We knew this instinctively as kids, but somehow forgot on the way to adulthood. We got busy and overwhelmed, started valuing things that don't matter, and learned to follow the rules that don't even exist:hate mondaysonly celebrate when the calendar gives you permissiondon't make a messdon't play hookyhide your weirdnesshide your wrinklescare what other people thinkFollowing these so-called rules is a terrific way to stress you out, sap your energy, and ensure a boring life. But there's a better way. In his enlightening book, author and artist Jason Kotecki uncovers some of the most useless rules so you can shift perspective and start seeing the world with wonder once again.It's time to stop living by someone else's rules. Your life is a story, and a short one at that. Make it a good one.

    With the help of the entire creative collective, Gordon-Levitt culled, edited and curated over 8,500 contributions into this finely tuned collection of original art from 67 contributors. Reminiscent of the 6-Word Memoir series, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1 brings together art and voices from around the world to unite and tell stories that defy size.

    There, a bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen," and happiness is "an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce’s satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book’s ninety-year history.A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi’s exhaustive investigation into the book’s writing and publishing history. All of Bierce’s known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included.Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.

    This is the perfect book for anyone who knows that love can be baked into a pie!A 16-time national pie-baking champion, Linda Hundt truly believes in the ability of pies to spread good will, one delicious bite at a time. In this sweet cookbook, she shares the heartwarming stories behind 52 of her signature pies. From classic to innovative, each delicious recipe is designed to inspire you to make (using the freshest ingredients) what will become your own family favorites. Among them: Mom Hundt's Apple Almond Pie, Linda's Best Browned Butter Coconut Chess Pie, Aunt Ella's Cherry Berry Berry Pie, Grandma Rosella's Vanilla Custard Pie, Yankee Dixie Pie, Mocha Hot Chocolate Pie, and many more. Eat Pie and Love Life!

    Schottenfreude is a unique, must-have dictionary, complete with newly coined words that explore the idiosyncrasies of life as only the German language can. In what other language but German could you construct le mot juste for a secret love of bad foods, the inability to remember jokes, Sunday-afternoon depression, the urge to yawn, the glee of gossip, reassuring your hairdresser, delight at the changing of the seasons, the urge to hoard, or the ineffable pleasure of a cold pillow? A beguiling, ideal gift book for the Gelehrte or anyone on your list—just beware of rapidly expanding (and potentially incomprehensible) vocabularies.

    He was a kid, eighteen years old. Married, broke, flunking out of college-and about to become a father. The Marines seemed like a good way out. He figured the Nam couldn't be any worse than home. He was wrong.Publishers Weekly says "Chilling...It tells how a youngster from Portland, Oregon matured in the crucible of combat...The reader is given a sense of what it's like to fight an unseen enemy who might appear anytime, anywhere and start shooting from ambush." Karl Marlantes, New York Times best selling author of "Matterhorn" calls "A Field of Innocence", "Powerful ...and riveting."Tim O'Brien, New York Times best selling author of "The Things They Carried" says, "With its raw realism and heartbreaking honesty...one of the finest Vietnam memoirs."Kirkus Review says A Field of Innocence is "Exciting and Impressive."

    When nothing stands between a leader's delusion whims and seeing them carried them out, all sorts of bizarre outcomes are possible. Whether it is Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim I practicing archery on palace servants and sending out his advisers to find the fattest woman in the empire for his wife or Turkmenistan President Turkmenbashi renaming the days of the week after himself and constructing an 80-foot golden statue that revolves to face the sun, crazed leaders have plagued society for millenia. This book will look at the lives of the ten most mentally unbalanced figures in history. Some suffered from genetic disorders that led to schizophrenia, such as French King Charles VI, who thought he was made of glass. Others believed themselves to be God’s representatives on earth and wrote religious writings that they guaranteed to the reader would get them into heaven, even if they were barely literate. Whatever their background, these rulers show that dynastic politics made sure that a rightful heir always got on the throne – despite that heir's mental condition – and that power can destroy a mind worse than any mental illness.

    Beginning with an introduction to array formulas, this manual examines topics such as how they differ from ordinary formulas, the benefits and drawbacks of their use, functions that can and cannot handle array calculations, and array constants and functions. Among the practical applications surveyed include how to extract data from tables and unique lists, how to get results that match any criteria, and how to utilize various methods for unique counts. This book contains 529 screen shots.

    From stupefying stunts to wacky world’s records, all of Ripley’s riveting findings are here, in an easy-to-browse, impossible-to-put-down color volume. Where else could you learn that: • It’s estimated that 10,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000 snowflakes have fallen to the Earth since the Earth was formed! • Queen Isabeau of Bavaria used a mixture of boar’s brains, crocodile glands, and wolf blood as skin lotion! • Anna Bread married John Butter in Leeds, England, April 22, 1926! • Phil Turco of Madison, Wisconsin, swallowed 339 goldfish in two hours! Bizarre and amazing categories include Accidents and Disasters, Animals and Insects, Archaeology, Feats and Stunts, Prophecies, Records, the Unexplained, and more. It’s fascinating fun for the whole family.

    Their reserve is not a defense against the rest of the world: it is a protective cover, like the lid of a nuclear reactor. Rob joyCalvinism is still deeply ingrained in the Scottish soul. A Scottish poet, overcome by the joy of sunshine and blue sky, once cried out what a fine day it was. The woman to whom he spoke replied, “We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it.” Cunning and cleverThe Scots respect cleverness and like to feel that they possess plenty of it themselves. In Scotland there is nothing wrong with being clever, so long as you show it by words or actions, rather than by bragging. You don't have to hide it. To say of someone that “he has a good conceit of himself” is neither praise nor blame, just a statement of fact.

    This landmark book documents the magazine’s rise to prominence as the voice of rock and roll and a leading showcase for era-defining photography. From the 1960s to the present day, the book offers a decade-by-decade exploration of American music and history. Interviews with rock legends—Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Kurt Cobain, Bruce Springsteen, and more—appear alongside iconic photographs by Baron Wolman, Annie Leibovitz, Mark Seliger, and other leading image-makers. With feature articles, excerpts, and exposés by such quintessential writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Matt Taibbi, and David Harris, this book is an irresistible and essential keepsake of the magazine that has defined American music for generations of readers.

    In GOVERNMENT ZERO, Savage sounds the alarm about how progressives and radical Islamists are working towards similar ends: to destroy Western Civilization and remake it in their own respective images. These two dark forces are transforming our once-free republic into a socialist, Third World dictatorship ruled by Government Zero: absolute government and zero representation.Combining in-depth analysis with biting commentary, Savage cuts through mainstream media propaganda to reveal an all-out attack on our borders, language and culture by progressive and Islamist travelers who have hijacked public policy from national defense to immigration to public education.There is only one thing that can stop this terrifying agenda. Michael Savage has a plan. Get the inside story before it's too late.

     Did you know that people in Bolivia have a word that means "I was rather too drunk last night and it's all their fault"? That there's no Italian equivalent for the word "blue"? That the Dutch word for skimming stones is "plimpplamppletteren"? This delightful book, which draws on the collective wisdom of more than 254 languages, includes not only those words for which there is no direct counterpart in English ("pana po'o" in Hawaiian means to scratch your head in order to remember something important), but also a frank discussion of exactly how many Eskimo words there are for snow and the longest known palindrome in any language ("saippuakivikauppias"--Finland). And all right, what in fact is "tingo"? In the Pascuense language of Easter Island, it's to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking to borrow them. Well, of course it is. Enhanced by its ingenious and irresistible little Schott's Miscellany/Eats Shoots and Leaves package and piquant black-and-white illustrations throughout, The Meaning of Tingo is a heady feast for word lovers of all persuasions. Viva Tingo!

    Part of the Imponderables® series, Feldman's book arms readers with information about everyday life -- from science, history, and politics to sports, television, and radio -- that encyclopedias, dictionaries, and almanacs just don't have. Where else will you learn what makes women open their mouths when applying mascara?

    A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American history—and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains. “Do not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb,” the letter warned. “It will explode.” The bomb maker was one Janos “Big John” Birges, a Hungarian political refugee who had worked his way up from nothing to become a successful entrepreneur in Fresno, California—only to see his life unraveled in middle age by divorce, cancer, and gambling debts. By 1980, he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvey’s. And he had roped his two teenage sons—who were as eager to please their father as they were terrified of him—into a plot to get the money back. But the bomb he planted in the casino that August wasn’t just an extortion scheme. It was a brilliant feat of engineering—an intricate and deadly puzzle that Birges hoped would prove once and for all just how badly the world had underestimated him. In A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, Adam Higginbotham draws from interviews with federal agents and Birges’s co-conspirators—as well as never-before-released FBI records—to tell the true story of the race to stop one of history’s most bizarre extortion plots. By turns action-packed and darkly hilarious, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite is an engrossing tale of genius at its most deranged. Praise for A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite: “A simple plan and a hell of a lot of explosives pay off in a galloping true crime tale that speaks in the language of ’70s SoCal dirt-bags, dreamers and G-men. Stranger still, beneath the pyrotechnics lies a poignant story of family. Higginbotham’s skills as a journalist and storyteller left me banging the plate for more.” —Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse “Of all the spectacular crimes that plagued America at the tail end of the Me Decade, none was more bizarre or more ambitious than the plot to bomb Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino. Adam Higginbotham brings this bonkers caper to vivid life in A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, a tale that explores the very fine line between criminal genius and criminal insanity. You’ll devour this rollicking yarn in one sitting, then spend the next few months regaling your friends with all the astonishing details.” —Brendan I. Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us