Posts by Dr. Boli
ADVICE FOR SCREENWRITERS.
IF YOUR CHARACTERS have a small problem to solve, it is always solved on the third attempt. Viewers will not have patience to sit through four attempts, but they will not believe that it was solved on the second attempt.
RETURN OF THE SPECTATOR.
A MOMENTOUS ANNIVERSARY has passed almost unnoticed in the world of letters. Indeed, when Dr. Boli discovered that his secretary had neglected to remind him of it, he raised his voice by nearly a minor third before deciding that mercy in this case was more to be desired than justice.
Three hundred years ago this month, the most elegant, most astute, and most delightful periodical publication in the history of English letters began its run. The Spectator has not only all these virtues, which made its best essays required reading for generations of schoolchildren, but it also has this one additional virtue: it was the inspiration for Dr. Boli’s own Magazine, which has never had any higher ambition than to be a pale shadow of the great and enduring work of Addison and Steele. Without the Spectator, the Magazine you are reading now would never have been conceived.
Nor has the Spectator lost any of its relevance. Indeed, we might say that technology has at last caught up with it: for the Spectator, and all the dozens of similar publications in the same era, were really nothing less than blogs looking for an Internet. Like the blogs of today, they were filled with short occasional essays and miscellaneous matter, updated several times a week; and they built small communities of admiring and engaged readers around them.
What better way to read the Spectator, then, than the way it would doubtless have been read if it had been published today? Here is the Spectator, exactly three hundred years after its original publication, presented in a form that brings the early eighteenth century back to life in the Internet age. Follow it here, and learn why the 1700s were really the golden age of blogging:
THE SPECTATOR
Three Hundredth Anniversary
(If you find the site “under review,” check back again in an hour or so. Our esteemed host suddenly becomes a bit twitchy when a new site begins to attract visitors.)
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I write to complain about the extraordinary prevalence of inaccurate information on the Internet. You call yourself an “editor,” yet I see little sign that the Internet is subjected to any sort of editing at all. As the Internet continues to grow, with literally hundreds or even thousands of “Web pages” now available to all and sundry at the click of a mouse, it has become painfully apparent that quality has been sacrificed on the bloody altar of quantity. It’s time you took your responsibilities a bit more seriously than that! If the Internet is too much for one editor to handle, surely you could hire an assistant. I understand that the Internet has become a very profitable operation, so there is no excuse for stinting on necessities. If I do not see some improvement in the quality of the Internet very soon, I shall be forced to cancel my subscription.
Sincerely,
Randall Hall, Esq.,
President,
Western Penna Ass’n of Crabby Old Men.
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From DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION.
Bacchus. In ancient Roman mythology, Bacchus, in addition to being god of wine, was also god of blue raspberry soda; but until recently the references to this latter attribute (necessarily veiled on account of the discipline of the mysteries) have been thoroughly misunderstood by scholars.
A TRIVIA QUIZ FOR YOUR DOG.
EXERCISE YOUR DOG’S higher cognitive abilities with this simple test. You may be surprised to learn how much your dog remembers.
- What famous English general defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, at the cost of his own life?
- In the Old Testament, who married Boaz?
- What kind of ship has three or more masts, with fore-and-aft sails on the aftermost mast and square sails on the others?
- What covers the top of a building?
- In the game of golf, what name is given to the area outside the fairway?
- What animal, intimately related to the dog, did Little Red Riding Hood meet on her way to her grandmother’s house?
- In jazz, what is the name given to a repeated musical figure, usually two bars long?
- Which English colonist did Pocahontas marry?
Answers:
From DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION.
Greek drama. Many attempts have been made to explain the presence of the chorus in Greek drama on purely artistic grounds, but more recent scholarship has focused instead on a trail of broken kneecaps left by the Children of Dionysus, an Athenian theatrical trade union.
ASH WEDNESDAY SERVICES.
John Calvin Orthodox Reformed Church will not be holding Ash Wednesday services this year, or any year. If you were thinking of repenting, save yourselves the trouble. You’re all damned anyway, so you might as well stay home and wallow in your own filth the way you do every other day of the year.
St. Britney Parish invites you to get your Lenten mortifications off to a good start at our All-Dan-Schutte musical service. Bring a guitar and strum along if you like.
Holy Regression Nicolaitan Orthodox Church reminds everyone not to fall for the heathen lie that says Lent begins this week. If the Julian calendar was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for you.
Blandville Unitarian-Universalist Church is a house of worship with a profound respect for all religions. This year we will be sacrificing eight Methodists to Huitzilopochtli.
St. Barnabas Lutheran Church invites you to repent for all the awful things you did in Libya this past week. We may not have been directly involved, but as Lutherans we know that we are all somehow responsible.
ASK DR. BOLI.
Dear Dr. Boli: How does the Internet work? —Sincerely, T. B.-L.
Dear Sir: The Internet works by means of a technique called distributed processing. When you make a request for a Web page, it is immediately typed and drawn for you by expert HTML coders. Obviously, the vast array of information and entertainment available to you through your Web browser would never be possible if all of it emanated from a single source. Instead, the work is distributed to HTML sweatshops throughout the world, so that, for example, one busy young woman in Guangzhou is responsible for every occurrence of the letter A, while a moonlighting divinity student in Aberdeen handles the punctuation, and an eleven-year-old girl in Kuala Lumpur is breathlessly waiting to see whether you will require any ampersands. The illustrations are a comparatively easy matter, since the same three photographs of cats make up most of the graphics on the Internet. All these materials are sorted at vast sorting plants in Bangalore and sent through a series of metaphorical “tubes” (which are really more like conveyor belts) to your Web browser, which adds the proper captions to the cat photographs and displays the results on your screen. If your browser is not currently displaying a captioned photograph of a cat, it probably means that the system has broken down somewhere; but you may be assured that service will be restored shortly, as soon as the foreman takes the proper disciplinary measures.
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