Dear Dr. Boli: So I have this neighbor who’s a little flaky, okay, and she’s been going on and on about the apocalypse happening on Friday. I don’t normally pay attention to her ravings, but I kind of feel like I have to cut her some slack because she told me a while ago that the Illuminati were going to force Twinkies off the market, and that actually happened. But is there any good reason why anyone would think that the apocalypse is about to happen? —Sincerely, A Man Who Has Had Just About Enough of His Flaky Neighbor.

Dear Sir: Dr. Boli will leave you with four simple words: “Gas Station Television Network.” From that phrase you may draw your own conclusions about the proximity of the apocalypse.

On this day in 1912, the fossil remains of Piltdown Man were discovered in, of all places, Piltdown. This is a discovery scientists have been trying to forget for nearly sixty years, but Dr. Boli takes a malicious pleasure in reminding them of it every once in a while.

Dear Dr. Boli: At a snobbish coffeehouse in my neighborhood, I heard someone talking about “orthodox tea.” What did she mean? I was not aware that tea had religious principles. —Sincerely, A Coffee Drinker.

Dear Sir or Madam: Tea culture is an ancient art with many traditions, but broadly speaking the methods of preparing the tea leaves may be divided into two classes.

Orthodox tea is picked as whole leaves, traditionally by hand, the harvesters taking only the top two leaves and the bud from each twig. The leaves are then rolled by hand, or (in the cheaper grades) by a machine that simulates the action of the hand. This orthodox tea is usually sold loose by the pound.

Heretical tea, also known as CTC (for “crush-tear-curl,” the mass-production of tea being a brutal business), is harvested by a machine, something like an elevated lawn-mower, that removes the upper leaves, twigs, caterpillars, spiders, and blowing trash from the tea bushes. What is collected by the harvesting machine is passed through a machine that folds, spindles, and mutilates it all until it becomes a batch of tiny pellets or fine shavings. This is the tea that is put in sad little bags and sold in American supermarkets.

Ours is a land of religious freedom, and the right of American citizens to follow any dubious heretical sect of their choosing is guaranteed by our Constitution. Dr. Boli is a very tolerant man, and understands that the only way to secure religious freedom for himself is to grant it to everyone else. But there is a wide difference between tolerance and encouragement, and Dr. Boli would not have his tolerance of rank tea heresy misinterpreted as approval.

Dear Dr. Boli: I know that the centigrade or “Celsius” scale of temperature measures from 0 at the freezing point to 100 at the boiling point of water. But what does the Fahrenheit scale measure? It seems queer that the freezing point of water is at 32 and the boiling point is at 212. What kind of scale is that? Why didn’t Fahrenheit use a simple decimal scale? —Sincerely, Lambert Cirrus, Chief Meteorologist, Dumont Ten O’Clock News.

Dear Sir: The Fahrenheit scale of temperature was originally designed to measure and predict the behavior of Mrs. Fahrenheit. Concordia Fahrenheit was a hardy soul and not averse to bundling up in the winter, but there was a certain temperature below which, no matter how many layers of coats, sweaters, gloves, and boots she wore, she became simply impossible to live with. This point Dr. Fahrenheit marked as 0 on his scale. Likewise, in the summer, she was not bothered much by moderate heat, but there was a point beyond which she could not be pushed, and excessively hot weather made her short-tempered and cross. Dr. Fahrenheit marked the point at which this transition occurred as 100. Between these two extremes, Mrs. Fahrenheit was as sweet-tempered a companion as any husband could wish for, but above or below that range the change in her mood was sudden and violent. Thus you can see that Dr. Fahrenheit did in fact use a centigrade scale to measure temperature, but very reasonably decided to refer it to something of far more moment to him personally than the exceedingly dull changes in the state of water.

In most of the United States of America, tonight is the night when we stop pretending that it is an hour later than it is when we are merely pretending that noon happens at exactly the same time across a wide and jagged vertical stripe drawn down the face of the continent.

In Arizona, tonight is one of two nights a year when patriotic citizens who have avoided the communist conspiracy of Daylight Saving Time feel smugly superior to the pinkos in the rest of the country.

Magnum opus. Opens Trollope’s The Way We Live Now to the title page.

Toastum praematurum. Causes the toaster to pop up before the toast is done.

Alea jacta est. Begins play in a game of Monopoly.

Loc. cit. Refers to the same page in a work previously cited.

Poco a poco accelerando. Causes the vehicle in front of the caster (but only in the same lane) to accelerate gradually.

Carthago delenda est. Places a mild curse on Carthage, North Carolina. Inexplicably ineffective against other cities named Carthage.

Incredulitas. Cures the caster of irrational beliefs in ghosts, fairies, monsters, magic, homeopathy, socialism, capitalism, etc.

On the subject of opening windows for ventilation in offices, “Violet” writes:

Opening a window only works in specific climates, however. Here in south Texas, opening a window to get cooler would be throwing gasoline on a fire.

Clearly this is because the southern Texan is opening the wrong sort of window. To cool off, an office worker in Texas ought to open a window in Manitoba. The problem, of course, is that Manitoba is situated at some distance from Texas. Dr. Boli understands the difficulty, and has consulted with some of North America’s best engineers, who after several minutes of earnest discussion have proposed a solution to it.

Proposed route of the Brownsville & Hudson’s Bay Temperature-Exchange Conduit.

Let a conduit be built from Brownsville to York Factory on the shores of Hudson’s Bay. The conduit would be a sort of tube, about four yards in diameter, in which powerful turbines would be located at intervals of about ten per mile. During the hot months, these turbines would capture the cooling breezes of the Hudson’s Bay and direct them southward into Texas, where various outlets would be located in southern Texan office parks. In the winter, the turbines would reverse direction, and warm air from the sunnier climes of southern Texas would be directed toward Manitoba, making the shore of Hudson’s Bay an attractive place to live year-round, and doubtless fostering the growth of prosperous cities of the latest artistic design. Prodigious amounts of energy otherwise wasted in cooling Texans and heating Manitobans would be saved.

The only trifling detail to be worked out is the power source for the turbines themselves. Dr. Boli’s engineers are leaning toward the idea of opening a series of fitness clubs along the proposed route, where ordinary citizens would pay for the privilege of exercising on pedal-powered machinery that would be connected to the great turbines by a system of belts.

At Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, the new Center for Sustainable Landscapes, billed as “one of earth’s greenest buildings” (though it is plainly various shades of brown and grey—perhaps someone in the public-relations department is colorblind), will soon be open. Dr. Boli and a few hundred other supporters of the conservatory were given a tour of the building this evening, and the offices (shown above) particularly caught his attention. On the right in the photograph we see a wall of glass through which sunlight pervades the offices during the day, making electric lighting unnecessary. Furthermore, if someone feels a need to adjust the temperature inside the building, the glass can actually be raised to admit fresh air from outside.

Dr. Boli mentions this astonishing technological innovation because he himself predicted it a little more than a year ago as a fixture of the office building of the future:

Large openings covered with glass in the walls of office buildings will virtually eliminate the need for artificial lighting during the day, as it will be possible to harness the light of the sun itself for most everyday tasks. A clever mechanical arrangement will make it possible to raise the glass panels, allowing natural air circulation that will greatly reduce the need for artificial climate control.

If this prediction has come true, can the rest of Dr. Boli’s predictions be far behind? They laughed at him as a visionary dreamer, but they will be sorry—all of them—when they see his predictions coming true one after another. To prepare yourself for the marvels of a future that may be only moments away, read the original article.

When the Forrest family moved from No. 1258 Sparse Street in Sandusky to No. 1263 Sparse Street, Aung San Suu Kitty, their Burmese cat, managed to find her way unaided from the old house to the new, by way of Mombasa.

Three of the world’s largest oil companies are owned by feline partnerships.

A Persian cat named Percival heroically saved his owners from a fire by deliberately knocking heavy objects off the dresser until they woke up. In so doing he partially atoned for having set the fire by deliberately knocking over the kerosene lamp.

Julian Hawthorne’s cat Rosemary actually wrote most of his novels, but Mr. Hawthorne loved her so dearly that he took the blame for them.

In ancient Egypt, cats were worshiped as gods, and expensive sofas were sacrificed to propitiate them.

When Dick Whittington was Lord Mayor of London, his cat (the second one he had owned), who controlled all access to the Lord Mayor, grew rich through bribery and corruption, and became Lord Mayor twice after Whittington’s death.

Jingles, a cat of indeterminate breed owned by Miss Felicity Barron-Crackle, has turned up his nose at a different brand of cat food every day since December 3, 2007.

The common cricket is a complete mobile weather station, and it is a very easy thing to read the temperature by counting the insect’s chirps. Follow this simple formula, and you will be the life of any party that is otherwise so sedate that you can hear the crickets chirping.

1. Count the number of chirps in one minute, and enter that number on the first line (let us call it “Line 1″) of a fresh page in your pocket memorandum book.

2. Enter your latitude on Line 2. Be sure to express degrees south of the equator as negative numbers.

3. Multiply the number on Line 1 by 23 and one third per cent (0.23333), and enter the result on Line 3. This is your adjusted gross chirp rate.

4. Add 40 to the number on Line 3 and enter the result on line 4.

5. Were any of your chirps subject to withholding? If so, enter the number withheld on Line 5. (If not, enter 0, which is the numeral zero and not the letter O, which would just be silly.)

6. Subtract Line 5 from Line 4, and enter the difference on Line 6. This is your estimated annualized chirp liability.

7. Subtract 32 from Line 6, and enter the difference on Line 7. This is your estimated annualized chirp liability minus thirty-two.

8. Divide the number on Line 7 by 1.8. This is the temperature in degrees Celsius.

9. Announce the temperature and receive merited applause.

10. After you have announced the temperature, you may also read off the latitude you entered on Line 2. Nothing stimulates intelligent conversation at parties like a good latitude.