Posts by Dr. Boli
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
MEMORANDUM.
To: All Employees
From: The President
Re: Election Day
My fellow employees:
All of us here at the Schenectady Small Arms & Biscuit Co. have our various duties. There are the sales representatives, whose duty is to make sure all our purchasers have a pleasant experience. There are our accounting wizards, whose duty is to be ever vigilant so that that not a penny is lost from the ledger. There is the receptionist, whose duty is to see to it that anyone who calls on the telephone is directed to Vaclav in Customer Service, so that Vaclav can practice his English. There is that guy who watches the coffee machine all day—I’m not sure whether he was hired to do that, but anyway you get the idea.
But there is one duty we all share, and that is to be good citizens of this great country of ours. That’s why I’m delighted to announce a new employee benefit program that will actually reward our Team Members for serving their country. It’s simple: all you have to do is go out and vote on Election Day, and you’ll see a bonus in your next paycheck. We’re even making sure you have time to vote, and there will be a chartered motor coach in front of the building at 10 a.m. to take you to the polls.
This program is being implemented through an innovative partnership with the Vot-O-Mat Corporation, makers of the electronic voting machines used in our fair Commonwealth. Through this partnership, we’ll be able to know exactly which of our employees voted on Election Day. Even more exciting, we’ll be able to know which employees voted in the best interests of our beloved country and which ones were filthy traitors who voted against everything true patriots hold sacred, so that we can determine exactly how to distribute the appropriate rewards.
So don’t forget to do your duty for the country you love. And don’t forget to mark the time you spend voting as “vacation” on your time sheet.
With Warmest Regards,
J. Rutherford Pinckney, President.
A FRIGHTENING STORY FOR HALLOWEEN NIGHT.
Once upon a time there was a pleasant little celebration called Halloween, which occurred on the evening of October 31. Children would dress in improvised costumes as ghosts or witches and parade from door to door, receiving apples or homemade cookies from the delighted neighbors, and returning home to popcorn and hot chocolate with the family.
But somehow, through the unspeakable influence of the almighty dollar, the demons of capitalism turned the homey one-night celebration into a commercial extravaganza occupying two months of the calendar and second only to Christmas in the filthy lucre it brings into the pockets of the robber barons. Now Halloween costumes are sold in vast emporia that spring up all over the suburbs like poisonous mushrooms, and children are warned by television and newspapers never to accept fruit or homemade treats, the warnings reinforced by horror stories straight out of the Brothers Grimm involving children who were injured or poisoned by wicked ogres with delicious-looking apples and brownies. These stories, if one follows them back to their source, inevitably turn out to have been supplied to the media by associations of packaged-candy manufacturers.
This is without qualification the scariest story Dr. Boli has ever heard.
YOUR HARDING-AGNEW YARD SIGNS.
It is a known fact that no single factor more affects the outcome of a presidential election than the number and placement (placement being more important than most people realize) of candidates’ yard signs. These signs, approved by the General Directorate of the Fringe Party, may be printed in tabloid format; click on each image to download a PDF file.
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THE DAWN OF SURREALISM.
Note: This article has been rendered even more surreal by the strange process of drift that occasionally affects images from Google Books. Some day Dr. Boli may attempt to correct the problem. Evidently that day is not today.
What is surrealism? “Surrealist works,” says the omniscient Wikipedia, “feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur.” By this standard, the most perfectly surrealist works of literature are the type samples issued by the great type foundries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr. Boli will make no further argument for this proposition, because argument is superfluous where demonstration carries conviction, These samples are all drawn from a single catalog of the Economical Printing Company of New York, issued in 1896:
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FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
USEFUL SPELLS FOR ELEMENTARY-LEVEL WIZARDS.
Magnum opus. Opens Trollope’s The Way We Live Now to the title page.
Toastum praematurum. Causes the toaster to pop up before the toast is done.
Alea jacta est. Begins play in a game of Monopoly.
Loc. cit. Refers to the same page in a work previously cited.
Poco a poco accelerando. Causes the vehicle in front of the caster (but only in the same lane) to accelerate gradually.
Carthago delenda est. Places a mild curse on Carthage, North Carolina. Inexplicably ineffective against other cities named Carthage.
Incredulitas. Cures the caster of irrational beliefs in ghosts, fairies, monsters, magic, homeopathy, socialism, capitalism, etc.
OUR VALUED CORRESPONDENTS.
On the subject of opening windows for ventilation in offices, “Violet” writes:
Opening a window only works in specific climates, however. Here in south Texas, opening a window to get cooler would be throwing gasoline on a fire.
Clearly this is because the southern Texan is opening the wrong sort of window. To cool off, an office worker in Texas ought to open a window in Manitoba. The problem, of course, is that Manitoba is situated at some distance from Texas. Dr. Boli understands the difficulty, and has consulted with some of North America’s best engineers, who after several minutes of earnest discussion have proposed a solution to it.
Proposed route of the Brownsville & Hudson’s Bay Temperature-Exchange Conduit.
Let a conduit be built from Brownsville to York Factory on the shores of Hudson’s Bay. The conduit would be a sort of tube, about four yards in diameter, in which powerful turbines would be located at intervals of about ten per mile. During the hot months, these turbines would capture the cooling breezes of the Hudson’s Bay and direct them southward into Texas, where various outlets would be located in southern Texan office parks. In the winter, the turbines would reverse direction, and warm air from the sunnier climes of southern Texas would be directed toward Manitoba, making the shore of Hudson’s Bay an attractive place to live year-round, and doubtless fostering the growth of prosperous cities of the latest artistic design. Prodigious amounts of energy otherwise wasted in cooling Texans and heating Manitobans would be saved.
The only trifling detail to be worked out is the power source for the turbines themselves. Dr. Boli’s engineers are leaning toward the idea of opening a series of fitness clubs along the proposed route, where ordinary citizens would pay for the privilege of exercising on pedal-powered machinery that would be connected to the great turbines by a system of belts.