Posts by Dr. Boli
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I read in this afternoon’s Dispatch that our superintendent of schools considers it her job to see that children are happy. Happy! Can you imagine a more shocking perversion of an educator’s mission? The only purpose of schools is to prepare children for adult life. Will they be prepared for the working world if they are coddled in an artificial world of fuzzy Norman Rockwell good cheer? No; they must be inured to grey monotony, day after day, year after year, until the hope that naturally infests the childish psyche is rooted out and utterly obliterated. They must wake before dawn to appear at their desks early for no good reason; they must eat the same appalling food at every lunch; they must devote all their energy to rote tasks in which success will be of no benefit at all to them, but failure will be ruthlessly punished. They must be made to understand that “success” is a privilege given to other people, not to them, by a capricious providence. They must lead lives of unrelieved misery. Then, and only then, will our country become great again. Happy! Either the woman completely misunderstands the aim of education, or she is nothing less than a saboteur bent on destroying America’s leading position in the world of commerce. I would say that she ought to be punished appropriately if it were in my power to imagine anything more miserable than being a school superintendent.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: As a young person with ambition, I was thinking that it might suit me to found a gigantic commercial empire and retire a billionaire at the age of twenty-eight. I have a good business plan, involving selling through retail outlets nationwide and building brand identity through advertisements printed on the sides of prominent politicians. The one thing I don’t really have is a product to sell. Do you have any suggestions? I need something that will sell like the proverbial hotcakes, but I looked it up and it turns out that the history of the retail hotcake business is just a litany of failures, so that’s out. —Sincerely, Holly Pressburton, Mrs. Skink’s Tenth-Grade Civics Class, Blandville High.
Dear Madam: The one product the world is crying out for is a shampoo that at least claims to clean hair. Look at the shampoo aisle in your local drug store. You walk in there with dirty hair, and you want something that will make it clean. And what do you find? You find shampoo that will fortify, moisturize, texturize, strengthen, emulsify, nourish, refresh, volumize, lusterize, define, replenish, hydrate, renew, activate, and revive your hair, which, after all that, will still be dead. The one thing you won’t find in that aisle is a bottle of shampoo that says “Gets your hair clean” in big letters. Bottle some scented detergent, label it “Gets your hair clean,” and get it into every drug store in America, and you’ll be able to retire at twenty-three.
IS YOUR CHILD USING THE RIGHT CAR SEAT?
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FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
CURRENT FASHIONS IN HEADSTONE DESIGN.
Your headstone should be a celebration of your life. It should let future generations know what was important to you. Put some thought into it now, while you are still on this side of the curtain, so that your relatives will not be forced to hire an expensive medium to ascertain your wishes, or—worse yet—exercise their own dubious taste in choosing a headstone for you. It’s your grave, after all.
Instead of the date of your birth, have the engraver mark the date on which you wish you were born.
Pictures may now be added to most popular headstone designs at very little additional expense. The logo of your favorite band will remind your descendants that you had impeccable taste.
Haiku has been shamefully neglected as a medium for thoughtful epitaphs.
The Neo-Puritan style has been very popular of late (see illustration). In taking inspiration from historical models, however, remember to keep it cheerful. The last thing anyone who visits a cemetery wants is to be depressed.
You can now have a QR code engraved permanently on your headstone, so that your descendants centuries from now will be able to call up your life story on their iPhones.
Looking for an inexpensive way to erect an impressive monument? Assign an art student to the project. You can charge the student for the experience and make her pay for the materials as well.
DR. BOLI’S GIFT HORSE.
Are you looking for the perfect gift for someone on your Christmas list who knows how to read (or, failing that, at least recognizes pictures)? Here it is. Dr. Boli’s Gift Horse is a 300-page anthology of some of your favorite articles, illustrations, and even advertisements from more than six years of Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine on the Web.
You used to need an old-fashioned Internet-connected electronic device, but now you can read (or look at) these things on paper, the medium of the future.
Perhaps you know a Luddite (from the futuristic planet of Ludd) who refuses to connect to the Internet. Now you can share your love of good literature (and pictures) with the most recalcitrant book-lover. And you can do it for about a twentieth of the cost of buying that person a tablet computer, not to mention the cost to your friendship of forcing him to use the thing.
The book itself is new, but every article (and picture) in it has stood the test of time by existing on line for months or years without being deleted. Some of the jokes in the book may be as old as time itself.
You owe it to your friends and family to improve their intellectual life, to raise their horizons, to help them become the better persons you know they can become. But that takes a lot of effort, so for now, why not just buy them this book?
ON NAMES, CONTINUED.
In our earlier discussion of naming characters, we neglected the important matter of initials. That much can be done in this area is demonstrated by the popular American novelist Emma Dorothy Eliza Neville Southworth, who gave her fictional characters lovely Gothic names like “Wolfgang Wallraven” and “Regina Fairfield,” but whose parents had obviously mastered the art of suggestive initials.