T is for the Tennis Star.
No matter what you do or are,
Your job is more enjoyable by far
Than being just a plain old tennis star.
His work is dull monotony in the extreme;
His duties no more complicated than they seem:
He whacks the ball hard as he can across the court, and then,
As soon as it comes back to him, he whacks the ball again.
And yet his job is necessary, though it seems there’s nothing to it:
For if he didn’t hit the ball, some other fool would have to do it.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.
No. 412.—A National Monument.
HOW THRILLING IT was for Ned and me to see Mount Rushmore in person! The mountainous landscape, monumental in itself, and the green forest around the site gave a magnificence and color to the view that no photograph can adequately convey; and the colossal heads of four of our greatest presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Warren G. Harding, if I remember correctly—filled us with patriotic ardor. We talked of it all the way home from our vacation that summer, and we agreed that, impressive as it was, the monument at Mount Rushmore was deficient in one important detail: there was no memorial to William Howard Taft, surely our most monumental president. Our disappointment was tempered, however, by a happy notion that, as far as I could tell, occurred to both of us simultaneously. Why should we not correct the omission ourselves? We lived in a place that, by fortunate coincidence, was also blessed with many hills and rocky outcrops; and, as for the design, Ned had won second place in a school competition whose object was to sculpt a flattering portrait of the vice-principal out of salt dough. Moreover, the form of William Howard Taft was so mountainous in itself that half our work was done for us already, if we could but find a hill of suitable shape.
We soon settled on a rocky eminence overlooking the Youghiogheny. This hill already bore an almost eerie resemblance to President Taft; and it was moreover easily visible from our home below in the valley, so that we should have the privilege of admiring our handiwork every day from our own back yards.
Now we needed some method of turning this unformed mountain into an accurate portrait. From our preliminary research at the library, we were able to determine that it had taken many years and hundreds of workers for Mr. Borglum to form the gigantic portraits at Mount Rushmore. Ned and I had only a week until the end of summer vacation, so we were determined to find, if possible, a more expeditious method than the one adopted by that talented but inefficient sculptor.
It was I who, remembering the happy hours I had spent the previous year watching the construction of the Mid-Valley Connector, suggested explosives. By placing charges at exactly the right points in the rock, it should be possible to do all the work at once, shearing away those portions of the mountain that did not resemble President Taft and leaving only those portions that did.
But where to obtain these explosives in sufficient quantity? My father kept only a small stock of dynamite for medicinal purposes, and Ned could find none at all in his house.
Here, however, we had a bit of luck: for Ned recollected that there was an old abandoned coal mine just a short trip away by bicycle. We visited the site and found what we were looking for: the previous owners had left a stock of old dynamite in one of the chambers of the mine. It was a little unstable from sitting unused for so many years, but we carefully tied as much of it as we could to our bicycles and transported it to our mountain. It took several trips to bring as much as we needed, but finally we were ready to begin the excavations.
Ned had drawn a pencil portrait of President Taft on a sheet of graph paper, and now we carefully marked each edge and wrinkle for placement of the dynamite. We would need almost an entire bicycle-load just for the chins, and needless to say digging in all that dynamite was hard work. Sometimes we were a bit frustrated when we had carefully dug out a hole and found that the dynamite stick would not quite fit, and then we often had recourse to the sledgehammer—a practice that, when I look back on it, I can see was perhaps not as careful as it ought to have been. It actually took us three days to get all the sticks in place and wired to the detonator. But at last we were ready; and, by the flip of a coin, I was given the honor of pushing down the plunger to create our newest national monument.
The roar was deafening. We had expected a loud noise, but nothing had prepared us for the intensity of the explosion. An avalanche of rock ensued—far more than we had anticipated—and a huge cloud of dust rose and obscured our view for several minutes.
When the dust finally settled, we caught our first glimpse of the sculpture we had made. Just as we had intended, a colossal portrait now stood where the mountain had been before; but you can easily imagine our horror when we discovered that it was not a portrait of William Howard Taft at all, but rather of the traitor James Buchanan! The unstable dynamite had exploded with more force than we had calculated. The next day, as emergency crews worked to remove the rock and earth from the railroad and highway below, there was much speculation as to who could have created the masterful and artistic colossus that had mysteriously appeared above the river; but Ned and I were too much ashamed of our creation to take the credit for it.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
S is for the Social Worker,
Grim and worried,
Flustered, flurried,
Solving problems left and right,
Staying up to work all night—
Who dares call the Social Worker
Lazy slob or idle shirker?
Bring your problems to this man:
He will solve them if he can.
Griping, grumbling,
Shambling, stumbling—
Frankly, if the truth were known,
He has problems of his own.
THE BOY’S BOOK OF CRAFTS AND HANDY-WORKS.
No. 349.—An Interplanetary Shuttle.
ON SUMMER NIGHTS my friend Ned and I used to spend hours lying out in the grass and gazing up into the impenetrable mysteries of the sky. How often we wondered what other strange creatures might be staring back at us from those illimitable vastnesses! Perhaps, at that very moment, some squat but jolly Jovian was looking into his own night sky, wondering what strange creatures might inhabit the planets closer to the sun. And so we would dream and speculate far into the evening, until at last my mother would come out and warn us to get into the house right away before we were abducted by possums. My mother’s greatest fear was that I should be abducted by possums, ever since she had lost my elder sister that way. It was always my own mother who came out to get us; I cannot recall Ned’s having a mother.
It was on one such evening, not so long ago in cosmological terms, that we first conceived the idea of making the trip ourselves, so that we might see firsthand those strange worlds with which we had filled our imaginations. We especially desired to see Mars, which a diligent perusal of certain pulp novels had convinced us must be host to a wide variety of interesting forms of life, many of them not much different from animals on earth but for such relatively small details as the number of legs or heads.
As was usually the case with us, once the idea had occurred to us we wasted no time in getting to work on it. It was too late in the evening for us to begin the construction of any sort of space capsule, but we had already begun making a sort of inventory of the materials we might need. It was clear to us that all the materials would of necessity be things we could readily find in the vicinity, as we were next to penniless. Ned had his paper route, but his unfortunate sarsaparilla habit swallowed nearly all his earnings; and my mind being of a more philosophical and abstract bent, I had no interest in gainful employment.
Fortunately the Limpets, our neighbors, had a large Dodge van that they were not using, or at least not very much; and, as they kept the keys on a hook by the back door, there would be no difficulty in obtaining them. This would make the main body of our vessel: it had plenty of room to store supplies, and the seats were comfortable enough for a long journey. It would, of course, be necessary to make it airtight, but we saw no difficulty there that could not be overcome with a bit of duct tape. Our air supply could be provided in the form of plastic bags, inflated by an electric fan and tied shut, to be pierced by a pin when we felt the need for more oxygen. Ned mentioned that we should take my little Brownie camera and a few rolls of 127 film, and I readily agreed.
We awoke early the next morning and set to work directly after breakfast. A little astronomical research informed us that Mars was at that moment more than two hundred million miles away, which was a considerable distance in those days. This distance posed us a bit of a challenge, as we had never seen the Limpets’ van do any better than thirty-five miles per hour even on the open highway. Since my mother would never consent to our being out later than suppertime, the speed of our vessel would have to be considerably improved.
In certain speculative journals, Ned had read of a kind of propulsion that worked by “warping” the “fabric” of space, much as bending a two-dimensional sheet of paper in three dimensions can bring the ends into close proximity without changing the two-dimensional distance between them. So much of the theory was obvious from even a cursory glance at Euclid, but the greater difficulty remained: by what means might we accomplish this “warping” in such a way as to send our vehicle hurtling through interplanetary space at a suitably high velocity?
We racked our brains for an answer, and finally realized that we had seen the answer at work on numerous occasions. Heat is the universal warper, so to speak. A little heat would warp thin plastic; a little more heat would warp old sound recordings beyond recognition, and a great deal of heat could warp even iron or steel. We had no doubt that, given a high enough temperature, we should be able to warp space itself, which was but the necessary next step in the series. We therefore gutted the engine compartment of the Dodge and filled it with dry pine logs, pine being a wood that burns intensely with a very high heat.
And so we were off to Mars, or so we thought. As it happened, we had considerably miscalculated the heat created by our engine-compartment fire. The pine burned so hot that space was apparently warped far beyond what we had intended; we shot far past Mars and indeed far beyond the limits of our solar system, arriving at last on an unnamed planet which Ned (by the flip of a coin) had the honor of naming after himself. Here we spent a pleasant afternoon riding on the exceedingly tame eight-legged, two-headed horses with which the planet Ned is singularly blessed. We met many other interesting creatures as well, and Ned (the sly dog) made quite an impression on one of the local princesses. But I shall not tell more, for I should not like to ruin the sport for any boys who might like to undertake their own journey to the planet Ned and see the sights for themselves. On our return, the pictures I took with my Brownie were published in the rotogravure section of our local newspaper, and for a while Ned and I were minor celebrities in our little town. All in all, we considered it a successful expedition, even if we did not reach our intended destination.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
R for the Rainmaker, scanning the sky
To see whether any dark clouds have come by—
Completely convinced that his work’s not in vain, yet
To tell you the truth, he still hasn’t made rain yet.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
Q for the Quality-Control Inspector—vital man
In charge of seeing that these rhymes pass his evaluation.
“I’m not too strict,” he says, “and I’ll support you when I can,
But some things I cannot allow to pass examination.
“Turning to A,
What can I say?
You shouldn’t print polemics
Against the works
And tenured perks
Of harmless academics.
“The little rhyme for letter B just might insult a baker:
I think you should display a little more consideration.
And think of the Prime Minister! Your little jabs might shake her,
Thus compromising her ability to run the nation.
“And as for Q,
It just won’t do.
Such rot drips from your pen!
I think you ought
To scrap the lot
And start them all again.”
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
P for the Prime Minister, the leader of her nation,
Who runs the state with calm deliberation.
She’s not afraid to speak her mind, or take decisive action,
But hesitates to favor any faction.
“My plans may stir up some debate,” she tells a young reporter.
“I say the days in spring should not get shorter.
My platform calls for night to fall no later than eleven,
And sunrise must be on its way by seven.
“The water in the ocean is required to be quite salty,
And wet, or it will be considered faulty.
And gravity must always pull things in the down direction,
And grass must be proved green upon inspection.
“Now, some of these ideas may be more bold than you expected,
But I’ll do what I must to get my party re-elected.”
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
O for the Optometrist,
An ocular idealist:
Her goal she states with prompt precision:
Twenty-twenty vision.
Her work requires painstaking care;
No “good enough,” or “nearly there.”
She spends her whole life making glasses
For the upper classes.
But though she does her work so well,
Her glasses still don’t seem to sell.
She’s missed her clients’ ruling passion:
Frames that are in fashion.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
N is for the Navigator.
Ask him where we are. He knows.
“Possibly at the equator,
Land of the eternal snows;
Possibly in North Dakota,
Where the elephants roam free;
Possibly the Latin Quarter,
By the chilly Java Sea;
Possibly in Kampuchea
(Now known by the name ‘Myanmar’);
Possibly in North Korea;
Possibly in Zanzibar.
Let me make a small admission:
I was never trained to know
Geographical position.
I just know which way to go.”
From Dr. Boli’s Encyclopedia of Misinformation.
Nylon. The work of Lavoisier proved the theoretical possibility of Nylon, but it was not until the twentieth century that the technology caught up with the theory.
From DR. BOLI’S ALPHABET OF OCCUPATIONS.
M is for
The Meteorologist,
Trying to be
A weather psychologist—
Trying to see
What the weather will do today:
Whether the sky
Will be stormy or blue today—
Wondering why
She didn’t go into
Abnormal psychology,
Bug physiology,
Celtic mythology,
Druid theology,
Endocrinology,
French musicology,
Greek etymology,
Hieroglyphology,
Irish philology,
Jungian psychology,
Kantian ontology,
Liturgiology,
Microgeology,
Numismatology,
Osmonosology,
Paleontology,
Quechua philology,
Runic graphology,
Systematology,
Thracian topology,
Universology,
Videographology,
Woodland fungology,
Xenobiology,
Yucca pathology,
Zoophytology,
Anything other than meteorology.
