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DR. BOLI’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MISINFORMATION.

Literary Supplement.

Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens was not paid by the word: that is a popular misapprehension. He was paid by the syllable.

Hawthorne, Julian. Julian Hawthorne inherited all his father Nathaniel’s prodigious literary talent, but straitened circumstances forced him to pawn it.

Hemingway, Ernest. Psychiatrists have determined that Hemingway’s trademark literary style was the result of a severe case of attention deficit disorder.

Joyce, James. When he was sober, James Joyce was completely unable to interpret his own Finnegans Wake.

Shakespeare, William. William Shakespeare sold the dramatic adaptation rights for The Phoenix and the Turtle to John Fletcher, but Richard Burbage described Fletcher’s play as “unproducible.”

Sterne, Laurence. Laurence Sterne was so furious at his printer’s emendations to the first volume of Tristram Shandy that he finally took a brush and entirely covered the most objectionable page in the proof with black ink. The printer, mistaking this effusion of bad temper for one of Sterne’s typographical peculiarities, printed the whole page black—much to Sterne’s private amusement.

Zola, Emile. Astonishingly, it is reported that Emile Zola believed his surreal soap opera Nana was “realistic.”

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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY.

ON THIS DAY in 1931, the first experimental big-screen television was demonstrated in Camden, New Jersey. Its 36-inch round screen required a Nipkow disk more than four storeys high, spun by a 200-horsepower stationary industrial steam engine. A similar Nipkow disk was required at the transmitting station approximately 50 yards east of the receiving set. The Radio Corporation of America determined that the prototype was not suitable for mass production.

 

From Dr. Boli’s Encyclopedia of Misinformation.

Termites. Much as bees communicate information by means of a specialized dance, termites communicate by means of a primitive form of opera.

FORTHCOMING WORKS BY DR. BOLI.

Archaeology of the Middle Reagan Period. A complete field manual for archaeologists working on this historically important period in our remote past. With his accustomed thoroughness, Dr. Boli shows where the most important remains of the Reagan Period can be found; how to identify remains of the period by its characteristic markers (such as the ubiquitous litter of Los Angeles Olympics memorabilia and Coca-Cola cans with the word “New” prominently displayed); how to conserve such fragile artifacts as LCD watches, primitive personal computers, and fast-food premiums; and how the Institute for North American Archaeology successfully reconstructed and displayed a remarkably complete Plymouth Reliant. Handy size for field work. 12mo, 264 pp.

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DR. BOLI’S ALLEGORICAL BESTIARY.

No. 11.—The Roc.

ROCS ARE LARGE birds native to the Arabian peninsula and other mythological lands. They are not very common, which is just as well, since a mature roc is about the size of a large passenger jet. Rocs feed mostly on the henchmen of villains in Hollywood Arabian fantasies; they have been known to abduct raven-haired princesses as well, but have never been known to succeed in eating one. Indeed, because of the prevalence of swashbuckling heroes throughout the roc’s natural range, the abduction of a princess usually proves fatal to even the most determined and ferocious roc. Most rocs, therefore, have long since learned to restrict their diets to henchmen, no matter how temptingly unguarded a princess may appear to be. This has caused a shortage of henchmen throughout the Caliphate, which in turn may have contributed to a marked fall in the quality of sinister plots, though there has been no shortage of wicked and scheming wazirs. The Audubon Society, concerned that the shortage of the rocs’ natural prey may lead to a further diminution of their numbers, has experimented with importing other kinds of henchmen and releasing them into the wild. The rocs, however, seem to show a marked distaste for mob henchmen, and mad scientists’ henchmen (though more to the rocs’ taste) have proved difficult to obtain.

Rocs breed in late winter, and the female roc lays a single egg about the size of a common fast-food restaurant. A few weeks later the egg is ready to hatch, for which the assistance of power tools is necessary. After the hatching, the female roc guards the nest while the male goes in search of food. The young at first are not ready for a diet of pure henchmen, and must be fed partially digested bureaucrats and minor functionaries until they have grown sufficiently. They learn to fly with the assistance of their parents, who toss them off the highest coastal cliffs when the time comes for them to leave the nest. The roc learns to fly, at least vertically, on the way down.

The roc teaches us that Happiness Must Be Earned.

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ASK DR. BOLI.

Dear Dr. Boli: I find myself facing a difficult theoretical problem, and I am at a loss as to how to arrive at the solution. If the distance between Pittsburgh and Chicago is 500 miles, and a train sets off from Chicago at 45 miles per hour, and another sets off from Pittsburgh at 50 miles per hour, when will they meet? —Sincerely, A Student of Mathematics in a Local Secondary School.

Dear Sir or Madam: They will not meet. You neglected to mention that the train from Pittsburgh is headed for Philadelphia, whereas the train from Chicago is headed for Milwaukee. Without this information the problem is, of course, insoluble. With the proper information, however, it becomes trivially easy.

 

On This Day in History.

ON THIS DAY in 1857, the famous tea clipper Pertinacious was wrecked in a ferocious gale just outside Zanesville, Ohio. To this day no one knows how it got there.

THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.

No. 241.—A Simple Time-Machine.

IT GOES WITHOUT saying that Ned and I were attentive to all our classes in school, for a thorough education is the foundation of future success—a truth that was even then abundantly apparent to us. But I must confess that, for me at least, the study of history held a special fascination. The stirring stories of heroes, saints, and conquerors of old filled my imagination with a thousand exciting scenes. How I wished I could have been there myself to see Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Washington crossing the Delaware, or any of the other great heroes of history crossing any of the other great rivers of geography. Ned, too, harbored those very thoughts, as he revealed to me once during a particularly spirited game of double solitaire.

We had never seriously considered the possibility of bringing our dreams to fruition until some time later, when one of the technical journals to which Ned subscribed (I believe the title was Red-Blooded Adventures) carried an article about a man who built a time-machine. This he used to travel back to the Stone Age, where he met a number of cave women (all blonde, to judge by the accompanying illustration) who quite naturally took more pleasure in his company than in that of the primitive and savage males who until then had been their only companions.

This article planted the idea in our minds that we, too, could perhaps build a successful time-machine. The scientist in the article had access to a well-stocked laboratory, with (again according to the illustration) a number of Jacob’s ladders and Tesla coils; we had only what we could find in the attic. On the other hand, the scientist in the article had built a time-machine that took him back ten thousand years. It should be a much simpler matter, we reasoned, to build a machine that needed only to take us back a few centuries.

The question, of course, was how to create a machine that would actually reverse time. The article in Ned’s journal was maddeningly vague when it came to the details of the construction of the machine.

We already knew how to make time go forward rapidly. Ned had shown me the trick with his father’s Hamilton pocket watch: by removing the escapement, he caused the hands to swing wildly around the dial at tremendous speed. If we could somehow be inside that watch while the hands were spinning, Ned and I would have a time machine capable of carrying us forward in time. Ned suggested that we could work on a machine to shrink us, but I dismissed that suggestion as impractical. It would be better, I said, if we could somehow make the watch bigger. Ned pointed out that a grandfather clock was much bigger. This was a step in the right direction, but it would still be necessary to enlarge the case of the grandfather clock to accommodate two people. And we had not yet solved the problem of making time go backwards. Nevertheless, we supposed that we should probably hit on a solution soon. First, therefore, we made sure all our schoolwork was done, for it was our inflexible rule never to begin a project until we had finished our assignments. Then we set to work.

We began in my house, as Ned was for some reason prohibited from ever ever touching any watches or clocks anywhere in his house ever again as long as he lived. Taking the grandfather clock from the hall, we removed the pendulum and substituted a small weight hung directly from the hook. This sped time up considerably. Removing the sides of the case, we used a number of large crates to build a much larger enclosure, capable of accommodating both of us.

Ned insisted on having at least one Jacob’s ladder, just for tradition’s sake; but as there was no room for it inside our time machine, we had to install it on the top, where I must admit it was a very decorative touch, making our machine look much more advanced than it really was.

And so our machine was complete but for one detail: we still lacked a way of making time go backward instead of forward. I racked my brain to come up with some way of reversing the movement of the clock, but it was designed to move in one direction only. It was at this point that Ned was hit by one of his occasional flashes of brilliance. Instead of altering the movement, he suggested, we could merely repaint the numbers on the dial, so that 11 was where 1 had been, and 10 where 2 had been, and so on. In that way we could make time run backward without altering the movement of the clock at all. I was amazed that this elegantly simple solution to the problem had not occurred to us before. With a little bit of paint our time machine was finished, and that in less than three hours after we had begun the project.

We decided on a trial run in which we would go back only a few hours, just to make sure all the mechanisms were in good working condition. Ned set the Jacob’s ladder going, and we entered the machine, closed the door, and set the weight swinging.

Here we discovered we had made a slight miscalculation. The weight, as it turned out, was at the same height as our heads, and it began to batter our skulls repeatedly the instant we set the machine going. We awoke some time later on the floor, with no sign of our time machine anywhere. A moment’s consideration was sufficient for us to apprehend what had happened: we had gone back a few hours to the time before we had made the time machine. This was an outcome we had not considered, but it made perfect sense now that we thought about it; and we were grateful that we had not decided to go back several centuries, since we should have had no way of getting back to our own time. All in all, however, we considered the experiment a success, though the one galling thing was that we had also gone back to the time before we had done our schoolwork, and therefore had to do it all over again.