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The Whole Boodle

People keep asking me one question, so here is the answer, whole: the history, the intention, the meaning, the being, and, at the end, the me. “What’s a Boodle Boy?” I get the question at dinner tables, in podcast mail, in the pause after a lecture when someone has finally worked up the nerve. My business cards claim the title. My websites announce it. A consultancy of my own wears the name. The asker usually half-expects a punchline, because the phrase sounds like something a vaudeville comic would shout while falling off a stage, and some people assume the whole thing is a pun on Boles. Those vowels help, I admit. History does the heavy lifting. The honest answer needs a Sunday night in 1974, a Dutch probate record from 1699, a safe-deposit vault stuffed with bribe money in St. Louis, a candy raid at West Point, and a banana leaf piled with garlic rice somewhere on Luzon. It also needs a teenaged cadet holding a pot of coffee. Pour yourself a cup, and I will lay the whole boodle on the table.

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The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

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Kick the Bot, Fear the Dog: Street Psychology and the Coming Age of Mechanical Animals

The first time you see a sidewalk delivery bot, you smile. It is impossible not to. The thing is knee-high, usually white or pastel, rolling along on six stubby wheels like a cooler that gained sentience and decided to take itself for a walk. It carries burritos, or prescription medication, or someone’s iced latte, and it navigates curbs and crosswalks with the earnest determination of a toddler heading for a puddle. You watch it pause at an intersection, calculate its moment, and trundle forward with a confidence that borders on optimism. Your first instinct is to root for it.

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Toss Aways

There have always always been disposable people in a limited-use society, but it’s worse now. We, as a nation of lonesome people found alone in a decaying world, have become much more than merely disposable. We have become the toss aways. We have lost our value. We have forfeited the way forward. We find ourselves teetering on the precipice between the living, and the dismayed, and the balance of the affair solely belongs to us — the us of us.

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Out of Many, One: Pete Buttigieg for President!

The time for change is upon us, and Pete Buttigieg is one of the brightest, most interesting, candidates for President of the United States I can remember in my lifetime. I fully support him for the run of his life, and I urge you, too, to consider him as your next President. I’ve only contributed money to two Presidential campaigns in my lifetime. The first was Barack Obama. The second is Pete Buttigieg.

Here are some of the reasons I am voting for Pete — as detailed in my latest Human Meme podcast:

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Fort Hancock Six Months After Sandy

Today, as I casually pondered what I would do with my day off, I had a jolting moment that I’m sure many people in the tri-state area have experienced. I thought to myself that maybe I would head over to my beach, particularly its recreation areas– and then was struck with the memory that I couldn’t.

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Biocompatible Polymers and Prosthetic Nerves

We previously read about the Black Ops Biomask:

Now let’s take that biomask news to the next, logical level.  Specially trained soldiers get their brown eyes burned blue.  The biomask gives them a whole new face.  Fingerprints are replaced.  Previous DNA records are erased.

You now have a whole new identity mask for and old body that now becomes an anonymous killing machine.  An old body you trained and made into a killer becomes something new, but never innocuous, that you can send into the world, undercover in a civilian visage, to do your Black Ops work in the open without repercussion.  If the soldier gets identified, bring in the biomask to reconstruct a whole new face and recycle the old body again into the wilds.

Now we have breaking news that biocompatible polymers are a bridge — a “scaffold,” really — to attaching regenerating dead human nerves to inanimate prosthetics. The idea of this new bio-bridge is keen to help recreate the body part, but it makes me wonder why the military is always the standard bearer for new human healing inventions. Are they interested in fixing the wounded, or in just creating a super-able-bodied soldier from scratch?

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