Posts by Dr. Boli
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ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: I have on many occasions been forced to vigorously defend against hostile skeptics, my long held belief that at the end of every rainbow is a creel full of trout. Are you aware of any scientific evidence to refute this? —Sincerely, Clay Potts.
Dear Sir: The ends of rainbows have not been explored much of late, though several famous expeditions were mounted in the nineteenth century. The prominent Victorian spectrologist Hugo Pennybetter, whose success as a student of all things related to the rainbow is all the more remarkable because he was completely colorblind, explored a number of rainbows in South America in the winter (or, below the equator, summer) of 1877-1878. He was able to reach the ends of four rainbows, a record never equaled by any other explorer. At the end of the first he found a pot of gold, but only inferior 10-karat stuff that failed even to pay the expenses of the expedition. At the end of the second he found a unicorn, a gryphon, a chimera, a cockatrice, a sphinx, and a duck. At the end of the third he found a platter (not a creel) of trout, but (surprisingly enough) speckled trout, not rainbow trout. It is not known what he found at the end of the fourth, since, having found it, he refused to come back.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I recently received notice from my natural-gas supplier that the company has petitioned the Public Utilities Commission for permission to lower my rates for natural gas.
Frankly, I am appalled. Have we completely forgotten the capitalist values that made our country great? When a company finds a way to cut costs, is it proper to pass that savings on to the consumer? By no means! We are not living in North Korea. This is the United States of America, and the proper way to spend any money saved is on executive bonuses. If there is any left over, it may be spent on advertisements with some catchy slogan about passing the savings on to the consumer. But the money is certainly not to be handed over to all and sundry willy-nilly! The very idea strikes at the heart of our capitalist faith.
Fortunately, we the faithful are not left without recourse. A wise provision of Commonwealth law requires utility companies to notify us of our right to protest their dangerous and unpatriotic rate decreases. (I have enclosed an example of the notification sent by the gas company, which tried to conceal it by folding it in with the bill.)
I call on all right-thinking consumers to lodge vigorous protests with the public Utilities Commission. Let your voices be heard. Let it be known that the citizens of this Commonwealth will not stand for creeping socialism. Tell your Public Utilities Commission that you expect a salutary display of greed from utility-company executives, not some welfare handout. It is not too late to stop this terrible miscarriage of capitalism. Under Commonwealth law, your voice counts! Together, we can shame our gas company into rescinding this rate decrease before it is too late.
——Sincerely, Kim Jong-Un, Bethel Park.
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ANNOUNCEMENT.
The Dormont Medical Association’s Walk to Cure AIDS, previously scheduled for this coming Saturday, has been canceled. Last Saturday’s Walk to Cure Brain Cancer was well attended, and yet there is still brain cancer. Nor will we speak of the miserable failure of our Walk to Cure the Common Cold, which seemed so promising at the time. In fact, not a single one of our walks has cured the disease it targeted. We are beginning to harbor suspicions as to whether walking is effectual at all in the treatment and prevention of these diseases. Even stronger measures may be necessary, and we have reluctantly concluded that it is best to focus our efforts on giving some sort of financial support to medical research. The General Committee will meet to discuss this new approach Thursday evening at 7 p.m., and members are asked to bring ideas for fundraising activities.
OUR VALUED CORRESPONDENTS.
In response to Saturday evening’s article by the Rev. Bob-Bob Lee, and in particular in response to the street address at the end of the article, reader Dies Irae writes:
Hey, Virginia ended Lee-Jackson-King Day as early as 2000 (taking effect in 2001, since the holiday being in January snuck in before the legislative session). Now it has King Day on Monday like the rest of the country, and Lee-Jackson Day the Friday before that. See Va. Code Ann. § 2.2-3300. I find it hard to believe Chesapeake, in the heart of the Tidewater and not Coal Country, would retain such a throwback name for a thoroughfare. Now, perhaps if they had renamed the Eastbound lanes King Blvd and Westbound lanes Lee-Jackson…
Indeed, Dr. Boli was very disappointed when Virginia scuttled Lee-Jackson-King Day. It was his second-favorite holiday, after Hitler-Stalin-Churchill Day. There is simply nothing else like it in the calendar. When else is it appropriate for Dr. Boli to fly his special Black Power Edition Commemorative Confederate Battle Flag?
As for the Lee-Jackson-King Boulevard in question, however, Dr. Boli believes that the “Lee” in the name is the Rev. Bob-Bob himself. On the planning map provided by the City of Chesapeake Public Works Department, Division of Public Works, it is marked as a gravel driveway.
MEMORANDUM.
FROM: The Demonic Forces, LLC
TO: Local Coven No. 4872, Blandville High School
Mesdames:
It has been a matter of some discussion among supervisors and staff down here that the quality of rhymes in your spells has fallen off markedly in the past few years.
It costs us a lot of effort to make the head cheerleader sprain her ankle or give your algebra teacher hives. It seems to us that the least you can do is cast spells with real rhymes. Just yesterday we heard this sorry attempt at a spell from one of your members:
Seven goats and six young lambs,
Make this year’s musical go off with a bang.
Never mind the rhythm, which is sorry indeed. What made anyone think that “lambs” rhymed with “bang”? Have you young ladies learned nothing at all in English class? Are we rappers or guitar-strumming coffeehouse-open-mike-night folk singers, that we should be satisfied with half-rhymes and assonance? No, we are not. We are proud members of the Kingdom of Evil. We demand the real thing, and will not come through with the goods for anything less. Our tender, shell-like ears sometimes burst into flames when we hear especially atrocious spells, and we have enough to do with flames already without aggravating our condition.
We still remember a lovely spell by Miss Aralia Lumpen, Class of 1923, that nearly moved us to tears:
Eyebrow of weasel and leaf of begonia,
Make Mr. Bittern come down with pneumonia.
We were glad to comply with such a beautifully worded request and sent Mr. Bittern his pneumonia at once—although, as it was a highly contagious strain, Miss Lumpen ended up joining us down here much sooner than she expected.
It is plain that your members require remedial training in the elements of simple doggerel. We have decreed, therefore, that all spells from your coven must henceforth be submitted to your English teacher for evaluation. (Miss Pym has been in our service for some time. How do you think she snagged the vice principal last year?) Only if she approves of your rhymes will the spells be forwarded to our Action Committee. This extra step is regrettably necessary to ensure the quality of your work.
Love and kisses,
Your Friends Below.
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST,
by the Rev. Bob-Bob Lee.
Did you know that President Obama lives at number 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Did you know that the Goryeo army defeated an army from Hubaekje in Korea in the year 934?
These two facts seem utterly unrelated, but the sinister meaning becomes clear when we realize that 934 from 1600 leaves 666!
I will go further. Did you know that Joseph Robinette Biden has a girl’s middle name? More importantly, did you know that he is the forty-seventh Vice President of the United States? Now, what do we get if we multiply 47 by 14.170212766? It cannot be mere coincidence!
Christian men and women, you must be aware that we are living in the end times. The number of the beast is everywhere. You yourself may be bearing the beast’s mark without knowing it! Try this simple exercise: assign each letter in your name a numeric value (A=1, Z=26, and so on for all the letters in between except H, which is equal to 734), and add all those values together. Let us call the result n. Now add n to the product of 111 multiplied by 12. Now subtract n. Now divide the result by 2. If your quotient is 666, you are bearing the mark of the beast and have already been claimed by Satan!
What, then, can we do? Well, of course, we must remember that God hears every prayer. Then he checks to see whether it came from someone bearing the mark of the beast, and if it did, he tosses it in his big old incinerator. So, for most of you lost souls, there’s no point in praying. Your best bet is cowering, which will not spare you on the Day of Judgment, but may preserve your doomed life for a few hours or days during the time of tribulation.
But there is one alternative. We can be saved by faith. God has promised salvation to all who believe in Jesus Christ. And how can we demonstrate faith? We demonstrate it by showing God that we do not rely on worldly goods to protect us. Instead, we show utter contempt for the things of this world by selling them all and sending the entire proceeds to Bob-Bob Lee Ministries, Inc., 666 Lee-Jackson-King Blvd., Chesapeake, Va. (The street address is one of those silly coincidences to which the wise will pay no attention whatsoever.)
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: Okay, I have what may seem like a silly question, but it’s kind of freaking me out. Where are all the pomegranates coming from? Until a few years ago, people ate pomegranates where pomegranates grow, and in the rest of the world, pomegranates were a rare specialty item in gourmet stores. But then suddenly somebody started this rumor that pomegranates cured cancer or baldness or something, and every supermarket and convenience store in North America was stuffed to bursting with hundreds of gallons of 100% real pomegranate juice. Have you ever tried to juice a pomegranate? Do you know how many pomegranates it takes to make one gallon of juice? (Answer: about three dozen, according to the all-knowing Internet.)
So where did all those pomegranates suddenly come from? I mean, suddenly everybody in North America needed pomegranate juice, and there were somehow enough pomegranates to make it for them? But pomegranates grow on trees, for Pete’s sake. You can’t just plant a pomegranate seed in April and have a bumper crop of pomegranates by June. I’ve been thinking myself into a dither, but I can’t for the life of me understand where all the pomegranates are coming from. Can you help me? —Sincerely, A Botanist.
Dear Sir or Madam: Dr. Boli regrets that you have asked him one of the few questions he cannot answer. It is not because he does not know the answer, but because it would be exceedingly dangerous for you to know it. There are dark forces at work, darker than you can imagine. If you value your safety and your sanity—if you love your family—you will put all questions about pomegranates out of your head at once, and think about bananas or carambolas instead.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
