Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty is the book for you. Here, at last, for the first time, are the full scripts of one of British television's funniest comedies. Follow the hilarious misadventures of the despicable Edmund Blackadder and his dimwitted sidekick Baldrick through four centuries of hopelessly mangled English history: from medieval nastiness through English history: from medieval nastiness through Elizabethan and Regency glory, to the mud and sauteed rats of the First World War. Aside from the ball-bouncingly funny scripts themselves, Blackadder also features special bonus sections: "Instruments of Torture in the Late Middle Ages"; "Medieval Medicine" ("1. Herbs; 2. Leeches; 3. Saw It Off"); and an indispensable "Index of Blackadder's Finest Insults".

    'Santaland Diaries' contains six of David Sedaris' most profound Christmas stories, from Dinah, the Christmas Whore to Season's Greetings to our Friends and Family.

    Please send a catalog.Designer Flo Waters responds:"I'd be delighted...but please understand that all of my fountains are custom-made."Soon the fountain project takes on a life of its own, one chronicled in letters, postcards, memos, transcripts, and official documents. The school board president is up in arms. So is Dee Eel, of the water-supply company. A scandal is brewing, and Mr. Sam N.'s fifth grade class is turning up a host of hilarious secrets buried deep beneath the fountain.

    The Onion has quickly become the world's most popular humor publication, misinforming half a million readers a week with one-of-a-kind social satire both in print (on newsstands nationwide) and online from its remote office in Madison, Wisconsin.Witness the march of history as Editor-in-Chief Scott Dikkers and The Onion's award-winning writing staff present the twentieth century like you've never seen it before.

    A ghost stalks the corridors, leaving strange letters for the management and killing people. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, two Lancre witches, investigate. This is an adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel, "Maskerade".

    It's almost bedtime, but there's a problem-Patrick doesn't have a bed at Granny's. So Granny goes out to her yard, chops down some trees, and makes a comfy bed for Patrick. Now he can go to sleep. Right? Not yet. He doesn't have a pillow! So Granny dashes to the henhouse, collects some feathers, and sews a fluffy pillow for Patrick. Now he can go to sleep. Right? Not yet. A few other things are still missing . . . . If Patrick is lucky, this could go on all night!"Children will snuggle down with smiles on their faces after this comic spin on the paraphernalia associated with a common ritual." (Kirkus Reviews)

    It was a cartoon that appeared for many years in daily newspapers and was loved by millions. (And was confusing to millions more.) But one day he stopped.Gary went into hiding. He made a couple short films. He played his guitar. He threw sticks for his dogs. They threw some back.Yet Gary was restless. He couldn't sleep nights. Something haunted him. (Besides Gramps.) Something that would return him to his roots in biology, drawing and dementia--a tale called There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story.It begins a few inches underground, when a young worm, during a typical family dinner, discovers there's a hair in his plate of dirt. He becomes rather upset, not just about his tainted meal but about his entire miserable, wormy life. This, in turn, spurs his father to tell him a story--a story to inspire the children of invertebrates everywhere.And so Father Worm describes the saga of a fair young maiden and her adventuresome stroll through her favorite forest, a perambulator's paradise. It is a journey filled with mystery and magic. Or so she thinks.Which is all we'll say for now.What exactly does the maiden encounter?Does Son Worm learn a lesson?More important, does he eat his plate of fresh dirt?Well, you'll have to read to find out, but let's just say the answers are right under your feet.Written and illustrated in a children's storybook style, There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story is a twisted take on the difference between our idealized view of Nature and the sometimes cold, hard reality of life for the birds and the bees and the worms (not to mention our own species).Told with his trademark off-kilter humor, this first original non--Far Side book is the unique work of a comic master.Now Larson can finally sleep at night.Question is, will you?(from the back cover)

    This humorous tale describes how aliens, rather than visiting Earth to take over the planet, really visit to steal your pants.

    Fame and fortune are cold comfort for Seth Wyatt, a man whose inner demons have him living on a volatile precipice—even before someone tries to murder him.An indefatigable caretaker, Pippa isn’t prepared to battle both her employer and his enemies. Still, she can’t resist the emotional pull of Seth’s damaged son or the opportunity to hide in the fortress he calls home. Pippa’s new-found security is destroyed when she and Seth are the victims of several near-fatal accidents. To prevent harm to those she’s come to love, must she run again? Can Seth ask her to stay when it could mean one of them might die?

    George. Elaine. Kramer. We've followed their misadventures for nearly ten years on Thursday nights. Here, finally, are the scripts of the first two seasons that will take you back to the beginning of Seinfeld.Featuring the first 17 episodes ever aired, The Seinfeld Scripts contains all the great lines that have kept us laughing for years: the pilot episode, "The Seinfeld Chronicles," where it all began; George introduces his importer/exporter altar ego Art Vanderlay in "The Stakeout"; Kramer becomes obsessed with cantaloupe in "The Ex-Girlfriend"; Jerry and George meet Elaine's dad in "The Jacket"; is Jerry responsible for a poor Polish woman's death when he makes "The Pony Remark"?; Jerry and Elaine decide to become intimate again in "The Deal"; what will George do when he is banned from the executive bathroom in "The Revenge"?; and Jerry, George, and Elaine wait for a table in "The Chinese Restaurant."It's all here: the award-winning writing of Seinfeld, "the defining sitcom of our age". Created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.Elaine: My roommate has Lyme disease. Jerry: Lyme disease? I thought she had Epstein-Barr syndrome? Elaine: She has this in addition to Epstein-Barr. It's like Epstein-Barr with a twist of Lyme disease. George: She calls me up at my office she says, "We have to talk." Jerry: The four worst words in the English language. Kramer: What a body. Yeeaaah...that's for me. Jerry: Yeah and you're just what she's looking for, too--a stranger, leering through a pair of binoculars ten floors up.

    This collection teams up dog portraits by Valerie Shaff and verse by humorist Roy Blount Jr., to give an original portrayal of what dogs really think.

    Do they really care about nutrients and mattresses, or are they hiding something? Luckily, one fearless grown-up will risk his neck and his dignity to find out. Disguised as everything from a chocolate milk scuba diver to a giant nose, this counterspy uncovers the disturbing truth. And what he learns will shock you like nothing before. Startling suckface emergencies! Dangerous digit gangs! Powerful sumo cells! Those are just some of the secrets revealed in this book by Caldecott medalist David Wisniewski. But don′t let anyone catch you reading it-especially grown-ups. Who knows what could happen if they knew that you knew?

    This spectacular adventure in space and time takes the reader from the edge of the cosmos to a single atom -- and it all begins at a picnic.Based on the bestselling classic Powers of Ten, this magnificient journey begins millions of light years away, with every two pages representing a view ten times larger than the view two pages earlier. As readers flip through the pages, they will descend the dimensions of the universe, through our solar system down to a park on Earth, then into a human body, it's cells, DNA, and finally a single proton. Or readers can travel in reverse, from proton to deep space.A fun and compact visual odyssey, the Powers of Ten flipbook shows us not only the relative size of things in the known world, but our own place in it.Also available is the critically-acclaimed Scientific American Library Paperback version of Powers of Ten, offering detailed commentary on astronomy, biology, particles physics and more by Philip and Phylis Morrison as well as many additional photographs and illustrations. Stephen Jay Gould, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it "a brilliant pictorial and textual embodiment of a wonderful idea".Both the paperback and flipbook were inspired by the brief and beautiful film Powers of Ten A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. Made by the famous designers, the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, and available on video-cassette, this remarkable film has given many people their first grasp of the dimensions of the world we live in.

    A general moral offered by the book is, "If you are planning to write fables, don't forget to change people's names and avoid places with high cliffs".

    He answered questions such as how do porcupines mate, what exactly does Barney Rubble do for a living, and where is Einstein's brain? His answers changed your life. Or at least settled a bet with a loved one. But surely, you are thinking, all the salient facts of the universe have been ascertained by now. Ha! Get a load of the mysteries The Master explores in this landmark volume:, If Teflon is such a nonsticky substance, how do they get it to stick to the pan? , Is the Great Cabal implanting microchips in our brains?, Do fluorescent lights cause cataracts?, What do Scotsmen wear under those kilts?, Can some people extinguish street lamps by force of their bodily emanations? , Is the U.S. Government really hiding alien spaceships?

    Nowhere else will you find such odes to self-absorption as:·Today I will equate material possessions with love. ·Today I will taunt others until they cry, then tell them they are too sensitive. ·Today I will make a new friend based solely on how he or she can further my career. ·Today I will respect my need to sabotage everyone else's success.

    20 YEARS OF FABULOUS FELINE FUN!Laugh along with Garfield and the gang in this timely tribute to the world's feistiest--and funniest--feline!Inside you'll find: ¸  Jim Davis' Top Twenty All-Time Favorite Strips! ¸  Foreword by Mike Peters! ¸  Exclusive 20th Anniversary Interview with Garfield! ¸  A Rare Glimpse Inside Jim Davis' Original Sketchbook! ¸  A Heaping Helping of Classic Garfield Strips! ¸  Doodles, Trivia, Anecdotes! ¸  Embarrassing Photos!It's nothing less than a milestone for Garfield and a must-have collection for every fat cat fanatic!

    Posted on the Web, Schmich's column quickly became an international sensation. Friends e-mailed it to friends, the media picked up on it, and a star was born. There was only one problem: Everyone thought the column was an actual commencement address given by author Kurt Vonnegut.Eventually, Mary Schmich was correctly identified as the author. AMP published her advice as a gift book in 1998. The following year, "Wear Sunscreen" became a hit song.

    Compiled and edited by Lee Lorenz, former art editor of The New Yorker and an acclaimed cartoonist in his own right, The Essential Cartoonists library is a celebration of this unique visual art form. Each volume focuses on one truly outstanding artist and features approximately 150 of the artist's best cartoons, as well as insight into background, influences, inspirations, working habits, and more. Launching the series: The Essential George Booth and The Essential Charles Barsotti. In Booth, Lorenz traces the career of this New Yorker icon. Known primarily for his unmistakable characters--Mr. Ferguson, the violin-playing Mrs. Rittenhouse, curmudgeons with their crazed dogs and unruly profusion of cats--Booth combines warmth, energy, quirkiness, and amazing detail. Like another famous Missourian, Mark Twain, Booth has never lost that flavor of small-town eccentricity--or the laugh-out-loud humor that defines his work.

    He chronicles in this book his appointment to the local school inspectorate and then stories of various visits made, with a background cast of brilliant characters such as the chief school inspector, the dazzling secretary who is always getting things wrong, the local aristrocrat who is head of the school governors, potty schoolteachers who should have gone out to grass years ago, and divine children with superb Yorkshire humour.

    Life lessons for bears-a lighthearted illustrated guide to basic Buddhist beliefs that feature our portly, plucky, and perpetually hungry bear friends.

    An unequalled audience of 29 million viewers watched Eric and Ernie do their stuff while Angela Rippon high kicked, Eddie Waring turned back flips, and a confused Elton John complained of having been "all over the place" looking for the studio. "In that suit?", replied an incredulous Eric. This was the last great flowering of the music halls transported to nearly every sitting room in the UK. Graham McCann evocatively recreates the now lost world of entertainment where the young Eric Barthlomew and Ernie Wiseman learned their trade. But it was when they escaped sharing a bill with unicyclists and paper tearers and got on the box that they were finally crowned as a national institution. McCann does not hide the exhausting hard work that went into their shows, or stint in his praise for their scriptwriters, but it is in recalling their genius for making people of all classes laugh--apparently including the Queen who watched in 1977--that this book is a most affectionate and fitting tribute to two men who really did bring sunshine to millions. --Nick Wroe

    Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe "Indian Territory" that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial "Territory" is what Owens defines as "Frontier," a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge.Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D'Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental — as well as cultural—survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

    This new collection includes such diverse gems as "Occam's Ducks", "Flatfeet!", "The Sawing Boys", and "El Castillo de la Perseverancia", taking readers through realms such as Mexican wrestling movies or the tiniest far future -- with astonishing ideas that no one else could ever imagine.

    for reviving the tradition of English lyric children's poetry. Now he makes his U.S. collection debut with poems for every mood -- thoughtful, funny, silly, fantastical -- all perfectly accompanied by the wondrous pastels of Mary GrandPre. Together they reveal the story of St. Brigid and the baker ... the mysteries that lie down Green Man Lane ... the pleasure of a special hat ... the joys of the Elegant Elephant Delicatessen and the talents of Mrs. Bhattacharya's Chapati Zap Machine. Like plums and poems, this book holds beauty inside.

    That was my signal to the house and to those around us--an to myself--that there would be no more words from Kramer. Julia: Elaine was someone who single women laughed at because she wrestled with her worst secrets and biggest fears. Let's face it, she embodied lots of problems. In fact she was a jerk. Anyone who chooses Elaine as a role model should be in therapy.Jason: When people reflected on their own lives in comparison to George's, they felt pretty good. They could tune in and see it was far worse for this poor slob. In a sick way that was comforting.Jerry: After nine years, how do you say good-bye to the experience, the people, the accomplishments? Emotionally, I just hoped not to get crushed, yet all the while I knew I would.

    If these poems don't put a smile on your face, Stephen Carpenter's hilarious illustrations surely will!

    

    Compiled and edited by Lee Lorenz, former art editor of The New Yorker and an acclaimed cartoonist in his own right, The Essential Cartoonists library is a celebration of this unique visual art form. Each volume focuses on one truly outstanding artist and features approximately 150 of the artist's best cartoons, as well as insight into background, influences, inspirations, working habits, and more. Launching the series: The Essential George Booth and The Essential Charles Barsotti. Charles Barsotti is also a 30-year veteran of The New Yorker, and in Barsotti Lorenz presents an overview of this signature cartoonist whose rounded, elegant, sparsely detailed style evokes both the traditional world of a Thurber and the contemporary sensibility of a Roz Chast. With his simple repertory--including a nameless but lovable pooch and a monarch whose kingdom consists of a guard and a telephone--Barsotti manages to miraculously dissipate the clouds in people's minds with his unexpected humor.

    Read on for information about the good times and the gory from the great goose fairs to the painful punishments and trickery of the ruthless royal family.

    First, she was an outsider to the world of racing; second, and more importantly, she was a woman in what was still very much a man's world. As she tells us in her frank and entertaining autobiography, simply titled Jenny Pitman, she overcame the first problem much easier than beating the second. Known throughout the equine world as the first woman of racing, Mrs Pitman--now Mrs Stait after marrying her long-time partner David Stait in early 1998--is still having to bang her head against the brick wall that is sex discrimination. She tells how, after entering a fitness regime at the beginning of 1998 and looking and feeling better than she had for years, a male colleague asked whether or not her sex life had improved as she appeared so fit and healthy! But racing has been Jenny Pitman's life and the book is a no-holds barred account of a truly remarkable career. After telling of her happy childhood as the middle child of seven spent on a Leicestershire farm run by her parents, she describes the happiness she felt at her teenage marriage to jockey Richard Pitman. That joy was to turn to tears 10 years later when her first husband, and father of Jenny's two boys Mark and Paul, twice walked out on her. However, the outwardly tough-as-teak Jenny gritted her teeth and got on with the job of training racehorses. Jenny has achieved success in the world's toughest races and she fully describes the joy and heartbreak of landing two (it should have been three but Esha Ness's success came in the 1993 void race) Grand Nationals. Then there were the other Grand Nationals, the Scottish, Welsh and finally to complete the set, Irish versions of the event. In 1984 she became the only woman to train a Cheltenham Gold Cup winner and followed that up when the same horse, Burrough Hill Lad, became the first trained by a woman to land the coveted Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup. That was a record which stood until Venetia Williams took 1998's running. It is a frank book which covers and fully explains her run-ins with officialdom, press and even jockeys. The lead-up to her spat with Jamie Osborne is fully explained, as are the reasons behind her famous letter to Aintree officials over the state of the ground at 1998's Grand National. All in all, an enjoyable and informative read in which Mrs Pitman, as usual, pulls no punches.

     In this, another howling success for the series, famous villains like Rob Roy, Dick Turpin and Blackbeard, who all became folk heroes over time, are given the once-over by the sharp-penned Deary as he tells the truth about their lives of crime, leaving little doubt as to what they were really up to when they were on the run. From poor hygiene and terrible food to a country overrun with body snatchers and thief-takers, the poor old Georgians didn't stand much of a chance in a country run by unsuitable politicians and less than stable monarchs, and Gorgeous Georgians wastes no time in taking a stab at this seedy side of Georgian life. --Susan Harrison

    Based on more than 35 years experience, award-winning humorist Jeanne Robertson provides an informative and practical system for gathering life-experience stories that lead to memorable presentations.

    Each has a 24K gold-plated or silver-plated charm to keep on the ribbon bookmark or to wear on a bracelet or necklace.'Twas The Night Before Christmas for dog lovers.

    One is hollow hilarity that masks pain far too deep for words. The other is a full, joyous laugh that sounds triumphantly on the far side of life's dark passages. Comedian Chonda Pierce knows both kinds.In It's Always Darkest Before the Fun Comes Up, this spunky preacher's daughter will do more than tickle your ribs. She'll touch the place in you where laughter and tears dwell side by side. She'll show you the deep wisdom of a merry heart. And with humor and honesty, she'll reveal the God who knows how to turn life's worst punches into its most glorious punch lines--in his perfect time.

    Maureen Lipman continues to examine the warp and weft of her own life's rich tapestry - including doing the weekly wash in a floor-length taffeta gown before going off to shake hands with HM The Queen.