No. 28. The Road-Runner.

The road-runner (Celeritas magnifica) of the American Southwest is familiar to biologists as an outstanding example of anticipatory evolution. The bird relies on its human neighbors to build the roads on which it runs; yet human beings did not arrive in its territory until millions of years after the evolution of the first road-runners. Generation after generation of road-runners stood around in the desert staring into space and thinking, “Now what?” Only when human beings arrived and began laying out highways between their pueblos could the road-runners finally consummate their true destiny, which is to be pursued at high speeds by intelligent but ludicrously ineffectual predators.

Appropriately enough, the road-runner allegorically represents the virtue of patience.

Dear Dr. Boli: Pit bulls have become a very popular dog breed lately, and I usually see them just as housepets. But they have a peculiar shape that makes me think they were bred for some practical employment. The name “pit” suggests something to do with the stock market, but I couldn’t find any confirmation of that speculation. What was the original purpose for which pit bulls were bred? —Sincerely, Bancroft E. FitzWallaby, President, Mid-Atlantic Association of Idle Speculators.

Dear Sir: You will find all sorts of incorrect assertions about the origin of pit bulls, usually based on folk etymology and presented as fact. The truth, however, is simple, and not hard to deduce from the form of the animal, which you correctly guessed was dictated by practical utility. Pit bulls were bred to be dishwasher-preparation dogs in the “dish pit” of busy mess halls, dining halls, restaurants, and other eating establishments. They are the product of generations of selective breeding with the aim of producing a dog whose tongue is broad and agile enough to sweep a plate clean in two licks. Furthermore, many of the pit bulls you supposed were simply housepets are in fact productively employed in their families at the work for which their ancestry has fitted them.

Dear Dr. Boli: Everywhere I look, I keep reading about the dangers of “blue light” from computer monitors, phone screens, and televisions. What’s so bad about blue light? —Sincerely, A Man Who’s Colorblind Anyway.

Dear Sir: Public-health experts worry that, if you are constantly exposed to blue light, you will become a Blue Light Special. And look what happened to Kmart.

This image does not have a caption yet. It will be published with the correct caption as soon as a thorough search of the Akashic Records has been made.

---

On the subject of “How Modern Science Is Making Life Better,” our correspondent “KevinT” writes, “I would be greatly interested in a blog post about the research methodology the good Doctor uses to find these amusing images. And the talents he applies to the explicatory text…”

The research methodology is probably not as arcane as our correspondent thinks it is. Every once in a while, it is an amusing pastime to look through the recent additions to the scanned publications in the Internet Archive—filtering out anything published later than 95 years ago. Any magazine opened at random will probably provide a few illustrations. They must be cleaned up and dressed in their Sunday best to be published here, but that is what the GIMP is for.

As for the explicatory text, that is a more complex endeavor. Many of the captions under these images are entirely incorrect as they are found, but the correct versions can be discovered by the methods explained more than a century ago by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. He tells us that “at a certain high stage of knowledge, man can even penetrate to the everlasting sources that underlie the passing things of time.… Those who have learnt to read such a living script can look back into a far more distant past than that which external history depicts—and they can also, by direct spiritual perception, describe those matters which history relates, in a far more trustworthy manner than is possible by the latter.” This is called reading the Akashic Records, and, as Dr. Steiner patiently elucidates, it is completely different from making stuff up.

From a 1961 ad: behold the immensity of the Big Boy, which by today’s standards is a little bitty hamburger.

Americans keep getting fatter. That is the observation of platoons of experts who, after studying the trends on their graphs, are so depressed about the implications of the squiggly upward line that they just want to lock the bedroom door and eat a whole bag of Doritos.

But why are Americans more obese now than they were half a century ago?

It’s a difficult question, the experts say—so difficult that you will need platoons of experts to answer it. They propose many hypotheses. Perhaps it is because of artificial preservatives or chemical additives. Or perhaps it is because we eat prepared meals instead of cooking at home. Or perhaps it is something in the kind of oil our food is cooked in—perhaps we ought to cook everything in olive oil, or in lard.

Where there are many hypotheses, it indicates that no one of them is satisfactory. They have all failed the test: they have not produced a theory, which is to say an explanation that makes testable predictions that come true.

Dr. Boli will now offer a hypothesis of his own, and any graduate students in public health may test its predictions. Dr. Boli’s hypothesis is that Americans are getting fatter because they are eating more food.

His evidence for that assertion is a series of observations made over a more than usually long life. But fortunately some of the evidence is available to anyone who cares to do a bit of archaeology. You need only pick up your pick and go digging in the menus of chain restaurants.

If you are in the Pittsburgh orbit, for example, you are familiar with Eat’n Park, a chain of “family restaurants” that began as a drive-in burger joint. Down at the bottom of the list of hamburgers is the littlest of them all, the Superburger.

If it’s so little, why is it called “Super”?

Well, because, when it was introduced, it was immense. It was a feast for a glutton. It had twice the meat of a normal cheeseburger. (In fact, it was originally a Big Boy, but it had to be renamed when Eat’n Park lost the Big Boy franchise.)

So why did the Superburger shrink?

It didn’t. It’s still the same size. But bigger, more glutton-friendly hamburgers grew up around it, until it looked like a miniature model of a hamburger by comparison.

You can see the same phenomenon wherever these little bits of history are preserved in chain-restaurant menus. The biggest thing on the menu fifty years ago is the smallest thing on the menu today. This pattern reflects, and perhaps caused, a change in Americans’ expectations. We demand more food in a meal today. We eat snacks with the same number of calories that made up dinner in the middle of the twentieth century.

This is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis: that more Americans are obese because we have developed a cultural expectation of eating more food.

To make the hypothesis into a scientific theory, its predictions must be tested.

Some nutrition advocates have tried to match the rise in obesity to the rise of fast-food chains like McDonald’s. But they usually fail. The curves don’t track: there is a significant period after fast food became a huge business when Americans still weren’t getting fatter.

Dr. Boli predicts, however, that the rise in obesity will closely follow the rise of bigger and bigger cheeseburgers that dwarf the former giants like the Superburger, the Big Mac, and the Big Boy. In other words, he predicts that statistical-historical analysis will show a close relationship between getting fatter and eating more food.

Graduate students, you have your assignment.

The American National Standards Institute Subcommittee on Brainy Things has extended its deadline for comments on the proposed ANSI standard for stupid. The subcommittee hopes to end the decades of pointless argument over what is stupid and what is not. The deadline has been extended because, while a number of comments have already been submitted, most of them were obviously from complete morons.

Dear Dr. Boli: I read somewhere once that a human being is worth like ten quid in chemicals, or, what, about thirteen “bucks” for you Yanks? But I was thinking that doesn’t seem to take into account what makes human life, like, worthwhile, you know? I mean, there’s more than chemicals, right? It’s about what you do with your life, right? So I was wondering: what is the real value of a human life? —Sincerely, name withheld, Lambeth Palace, London.

Dear Sir or Madam: Since, coincidentally, we were talking about privacy policies and other legal paraphernalia foisted on consumers by car companies, it seems reasonable to mention the findings of two United States Senators about one particular car company.

Between 2020 and 2024, Honda shared data from 97,000 cars with Verisk, which paid Honda $25,920, or 26 cents per car, and it did so without obtaining informed consent from consumers, according to information Honda provided Senator Wyden’s office.

Verisk is a company whose business is “data analytics and risk assessment,” according to its Wikipedia article, which appears to have been written by someone at the company. In other words, Honda sold every piece of information that could be known about you from your interactions with its electronic services, which includes things like your sex life and your genetic information, for 26¢.

Actual sales figures seem to Dr. Boli to be the only realistic and objective way to determine the value of a thing. On the open market, a human life is worth 26¢.

Probably not, to judge by this little notice on a page Dr. Boli was just looking at.

This is the sort of thing that makes Dr. Boli incandescently furious, thus qualifying him for a place in social media if only he would get over his prejudice and open an account with one of the various billionaire supervillains’ social-media empires. “Inclusive language” indeed! In most American textbooks there are six kingdoms of life, yet the Fauna Flora Funga Initiative thinks “Fauna, Flora, and Funga” is inclusive enough. Because who cares about Protista, Archaea, and Bacteria?

Well, Dr. Boli cares, and he thinks the people at FFF (“We are unthinkable without fungi”) ought to consider where they and their precious fungi would be without the three apparently unmentionable kingdoms of life.

Don’t be a tool of regressive special interests! When you say or write “flora, funga, and fauna,” keep going and add the P, the A, and the B. Join the FFFPAB Initiative today.

Scarlet Honeycreeper.—In spite of its bold coloration, the Scarlet Honeycreeper (Certhia coccinea) has evolved the astonishing ability to become completely invisible to predators by standing directly behind another Scarlet Honeycreeper.