Posts by Dr. Boli
IN THE NEWS.
Police were called to the convention center this afternoon when a brawl erupted during a conference of the Northeastern Association of Certified Homeopaths. According to eyewitness reports, the fight began during the reading of a paper on “Esoteric Homeopathy,” in which it was claimed that patients could be healed at any arbitrary distance by running a specially treated blank sheet of paper through a fax machine. A member of the audience stood up and denounced the claims as “superstitious nonsense,” insisting that cures could be prepared only by the rigorously scientific method of dilution and succussion. Heated words ensued, and by the time police arrived the speaker was allegedly running a blank sheet of paper through a fax machine in a menacing manner. Sixteen homeopaths were arrested and taken to the Western Pennsylvania Homeopathic Rehabilitation Center, where they were cured of tendencies to assault and battery by a series of infinitesimally light blows to the wrist.
ANNOUNCEMENT.
Because of the ongoing shutdown of the federal government, your Transportation Security Administration is asking all air passengers to pair off and strip-search each other before passing through the security gates. Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
MEMORANDUM
TO: All Employees
FROM: The President
RE: Quarterly Dividend
All of us here at the Schenectady Small Arms & Biscuit Co., Inc., have experienced some anxiety since the 20% layoffs last month. It is useless to pretend otherwise. You may think that, in my position of exalted responsibility, I would have nothing to worry about, but I assure you that that is not the case. There are days when I think that if I hear any more sniveling from the cubicles I shall simply “lose it,” to use a colorful vernacular term, although I am not sure what “it” is supposed to be, and why I should be unduly distressed about losing “it” when I could just send my administrative assistant out to get another of “it.”
I must tell you candidly that the layoffs were not without stress for your executive team. In order to produce the maximum cost savings for our quarterly numbers, it was necessary to rid ourselves of the most expensive 20% of the workforce (exclusive of management, of course): that is, the workers who, by their intelligence, hard work, and loyalty, had earned the highest salaries and the most in bonuses. It required actual work on one of those math boxes with the numbered buttons to identify these people. In fact, it was exactly the sort of work that would usually be assigned to the best and brightest in the company, but for obvious reasons it had to be done without their knowledge.
Today, however, I am sure you will be delighted to hear that our hard work in identifying and firing the overachievers has paid off handsomely, and with the money we saved on salaries and benefits we have been able to increase our quarterly dividend from 8¢ to 9¢. Not only does this demonstrate our confidence to the stock market, but it also has a direct effect on executive compensation, which is highly motivational for your executive team.
I wish once again to convey to you how much the Schenectady Small Arms & Biscuit Co., Inc., values the intelligence, hard work, and loyalty of its employees, especially in the upcoming quarter, during which we hope to be able to raise the dividend to 10¢, thus reaching the double digits for the first time and sending a strong message to stockholders that we have their best interests at heart. To do so will require dedication, perseverance, and another 20% cutback in the workforce by the same method as before. However, with the information you have now, you should be well aware of what you have to do to be one of the lucky 80%.
With Warmest Regards,
J. Rutherford Pinckney,
President
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST PHOTOGRAPHY.
The Duck Hollow Museum of Art is hosting a new exhibition of “Abstract Expressionist Photography by Twenty-First-Century Masters.” By special arrangement with the museum, we have been permitted to reproduce a few of the works exhibited:
As the World Turns, by Willis P. Mango
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Dust Thou Art #6, by M. M. Bring
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Cult Object, by Mortimer Capoff
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Cultural District, by Zalman Spright
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À rebours, by Rafael Pungent-Hicks
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The exhibit continues through December 10, after which it will move to the Tampa Museum of Art, where it has already been advertised as “Unseen Herculaneum: Treasures from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.”
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SITE CONTENTS.
| Filler | 62% |
| Deliberate falsehoods | 23% |
| Ambiguities | 14% |
| Errata | 9% |
| Misinterpretations | 7% |
| Libel | 3% |
| Weather | 2% |
| Rhyme | 1.5% |
| Reason | 1.2% |
| Sophisticated humor | 0.7% |
| Implausible statistics | 561% |
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ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: All my friends have smartphones, and I was thinking of getting one myself. Is it a good idea? —Sincerely, A Woman with a Stupid Flip-Phone That Was So Cool Five Years Ago.
Dear Madam: Smartphones do a number of different things, almost all of them in a mediocre but acceptable way. You can look up something on the omniscient Internet, if you are willing to read a few words at a time on a tiny screen. You can keep up with your correspondence, if you can navigate a tiny keyboard or put up with the very amusing errors produced by voice dictation. You can take pictures with smartphones that will sometimes be fairly good (Dr. Boli’s friend Father Pitt has sometimes slipped in a cell-phone picture without mentioning it to anyone). You can read books on them if you are not picky about typography. You can read Wikipedia articles about great books on them and spare yourself the trouble of reading the books. You can watch tiny movies on them. You can find an infinite number of recipes for fondues on them. You can keep your appointments on them. You can time your tea with them. You can tune a ukulele with them. Like an electronic Swiss Army knife, they compress an enormous number of tools into a tiny space; and, while no one of them is as useful as its dedicated equivalent, you are glad to have them all in your pocket at once.
The one thing smartphones are very bad at is being telephones.
The land-line telephone system is based on ludicrously outdated nineteenth-century technology: you could connect a telephone from 1898 to your home telephone line, and it would work. And the sound quality would be ultra-high-fidelity compared to the sound that comes from a cell-phone call. Dr. Boli does not understand all the technical details of why twenty-first-century sound is so much worse than nineteenth-century sound, but—considering that you can receive high-quality streaming stereo music over your smartphone—he suspects that some sort of Gargantuan practical joke is at the bottom of it. The jokers get away with it because everyone assumes that telephone voices ought to sound tinny and distorted. This assumption is absolutely unquestioned in popular culture. The next time you watch a science-fiction movie set in the distant future, pay attention to the futuristic communications devices, and you will notice—perhaps for the first time—that they all sound like telephones from 1898. As long as no one but Dr. Boli questions this assumption, countless hours of work will be lost, opportunities will be missed, and lives will be ruined because of telephone misunderstandings.
Dr. Boli therefore recommends that you keep a smartphone for all its useful applications; but when it comes to conversations with friends, you will have a better chance of getting through to them if you leave the phone in your pocket and shout in their direction.
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FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
