Posts Tagged ‘books’

1. I Married a White Man – Wanda Calvert, a Baltimore washerwoman, explains how it came to be that she married a white man. The fact that she is also white makes the story very uninteresting.
2. I Loathe Lucy – Willam Frawley takes us on a dark journey into the seamy underbelly of Desilu Studios. He takes particular aim at “Little Ricky’s” incredible growth spurt. More specifically Mr. Frawley decries the implausibility of Little Ricky being born one season and showing-up as a wise-cracking 5-year-old in the next.
3. One Door Closes, Another Opens – An elderly female elevator operator from Pasadena is forced to retire after she accidentally inhales too much clumping cat litter. Her coworkers now call her, ♫The Little Old Lady with Emphysema.♫ When asked how she was doing the former elevator operator responded, “Well I don’t have as many ups and downs as when I was working.” In the British edition of this book, the little old lady is a lift operator from Wuthering Heights.
4. This Plant is Closed – The story of a Venus flytrap as seen through the compound eyes of a newly imprisoned fly. And yes, near the end, the fly does eke out a forlorn “Help me!”
5. This Plant is Closed – The story of a straw manufacturing plant as seen through the hole of the final straw. And when that final straw rolls off the assembly line, a visibly moved CEO picks it up and cries, “We’re closing now. This is the last straw.”

The Not So Good Ones

1. The Queen Elizabeth Phone Sex Tapes: Naughty, Naughty on the Telly – In these newly discovered recordings found in the rethatched roof of the Pig & Whistle Pub in Ipswich, the Queen is heard sharing tawdry talk with her palace guard Beefeater, Heathclyffe. Listen in sordid salaciousness as Heathclyffe refers variously to the Queen’s undercarriage as Her Majesty’s Pita, the Royal Gash and the Outback Downunder. Some question the tape’s authenticity. Especially since in the background we repeatedly hear someone picking up a phone and saying, “George Santos residence.”

2. Hair Raising Experiences – Pie weight salesman Osgood Pantene shampoos a woman against her will. Or did he? He says she agreed to it by bending over a portable basin he keeps in his wallet. She says she didn’t know what was happening until he had his sudsy fingers all up in her hair, but by then it was too late and she was all in a lather. This kind of thing happens a lot in the book so I can’t recommend it. I mean it’s just so lather, rinse, repeat. Still, this “He said, She said” shampoo story is Head & Shoulders above anything else we’ve read in the Bathic novel genre.
3. Letters of Pol Pot – People sometimes forget this little mass murderer who disappeared 1/10^th of Cambodia’s population in the 1970s – and just because someone screwed-up his take-out order (who orders blue curry?). In a pique of rage, he channeled his wrath into an indiscriminate cleansing of the population just to get rid of all the sloppy order-takers everywhere in the greater Phnom Penh region. His method was the very definition of overkill, but then again misplaced anger seldom achieves its goals. In this attempt to rehabilitate his legacy, Madam Wat, who ran the brothel Mr. Pot frequented, has released a trove of love letters the young and lovelorn Pol wrote to his favorite prostitutes. If this doesn’t make you reassess the diminutive despot, nothing will.

1. The Extra Virgin Virgin – If Olive Oil Can be Extra Virgin, Why Can’t People Too?
2. I Love Talking on the Phone to My Mother: And Other Lies
3. Moby Richard: The Politically Correct Version of Moby Dick
4. If You Won’t Trust Me with Your Emu, How Can I Trust You with My Ostrich?
5. Madame Ovary…. Flaubert’s masterpiece (Madame Bovary) reimagined against a backdrop of menstruation
6. The Ileum: Homer’s Reworked Epic Poem Takes a Heroic Journey Through His Digestive Tract
7. Seriously, Is There Anybody Out There Who is Not on the Spectrum?
8. Falling in Love with Your Type Face: Fonts I Have Cherished
9. 

   Feeling bookish and bike-ish.

   Hamlet and Eggs: Dr. Seuss Meets Shakespeare

10. A Thrower in the Oats…. The less successful sequel to A Catcher in the Rye
11. Sorry Earthlings, I’m Just Not that Evolved Yet: A Young Soul Apologizes for Being So Unenlightened F*cking Stupid
12. How to Win Friends and Influence Cannibals
13. Pretty, Pretty Good Expectations…. by Larry David not Charles Dickens
14. Tommy Quixote: Don’s Little Brother Tilts at Pinball
15. Can’t Count on Kant: Stories about Immanuel Kant’s Unreliability (May have inspired Better Call Saul)
16. Catch-99 Luftballons… Even Joseph Heller can’t resist Nena’s “catchy” German song
17. The Invisible Man…. I don’t see myself reading it
18. Blades of Leaves…. Whitman’s follow-up to his Leaves of Grass
19. The Miserables…. American version of Les Misérables
20. The Very, Very Good Gatsby.… The lesser-known prequel to The Great Gatsby
21. Sorry, I Thought it was a Drinking Fountain: And Other Bidet Mistakes
22. The Poetry of Vlad the Impaler…. Such a misunderstood tyrant. The newly rehabilitated Impaler displays his rapier-like verse in pointed ways. The sensitive skewer-master evinces a piercing understanding of the human condition. A great read – why not take a stab at it?
23. The Greatest Stories Ever Whispered: Pillow Talk at its Juiciest
24. Someday It’ll be 50 years in the Future: Things I Said 50 Years Ago
25. We’re All Non-Binary. We’re Just Choosing to Be Binary.
26. Lit From the Inside: The Karin Hardiman Story (Best Book Ever – Still Being Written)

1. The Cat in the Scat
2. Poop on Pop
3. Horton Hears a Fart
4. The Lorax Makes a Gift for Daddy
5. Oh, the Places You’ll Poop
6. A Pinch for the Grinch

And there’s the latest potty-friendly book:

Rumpty Dumpty.

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The chief characters in Rumpty Dumpty are Cheek 1 and Cheek 2. It’s a sequel to Green Eggs and Ham where “Sam I am” has eaten his strange breakfast and now it’s time for his morning Rumpty Dumpty

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Bonus Book: Dr. Seuss’s young adult pregnancy prevention book: Beware! That Yertle is Fertile

1. 50 Shades of Windows: The X-Rated Microsoft Office Story
2. You Wouldn’t Know a Left Hook if It Hit You in the Face…and other Non-Sequiturs
3. “You are what your record says you are”: The Collected Wisdom of Coach William Parcells
4. Servant Gossip: How Laundry Hampers Hamper Help from Airing Their Dirty Laundry
5. The Sequel to “How the States Got Their Shape” entitled “How William ‘Refrigerator’ Perry Got His Shape”
6. They’re There to Bother You: Why the Prongs on a Plug are of Different Widths
7. They’re There to Bother Ewes: Why Rams Exist
8. Brilliant Insights That Will Completely Change Your Life…for About a Day and a Half, Then It’s Back to the Same Old Grind
10. Never Leave #9 Blank, and Other Perilous Omissions
11. How Can a 90° Angle be So Right When It Feels So Wrong?
12. Say Yes to the Dress: How Can a Sarong Fit So Tight When It Feels Sarong?
13. Orville and Wilbur Were Never Wrong Because They Were Always Wright
14. “I know how a thermostat works”: Lies You Tell Your Wife when you wake Up and Its 83° in the Bedroom
15. “I know what a right angle is”: Lies You Tell Your Math Professor when he Measures Your Right Angle and Its 83°
16. I Never Watch Wheel of Fortune, Eat at McDonalds or Suck the Tip Off a Can of Whipped Cream After I Use It and Other Things I Lie About
17. If the Fact That We’re All Going to Die, Lose Everything and Not Know Where We’re Going Afterwards Doesn’t Bother You, Then OK, I’ll Play Along and Not Panic Either: On Succumbing to the Peer Pressure of Healthy Coping Mechanisms
18. I Don’t Care Who Matthew Broderick Thinks He Is, He’ll Always be Ferris Bueller to Me
19. I Know I Shouldn’t Judge, But My God, You’re Just So Stupid
20. All That Glitters is Not Gold: But It Might Be, So You’d Better Pursue It Just in Case

1. 

   Brick and mortar books: More expensive, less convenient and just as satisfying as ebooks, audibles or kindles. Buy them anyway.

   Schizophrenia: Two Views

2. It’s Sheila: On Discovering the Name of the Horse You Rode through the Desert on. Y’know, the One You Thought Had No Name
3. Too Short for the Low-hanging Fruit: The Kevin Hart Story
4. Schoolroom Horror Avoided: My English Teacher Wants Me to Use “Intoxicants,” But Only in a Sentence. Phew!
5. Schoolroom Revelation: It’s Not the School I hate. It’s the Principal of the Thing
6. Why Can’t All Pools Just Be Heated for Christ’s Sake?
7. God’s Broken System of Reincarnation: On Coping with People Who Were Cows or Other Livestock in Their Last Lifetime.
8. Feelin’ Very Caucasian: The Mike Pence Story
9. You Can’t Get There from Here: On Pushing String and Planting Cut Flowers
10. “Ha Ha. Look Everybody. Breana Says She’s This Many Fingers”: Fighting Ageism in Toddlers
11. How My Sister and I Became Attached at the Hip: On Choosing to Become Conjoined Twins
12. Ice Cream Truck Jingles You Never Forget: Sweet Baby Jesus I Beg You, Get Them Out My Head!
13. Epileptic Fit Bit: Least Loved Wheel of Fortune “Before and Afters”
14. The Great American Navel
15. I’m So Dumb and I Don’t Even Know It: Admitting You’re Stupid is the First Step on the Road to Recovery
16. “Van Gogh”: What Babies Say When the Dodge Caravan Drives Away
17. Life: A Preexisting Condition Covered Only by the Sky
18. One Can + One Can = Toucan: The Story of Kellogg’s Froot Loops
19. “Cargo”: What Babies of Federal Express Employees Say When the Dodge Caravan Drives Away
20. Thinner: The David Hardiman Story
21. Thinner: What I Use to Dilute Oil-based Paints
22. Thinner: How People with Lisps Pronounce “sinner”
23. “Escargot”: What French Babies Say When the Dodge Caravan Drives Away

Thank God these newly discovered books of the Bible weren’t included in the New Testament. Its hard enough reconciling the original ones.

In an unprecedented discovery, never-before-seen books of the Bible (scrolls actually) have been unearthed at an excavation site near Jerusalem. They were discovered by a team of archaeologists from UC Berkeley who were astonished by their outrageous fortune remarking, “Can you believe we finagled a grant to dig around the Middle East for 6 months? Unbelievable – oh yeah and stumbling upon these Bible books was pretty cool too.”

The scrolls, written in ancient Aramaic, were found in an amphora (large 2-handled clay vase) marked “Burn these when it gets cold – looks like King Solomon’s son is at it again with his heresies. What a waste of good papyrus.”

Fortunately for posterity, these written ruminations weren’t reduced to warming embers. UC Berkeley Press has collected and curated these strange and wonderful writings that give us a window onto the ancient world and has published them in a bracingly numinous compendium called “The New Testament for Dummies.”

It’s apparent from the tenor of these writings that this early version of the Bible was intended more as a Self-Help Guide Book to assist newly minted hominids in navigating the unhygienic world of ancient Babylonia without contracting typhoid. It was a time without organized religions. When spirituality was a personal experience practiced, not through intermediaries, but from direct personal interface with what today is called consciousness, but back then was called “that thing that makes me feel guilty when I covet my neighbor’s ta-tas”

But before acolytes realized what was happening, well-intentioned malefactors tricked worthy men into organizing the inexplicable cosmos into defined religions, and now religion has become this external thing you pay homage to rather than the deeply felt presence of immediate experience ~ UC Berkeley Press

Irrespective of man’s codification of the spiritual experience, the following is a list of the Bible scrolls recovered at the site, along with a brief summary of their contents. They are attributed to King Solomon’s son, Prince Kanye:

1. The One Commandment: This was simply the Golden Rule whereby you treat others as you would like to be treated. And it worked beautifully…until it was sent to committee, where they kept adding amendment after amendment.
2. Do Unto Deuteronomy as You Would Do Unto Mitt Romney: How someone from antiquity could foretell the existence of Mitt Romney is startlingly prescient.
3. 50 Shades of Truth: The less said about this book the better. Way too much focus on spanking.
4. Numbers: Not numbers but numbers. Let me explain. This long forgotten book was once a helpful list of 5-star dentists (middle eastern barbers really) in the greater Judea area who knew how to effectively use Novocain. Therefore, because of their anesthetic abilities, they were numbers (silent “b”) not numbers (audible “b”).
5. King Herod Deals with Hemorrhoids: The Great One tries to reconcile God’s Majesty with a prolapsed rectum.
6. Laminations: A precursor to Lamentations. This rather pedestrian scroll deals more with medieval flooring than the Human Condition. In Laminations, the prophet Linoleum speaks grandiloquently of scuff-resistant, non-permeable surfaces as a foundation for hygienic living. It is believed this is the first mention of cleanliness being next to Godliness.   
7. How to Avoid Getting Stoned: Not the “far out” kind of stoned. This book deals with avoiding the kind of stoning where suffocating rocks are pressed down upon one’s chest to encourage behavior modification. This method of negative reinforcement was really just a medieval reminder to not take the Lord’s name in vain, or to take narcotics in vein.  
8. Burning Taint: STDs to avoid while visiting Sodom
9. Up From Animals: We we’re barely more than livestock when this scroll was written. At that time humans were lucky to eat spelt or alfalfa sprouts. Most food was absolutely offal, or those awful falafels. Even more worrying was people’s fear that if they beheld heathens in the act of fornication, they would fall from grace and instead of being a pillar of the community, they’d become a pillar of salt.  
10. Flatulence of a Lesser God: To quote that prophet Bob Dylan “The answer my friend is-a blowin’ in the wind.” Yes, even in ancient Masada they had street food featuring taco carts. Most found it long-winded.
11. Goliath’s Kidney Stones: Why do you think he was always so ill-tempered? Spoiler Alert: It’s the stone David used to slay him.
12. Hummusphobia: Fear of Hummus afflicted many Anti-legumers who were uncomfortable with these same sex ground beans. Favored by the LGBTQ crowd – Legumes, Grapes, Beets, Turnips and Quince eaters.
13. The Book of Termination: An apposite companion piece to the book of Genesis, this apocalyptic End of Days quatrain presages the coming Social Security time bomb.
14. OMG, Guess What I Can Do?: Really a defense of God’s perfect justice. It explains how orgasm is God’s way of making up for Smallpox
15. Deuteronomy to Me One More Time: This tuneful verse somehow prefigures the Captain and Tennille’s “Do That to Me One More Time.”
16. Love Will Keep Us Together: Somehow, once again, the Captain and Tennille divined.
17. Muskrat Lust: Downright scary. This is where the Captain and Tennille divination should’ve stopped.
18. Book of Antiverbs: A response to the Book of Proverbs
19. Weights and Measures: Keeping things in Biblical Proportion. Scroll goes to great lengths in discussing cubits, stadions and reeds. I couldn’t fathom it.
20. Ob-la-di Obidiah: Jaunty little book proves that life goes on…brahhh. La la la la life goes on. So if you want some fun, sing Ob-la-di Obidiah.

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… IT Technicians

Genesis: The Book of DOS

Inspiration is where you find it. Interpretation is quite another thing.

In the Beginning there were vacuum tubes. And from that darkness emerged transistors. And God swept over the face of these primitive semiconductors and lo, the silicon chip did appear. The Almighty, whilst toiling in his garage in the constellation of Palo Alto Minor, did build his Earthly platform from whatever he had laying around: chicken wire, roofing shingles and old Playboy magazines. Yea verily. He built it he did. And he saw that it was good. And on that first day of Build 1.0 he proclaimeth the Earth as an ethically-sourced, sustainably-produced, fair-wage platform suitable for populating with his children. And so it was. And he programmed them so that they were fruitful and multiplied. Some fruitier than others – especially in the area known as San Francisco.

But all was not kosher in Denmark. His vast design was soon deconstructed and copied by angels who had fallen from the vault of heaven and became known as “hackers.” They pirated his Will and twisted it into a gross caricature of his original intent. Thus was born Original Malware. And so the world grew, strewn with good and bad which was expressed as long strings of 1’s and 0’s. The once pristine World Wide Web, a platform of limitless potential, had become a saturated thicket of cat videos and ads for penis-hardeners. And mankind began to lose his identity and fall back into the illusion of his separateness from his source. So much so that when purchasing things online, he was required to tell Big Brother, “I am not a robot.” Man reminding his father he is not a robot – how poignant. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Thank You for Your Service: A Shout Out to Crash Test Dummies
2. “I Didn’t Sign Up for This”: Complaints by People Who Signed-up for Things They No Longer Like
3. The Politicization of Baloney: The Right Claims It, But Isn’t it Really a Left-Wing Meat?
4. Are Toadstools and Frogchairs the Same Thing?
5. Coping with Coping Saws
6. Not in My Backyard: A Short History of Above Ground Pools
7. Too Many Colons::::: A Tubular History of Diacritical Marks
8. “Absolutely no one in my entourage may ever take drugs.” “Hello, Offshore Pharmacy, send me 1000 vials of Fentanyl.” The Hypocrisy of Prince in a Book Title that Doesn’t Even Fit on the Book Cover
9. Dan Quayle: Not Looking So Bad These Days
10. George W Bush: Oh How We Miss Thee
11. Joseph Stalin: No, He Still Sucks
12. Old School: A Misplaced Appreciation of When Things Were Even Stupider
13. Having Said That: Things that People Have Already Said
14. “No, not quite. The cheese itself isn’t grilled. The bread surrounding the cheese is.”: The Genesis of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich
15. Harvey Weinstein’s Prison Experience: “OK. Enough. I get it! Can I please leave?”
16. How Grover Cleveland Got His Groove Back and Other Stories of Presidential Redemption
17. Subway Franchisees: They’re Not All From India
18. “No, not Cool-aid, but Kool-Aid.” How an Intentional Misspelling Made Kraft a Fortune
19. Google to Partner with Titleist to Research Self-driving Golf Balls (Really a headline and not a book. So sue me.)
20. “Can I pay someone to do yoga for me?” and Other Questions from the Wealthy

Everything you don’t need to know all in one incomprehensible edition.

As a dilettante of the second order, I occasionally glance at The New York Review of Books just to see how the other half lives. Alright, just to see how the other .00000000025% live. Except for Presidents giving a State of the Union Address, no one reads any more. Instead they troll for satisfying videos of some do-gooder giving a homeless guy $100 or an abandoned kitten being breast fed by a honey badger. I know I do. And I get it. Reading takes time and application. It’s proactive, but it is ultimately more rewarding and nourishing than idly surfing some video screen seeking temporary fulfillment. Well that’s as preachy as I’ll get because Wimp.com just posted a video of a Dolphin making oatmeal. That Dolphin happened to be former Miami Dolphin fullback Larry Csonka.

The NY Review of Books is bone dry and devoid of juicy gossip. If it were any drier it would spontaneously combust. It’s a narrow publication appealing to people who sometimes equate intellectual heft with spiritual awareness. The NY Review of Books is replete with bravura verbal muscularity and apposite aphorisms, soft as church music. However as comprehensive as it may be, the following words or ideas seem to creep into about half the articles or reviews. For example I’ve detected these recurring themes or phrases throughout the NY Review of Books:

• • Sylvia Plath’s suicide changed nothing. She was still unhappy.
  • So that was it. Jane immersed herself in English romantic poets as a means of coping with her intractable psoriasis.
  • Harold’s homosexuality was known only to his wife, Ralph.
  • All we had were parsnips. Fortunately all we wanted were parsnips.
  • the Zionist experience of Jewish Semites
  • the Jewish experience of Semitic Zionists
  • the Semitic experience of Zionist Jews
  • the influence of chivalric modalities in 12th century Hohoenzollern 
  • Marcel Proust would often mispronounce his name as “Proust.” Knowing that if anyone were to write about the event, no one would be able to know how Proust pronounced “Proust” in the first place. 

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