bruises and described the meeting as “productive.”
IN THE NEWS.
Masked members of the secretive protest group Sine Nomine staged a “sip-in” at the Starbucks on Sixth Avenue in protest against the global coffee giant’s employment practices. In what a masked spokesman described as a “coordinated RL denial-of-service attack,” protesters kept the staff busy by ordering Double Chocolaty Chip Frappucino beverages until everyone got sick and staggered off to the subway and various bicycle racks. The manager of the establishment told a Dispatch reporter that this had been the second-best day for sales in his unit’s history, surpassed only by the G-20 protests in 2010.
AN OMINOUS WARNING.
CAPTION CONTEST, WITH A MATERIAL PRIZE.
A winner has been chosen. Many thanks for all the entries, which kept Dr. Boli and his readers amused for days.
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“Why aren’t you doing a picture-caption contest?” one of Dr. Boli’s most insistent fans keeps asking. “That other magazine is always doing caption contests. Why can’t you be more like that other magazine?”
Leaving aside the fact that that other magazine never did caption contests while Mr. Harold Ross was running it, Dr. Boli could think of no good reason to deny a constant reader what is obviously her dearest wish. Here is a picture from an old magazine, and it is up to you to imagine what the caption should be. Leave your caption as a comment on this article.
And what is the prize? Nothing less than an inscribed copy of this season’s most coveted Christmas gift, Dr. Boli’s Gift Horse. You can have it sent directly to you, or you may choose to have it sent to an unsuspecting victim of your choice.
This is how it works: You leave your captions as comments. Dr. Boli reads them. By some method (he has not decided what the method is yet), he picks the one he like best. If he likes them all best, he uses some algorithm to pick one at random. He emails the winner, who gives him a shipping address, and off goes the book.
The contest will be open through Friday afternoon. Friday evening, a winner will be announced.
You will notice that there is no mechanism for eliminating bias, no anonymization of entries, nothing to make the contest fair or to guarantee that only the meritorious will win. All those things would amount to work, and Dr. Boli chooses not to add to the labor he already expends on running a great publishing empire. He makes this admission here at the beginning, so that there will be no unpleasant accusations at the end.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
On this day in 1773, a group of British merchants invited some of the first citizens of Boston to a tea party on board their ships, unaware that the Bostonians of the time were bigoted and fanatical coffee drinkers.
OTHER FUN STUFF.
Dr. Boli has always relied on the National Weather Service for his weather, and for the most part has been satisfied with the results. But he admits that he seldom probes the inner recesses of the National Weather Service site, which is his excuse for not having noticed before that there is a page called “NWS Playtime for Kids.” Wondering what weather games young people these days played, Dr. Boli decided to click on that link (which you, dear readers, really ought to do as well, because it is the only way to enjoy the full effect of the animated icons).
Hurricanes, winter storms, tornadoes, thunderstorms/lightning, floods, and other fun stuff!
Kids, this Web site isn’t just ordinary fun. This is a Web site that makes you a god.
Under the circumstances, we can probably be grateful that the page has not been updated since Washington’s birthday in 2006. If children were let loose with today’s weather technology, there would hardly be a trailer park or barrier-island resort left standing in the United States.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Sir: Just this afternoon I was driving on the Boulevard of the Allies behind one of those hybrid hatchback things that lazy unpatriotic perverts who want the terrorists to win always drive, and I saw a bumper sticker I just couldn’t believe. I read it quite distinctly, because the speed limit was 40 and this loafer was only doing 48, so I was driving about six inches from his bumper and honking to let him know what he was doing wrong. Do you know what it said? It said “Judge not, lest ye be judged”! Can you believe that? I mean, I’ve heard some pretty stupid ideas in my time, like women’s suffrage and public education, but this one absolutely takes the prize. If we don’t judge people, how will we know which ones of them are the wrong people? I mean, really, do you want to associate with Unitarians? Do you really think Carpatho-Rusyns are just as good as you and me? If I didn’t carefully note the waitress’ hair color every time I went to the Eat ’n Park, how would I know what kind of tip to leave? How could I get through passing the peace at church if I didn’t know who deserved a handshake and who deserved a withering stare? How would I know which children to slow down for in the school zone? How would I know which tradesmen to leave a Christmas present for? How would I distinguish which sick people should get help and which ones deserve to die? “Judge not!” Can you imagine a decent citizen living his life that way? I don’t know who came up with that “Judge not, lest ye be judged” thing, but he was certainly no Christian. —Sincerely, Carloman Dern-Tooting, Greenfield.