Word: inventor
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Spoofing honorary degrees is the four-year-old avocation of John Bear, 33, a freelance writer, erstwhile adman, and co-inventor of the once popular Beethoven sweatshirt. Having sweated out a real doctorate in communications at Michigan State University, he found himself feeling less than charitable each June as he read about such instant academics as Dr. Captain Kangaroo, Dr.Bob Hope and the late Dr. Dario Toffenetti, a Manhattan restaurateur honored by the University of Idaho for "promoting . . . the Idaho potato...
...idea that Doc is just a jock, though. He is also the world's greatest surgeon, the greatest chemist, the greatest inventor. He had Polaroid, television and the shotgun mike at least a decade before the public did, and if you don't watch out, he'll "teleport" you atom by atom to his mysterious laboratory near the North Pole. Like James Bond, Doc is gadget-gaga. Dozens of tiny martial devices-gas bombs, sedative darts, ultraviolet flashlights-are concealed in his clothing. His cars are rolling fire bases that can "go like Barney Oldfield" and crash...
...appreciate the damage that this sort of sloppiness can do, it is useful to invoke the late Count Alfred Korzybski, inventor of general semantics. Korzybski was a Polish-born mathematician and physicist, part crank and part genius, who regarded his theory as a whole new science of life. Our language, argued Korzybski, does not reflect reality, and its structure does not correspond to the seen or unseen world. Its grammar, based on Aristotelian logic, implies primitive philosophical concepts tied to the prescientific past. All this leads to emotional disturbances and frustrations, known as semantic shock. Korzybski prescribed some mental tricks...
After graduation, he married an art teacher who was the heiress to the fortune of the inventor of the little red wagon. He tried some courses at the Business School, some accounting jobs, and a stint at housewifery before becoming a teacher in a suburban high school. "A Harvard degree is never good if you stay in one place too long," he cautions. "Rather than becoming dully competent to a task you should play the role of the well-mannered but restless whiz...
...whether angiography tells a surgeon all that he needs to know and feels that some conditions must be observed more thoroughly to be properly evaluated. As a result, Johnson operates on many patients whom the Cleveland crew would reject as unfit. But Stanford's Dr. Norman Shumway Jr., inventor of the heart-transplant technique, has reservations about his colleagues' methods. He believes that mammary implants, which may take months to improve ventricular circulation, are impractical. Instead he combines bypass grafts with the gas endarterectomies in what his operating team calls a "gas and pass" procedure...