Posts by Dr. Boli
From DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION,
Second Series.
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Tilden, Samuel J. Samuel Tilden suffered from Tourette’s syndrome for most of his life, but it went undiagnosed for years because he didn’t know any dirty words.
—
Are you misinformed yet? It’s never too late to mend.
EXTRAORDINARY LITERARY EVENT.
NOW AVAILABLE
Dr. Boli’s Encyclopedia of Misinformation
in a handy one-volume edition.
DID YOU KNOW that “apricot” is merely an inferior grade of peach? That the judge at the first Westminster Kennel Club show narrowly avoided being crushed by the paw of a giant schnauzer? That Pertinax was the first Roman emperor to hop on one foot for more than three hours straight?
If you did not know these important facts, then you have not been reliably misinformed.
Do not despair! Help is at hand. Now, for the very first time, Dr. Boli has gathered all the misinformation in the known universe and compressed it between the covers of one handy portable volume. Read it, and you can be as completely misinformed as the most powerful politicians and professors on earth.
No expense has been spared in the production of this lavishly illustrated volume. The paper is first-rate, the binding meets the most stringent federal safety standards, and the type has been painstakingly designed, letter by letter, by none other than Dr. Boli himself.
Yet the expense to you, the sagacious reader, is negligible. You can have Dr. Boli’s Encyclopedia of Misinformation for less than 1/150 the cost of a standard encyclopedia—a work which, being filled with mere information, has almost no practical application in the real world of today.
It is certainly not necessary to enlarge upon the potential benefits of this publication to the educated population at large. If you had been stymied in your search for the perfect Christmas gift, be stymied no longer. A suitable number of copies will take care of all your Christmas shopping at once. You may also wish to donate copies to your local library, school, and homeless shelter.
NOW IN PRESS.
Dr. Boli’s Lavishly Illustrated Folio History of the Coffee Table. Perhaps the world’s most inconvenient piece of furniture, the coffee table was a fixture of suburban living rooms in the bygone days of the middle twentieth century. In this nostalgic look back at the ranch houses and split-levels of yore, Dr. Boli traces the mysterious origins of the coffee table in the pseudo-orientalism of the late Victorian era, through the age of modern design and into the early days of postmodernism. A special chapter on the medical aspects of coffee-table design details the many forms of knee and shin injuries frequently reported during the heyday of the coffee table’s popularity. The illustrations in this generously sized volume are so delightful, and the binding so attractive, that you will certainly want to leave this book out for your guests to admire, perhaps laid open on some sort of low, flat surface. Folio, 328 pp.
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IN THANKSGIVING.
IF I COULD stop the world for just one day,
Like Joshua, command the sun, “Stand still!”—
Would time stop, too? The hours that rush away,
Would they sit, patient, waiting on my will?
If I had stopped the years from rolling on,
Would you stay as you were ten years ago?
Could we stay happy in those days long gone?
No point in asking: we can never know.
So I can only hope that life is best
When it moves forward; even if we bend
A little lower with each year, a rest
Is waiting for us somewhere at the end.
In memory of Patricia M. Fullinwider, 1940-2011.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
ON THIS DAY in 563 B.C., Thespis became the first Greek actor to portray a fictional character on stage. Before that time, actors had appeared only as themselves, making pre-Thespian Greek drama the dullest form of entertainment known to mankind until the invention of the modern reality show.
OUR VALUED CORRESPONDENTS.
A FREQUENT CORRESPONDENT by the name of “Martin the Mess” responds to an advertisement for Superior Reading Lamps:
Well, I guess when you’re well into your third century and your eyesight isn’t what it used to be, and you read all those old pre-Victorian public-domain books with their tiny cramped printing and obsolete hard-to-read fonts where the S’s look like F’s and so forth, you need one of those things.
In fact, Dr. Boli, who is indeed well into his third century, has no need of high-powered lamps, making do very well with a pair of quadrifocal corrective lenses of his own design. It is, however, fascinating to consider from a merely scientific point of view the effects of aging on the eyes. It is a curious fact that, in many individuals, the primary effect of aging on the eye is farsightedness, or presbyopia (from Greek terms meaning “priest-eye”). It becomes progressively more difficult to focus the eye on objects nearby, but easier to see things in the distance. The effect becomes more pronounced with advancing age, and, after the first century and a half or so, one begins to notice that it is a temporal as well as a spacial phenomenon. The present is a bit of a blur, but the past appears in sharp focus. Nor is this temporal farsightedness unidirectional: today, at the age of 228, Dr. Boli finds that he can see a century into the future with perfect clarity.
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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.
Otto and Innocent in happier times.
ON THIS DAY in 1210, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV was excommunicated by Innocent III, who had always resented Otto for being one Roman numeral ahead of him. This setback made the Roman Emperor somewhat less holy, and he was forced to turn to his uncle King John of England, whose support, curiously enough, did not make him any more holy in the least.