Book picks similar to
Strange Hollywood by Portable Press


non-fiction
humor
television-history
books-on-tape

The Paranoid's Pocket Guide: Hundreds of Things You Never Knew You Had to Worry About


Cameron Tuttle - 1997
    Because a pair of drawstring sweatpants could bring about your most embarrassing moment. And a toothpick in your sandwich can be the deadliest of weapons. Including hundreds of bizarre-but-true things that can get you, this compact volume will induce nervous page flipping and make even the most snug and secure folks bonafide paranoiacs. Chilling black and white photographs document the everyday items that menace your safety. But whether it's archibutyrophobia (the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth) or phobophobia (the fear of fear itself) that eventually gets you, don't be afraid to buy this book. You never know what might happen to you if you don't.

Wal-Mart Book of Ethics Abridged Edition


R.A. Wilson - 2012
    Why else would you be looking at this book? If you have ever wanted to see behind the front lines of retail, this is the book for you. If you want to validate your own experiences in retail, this is the book for you. If you just want to laugh at humorous things from funny people, this is the book for you. Packed full of true short stories from working in one of these super stores, only one conclusion can be reached in the end: Wal-Mart is the craziest place on Earth!

Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?: And 101 Other Intriguing Science Questions


New Scientist - 2008
    Following the phenomenal success of Does Anything Eat Wasps? (2005) and the even more spectacularly successful Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze? (2006), this latest collection includes a bumper crop of wise and wonderful answers never before seen in book form.As usual, the simplest questions often have the most complex answers - while some that seem the knottiest have very simple explanations. New Scientist's 'Last Word' is regularly voted the magazine's most popular section as it celebrates all questions - the trivial, idiosyncratic, baffling and strange. This all-new and eagerly awaited selection of the best again presents popular science at its most entertaining and enlightening.

Walk With Us: How "The West Wing" Changed Our Lives


Claire Handscombe - 2016
    That's a long time ago. Back then, we were worrying about the Millennium Bug, paying $700 for DVD players, and using pagers. 1999: a century ago.And yet, the show continues to have an impact that is arguably unique. If you live or work in DC, references to it are inescapable. People have walked down the aisle to the theme music. Or they’ve named children, pets, GPS systems, and even an iPhone app after the characters. Or they’ve started Twitter accounts as the characters to continue the storyline and comment on current political events. Or they credit it for closer relationships with their family members or a way out of depression.In this anthology of quotes and essays, contributors from six countries, ranging in age from twenty to seventy years old, tell their West Wing stories.

Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure


Paul Lukas - 1997
    He wanders the aisles of supermarkets, hardware stores, and secondhand shops, taking obsessively detailed notice of products and services that are either too obscure or weird for us to notice, or so ubiquitous that we've stopped seeing them at all. He reviews them all in his acclaimed 'zine, Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption. In Inconspicuous Consumption you'll find the very best of these hilarious reviews - 100 products and services that add up to an irresistible read. From kitschy novelties and wildly unappetizing food products to beautifully functional items, Inconspicuous Consumption is a delightful celebration of the sometimes elegant, sometimes ridiculous, and always unsung fringes of our late-twentieth-century consumer culture.

Sea Turtles - Animals Explored in Pictures and Words


Ann Lawrence - 2013
    With an ancestry dating back to the early days of the dinosaurs here on earth, the book looks at: The king of the marine turtles - the leatherback. The stunningly beautiful hawksbill sea turtle. The big-headed loggerhead sea turtle. The grazing green sea turtle. The heart-shaped olive Ridley sea turtle. The Australian sea turtle - the flatback. The baby of the marine turtles - the Kemp's Ridley. After a lifetime spent studying the animal kingdom at first hand as she has traveled the globe, Ann Lawrence brings the world of these marine creatures to life with some of the most amazing pictures you will find anywhere.Pick up this beautiful interesting and informative book today at the low price that you will find only for Kindle readers!*** Download your copy of Sea Turtles today! ***

101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions


Kenji Kawakami - 1995
    A collection of the author's most imaginative Chindohgu, otherwise known as unuseless ideas, includes the bath body suit and the walk 'n' wash ankle-attachable laundry tank.

The Rites of Autumn


Dan O'Brien - 1988
    When one of his release sites was raided by a golden eagle, he managed to save a peregrine chick, and decided to make an improbable two-thousand-mile trip with the surviving young falcon, Dolly. From the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, following the autumnal migration of waterfowl, O'Brien taught her to hunt as a wild falcon would, in the hopes of releasing her into the natural world. The Rites of Autumn is the riveting account of their incredible journey. (51/2 X 81/4, 208 pages, map)

History Bytes: 37 People, Places, and Events that Shaped American History


Nick Vulich - 2015
     Why doesn't everyone know the Boston Massacre wasn't really a massacre? Subsequent testimony proved the soldiers fired in self-defense. The King Street riot was started by a group of four street thugs who got their rocks off attacking lone British soldiers. Sam Adams and Paul Revere twisted it into a massacre. And, if you think the Boston Tea Party was a response to British taxes that raised the price of tea in the colonies, think again. The Tea Act of 1773 actually reduced the price of tea paid by the colonists. The people hurt by the Tea Act were the smugglers. The lower price of tea undercut their business, and ensured that the East India Company would have a monopoly on tea. The South Carolina Nullification Congress of 1832 was a harbinger of things to come. The question was if a state disagrees with a federal law, does it have the right to nullify it, and disregard that law? Vice-president John C. Calhoun argued state's rights superseded federal laws. President Andrew Jackson believed to his dying day that Calhoun was a damned traitor, and that he should have strung him up from the nearest branch. The Black Hawk War was a mix-up of frontier madness, mayhem, and murder. Illinois Governor John Reynolds called out the militia and raised thousands of volunteer troops. General Winfield Scott marched his regulars half way across the country to Fort Armstrong at Rock Island. Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Taylor led a group of infantrymen in the fighting. In the end, it was a massacre that nearly wiped out the Sac tribe. In the fall of 1845 President Polk offered Mexico five million dollars if they would recognize the Southwestern Boundary of Texas at the Rio Grande. When Mexico refused his offer Polk decided to force the issue. He sent General Zachary Taylor and 3,000 troops to Corpus Christi, Texas. In March of 1846 General Taylor moved his forces into the disputed territory between the Rio Grande and Nueces Rivers. Soon after that, Mexico was provoked into a war with the United States. It has been said that James Buchanan was a "weak, timid, old man" who didn't do anything to prevent the Southern states from seceding. Some historians have even gone so far as to declare Buchanan was an "accessory after the fact." He was a president, Southern sympathizer, and traitor. But, was he? Imagine what it would be like to wake up, flip on the morning news, and discover Bradley Cooper or Ashton Kutcher assassinated President Obama. That's what happened in 1865. People were shocked when they learned John Wilkes Booth killed President Lincoln. Booth was one of the most popular actors of his day. He was young, just twenty-six years old, considered one of the most attractive men in America. At the time he killed Lincoln, Booth was pulling down $20,000 a year as an actor (that's roughly $300,000 in 2015 money). And, yet--he sacrificed it all for his political beliefs. What was going on in the mind of John Wilkes Booth? I could tell you more, but you get the idea.

Pudge: The Biography of Carlton Fisk


Doug Wilson - 2015
    A baseball superstar in the 1970s and 80s, Fisk was known not just for his dedication to the sport and tremendous plays but for the respect with which he treated the game.A homegrown icon, Fisk rapidly became the face of one of the most storied teams in baseball, the Boston Red Sox of the 1970s. As a rookie making only $12,000 a year, he became the first player to unanimously win the American League Rookie of the Year award in 1972, upping both his pay grade and national recognition. Fisk's game-winning home run in Game Six of the hotly-contested 1975 World Series forever immortalized him in one of the sport's most exciting televised moments. Fisk played through an epic period of player-owner relations, including the dawn of free agency, strikes, and collusions. After leaving Boston under controversy in 1981, he joined the Chicago White Sox, where he played for 12 more major league seasons, solidifying his position as one of the best catchers of all time.Doug Wilson, finalist for both the Casey Award and Seymour Medal for his previous baseball biographies, uses his own extensive research and interviews with childhood friends and major league teammates to examine the life and career of a leader who followed a strict code and played with fierce determination.

Generation Oxy: From High School Wrestlers to Pain Pill Kingpins


Douglas Dodd - 2017
    This teenage criminal enterprise ultimately shipped hundreds of thousands of OxyContins and other prescription painkillers throughout the country, making millions in the process.This true crime memoir details the three-year-long rise and collapse of the Barabas Criminal Enterprise, an opiod-pill trafficking ring founded by Douglas Dodd and his best friend on the wrestling team, Lance Barabas. Raised by an alcoholic mother and surrounded by drug-abusing relatives, Dodd got involved in narcotics at an early age. Their scheme to sell the drugs he was already consuming coincided with the explosion of prescription addicts who were traveling the “Oxy Express” to Florida for easy access to the pills they dubbed “hillbilly heroin.” Soon they were shipping forty thousand pills a month, with tens of thousands of dollars returning in hollowed-out teddy bears.In Generation Oxy, Dodd recounts his time as a wannabe Scarface: bottle service at clubs, an arsenal of weapons that would make Dillinger blush, narrow escapes from the law, hordes of young women, and as many pills as he could swallow. And this was all before he was legally able to drink a beer, while still living with his grandmother. The good times came to an end when the DEA closed in and the twenty-year-old Dodd faced life in federal prison.

44 Horrible Dates


Eddie Campbell - 2012
    Read it and prepare for your next date."—James Van Praagh, New York Times bestselling author, Talking to Heaven "Every story is the truth and every truthful moment is a hilarious journey! It's as if you're listening to your best friend at a coffee shop and watching a stand—up take command of the stage. You won't be disappointed as you travel this refreshingly funny road of 'horrible dates!'"—Debra Wilson, actress/comedian, MADtv "Eddie's book is an emotional catharsis for anyone who has ever come home from one horrible date and wondered, What the hell was that? This book is laugh–out–loud hilarious and extremely well written."—Chad Allen, writer, producer, actor, activist What I have to tell you in this book will seem almost unreal. But you are going to have to keep reminding yourself that these are actual real dates. For everyone who can empathize and knows what it's like to be on at lease one crappy date, this book is for you. For everyone who wants that dinner back or sat through a boring, horrible movie only to determine that the person you were with was a complete and utter tsunami, this book is for you. For everyone else, buckle your seat belt and turn off your phone, because a massive car wreck is about to begin.

Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness


Michael P. Branch - 2016
    Within this remote, high desert landscape sits the home of Michael Branch, where he, his wife, and their two curious little girls brazenly live among the packrats and ground squirrels, rattlesnakes and scorpions. In Branch's hands, this exceedingly barren and stark landscape becomes a place teeming with energy, surprise, and an endless web of connections that ultimately includes his family and home. It is in this desert setting where, in building a ladder to the stars, one can find a connection to the past and to the heavens; where his children's first garden becomes not the quaint blossoming of seed to flower and fruit but a smoke bomb-drenched exhibit of futility in the face of the inhospitable desert environment; where the surprise of fire acts as a reminder all too real of the unknowable that awaits us and for which we can never fully prepare. In this exhilarating, lyrical, and humorous exploration of natural history, Branch reveals a desert wilderness in which our ideas about nature and ourselves are challenged and transformed.

Lessons In Stalking: Adjusting to Life With Cats


Dena Harris - 2005
    In no other cat book will you find such riveting accounts as:The Great Cat Butt Wiping AdventureJingle Ball HorrorsThe Creature Under the FridgeYoga CatThe Big Brown Mouse & Other Toys Our Cat LoathesLessons In Stalking is the purr-fect gift for cat lovers!Dena Harris has been a humor columnist for Cats & Kittens magazine and contributor to Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul. Her newest book, "Who Moved My Mouse? A Self-Help Book for Cats (Who Don't Need Any Help)" is being translated into 5 languages. Visit www.denaharris.com or www.selfhelpforcats.com for more info.

Government Zero: No Borders, No Language, No Culture


Michael Savage - 2015
    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.