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The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists by Karl Shaw


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Standing For Something More: The Excommunication of Lyndon Lamborn


Lyndon Lamborn - 2009
    After a highly publicized and controversial exit from Mormonism, Lamborn intertwines the story of his awakening with psychological aspects of religious belief.

Gorgeous Georgians Activity Book


Terry Deary - 2005
    Twelve classic Horrible Histories are being reissued with a tie-in cover. In Gorgeous Georgians readers can discover thehe full story: Gangs who made a living selling dead bodies. Husbands who sold their wives at auction. Doctors who cured toothache with squashed fish eyes. Join Rattus Rattus and the gang for the funniest, fastest, nastiest and daftest ride through histor you're ever likely to see..

Not Like My Mother:Becoming a sane parent after growing up in a CRAZY family


Irene Tomkinson - 2008
    How to separate what belongs to your history and what belongs in your present life is some of the rich, practical advice you will take away from  Not Like My Mother.  In the early distribution of Not Like My Mother readers reported they couldn’t put the book down. It reads like a compelling novel with a human and spiritual insight that makes you feel a part of the conversation.  YOU WILL WANT THIS BOOK FOR ALL YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS!!!!!"

Micronesian Blues


Bryan Vila - 2009
    street cop Bryan Vila’s hilarious road to cultural enlightenment as a police chief in the remote Pacific islands of Micronesia.Through lively narrative laced with wry humor, it chronicles his adventures and misadventures on Saipan, Ponape (now Pohnpei), Truk (now Chuuk), Palau, Yap, Kosrae, and Kwajalein.Trial and error was the name of the game in this dubious paradise, where Bryan had to learn the rules—or make them up—as he went. Yet he embraced island life, succeeded in his new role, and ultimately found himself profoundly changed by his experiences in Micronesia and the lessons he learned there.

The QI Annual: E


John Lloyd - 2007
    This work is packed with original contributions from Stephen Fry, Alan Davies, Jo Brand, Bill Bailey and other regular guests on the show, with games to play at home, puzzles, cartoon strips, mini-encyclopaedias, how-to diagrams and masses of QI facts. If you want to read Julian Clary's poetry about the Queen, Roger Law's musings on flatulent kangaroos, or have often wondered how you might make a waterproof apron out of a whale's foreskin, your Christmas gift dilemma has just been solved. Warning: very silly indeed. Will offend dullards, whales and parents in no particular order.

Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: Royal Family Life


Ruth Binney - 2012
    From difficult childhoods to fashion icons, from love matches to divorces, and from unrehearsed coronations to assassination attempts and untimely deaths.Curiosity about Britain’s rulers and their next of kin never seems to wane, and it is this compendium about the lives of the members of the Royal Family that makes this so utterly compelling.

Alpana Pours: About Being a Woman, Loving Wine Having Great Relationships


Alpana Singh - 2006
    Since American women purchase and consume more wine than American men, 77% and 60% respectively, a voice is needed to help women understand that their busy professional and social lifestyles can be well paired with wine. Master Sommelier and successful television host Alpana Singh, twenty-nine, happens to be just the person who can help them do it.Alpana Singh is uniquely qualified to talk about wine, contemporary women and relationships. At age twenty-six she became the youngest woman to be inducted into the world’s most exclusive sommelier organization, the hundred-and-twenty-member Court of Master Sommeliers. She spent five years as sommelier at a world famous four star restaurant, Everest of Chicago. While there she closely observed the sometimes humorous, sometimes absurd, social interactions between men and woman at all stages of their relationships. Her mental journal of these “social observations” came in handy as she wrote her first book, Alpana Pours.Alpana Pours reaches readers in playful language they will understand, and in a highly entertaining manner they will enjoy. Women want to know how to select wine when entertaining important clients, pair wine with food they and their partner are preparing together, choose the right wines for hostess gifts, bridal showers, a first meeting with a boyfriend’s parents and what wine to, or not to, order on a first date. Alpana Pours supplies tips on these and a myriad of other topics including “dating” and “dealing with guys.” The book’s gender riff on wine and lifestyle is unique and will definitely grab reader’s attention.

How to Stay Bitter Through the Happiest Times of Your Life


Anita Liberty - 2006
    But I wrote a lot of good poems.”So maintains Anita Liberty, the caustically funny New York City performance artist who was going along happily healing her hurt by hating and humiliating her detestable ex-boyfriend on stage and in print until the unthinkable happened: she had a good date. And one good date deserves another. And another. And another. And, all of the sudden, Anita Liberty finds herself in a predicament. Getting dumped launched Anita’s career–Will falling in love finish it? Who’s more important: her devoted audience or her newly devoted boyfriend? And on top of everything, Hollywood won’t stop calling and Anita can’t figure out if It wants a serious commitment or just a little bit of no-strings-attached fun. From digging mercilessly into the minutiae of her new relationship to dramatically torching every professional bridge she crosses in L.A., Anita refuses to let a big load of bliss get dumped right in the middle of her career path.“He said that my work was amazing and hilarious and smart and that he can’t wait to see me perform.So I had sex with him.”“My boyfriend asked me to change my look.To something other than contemptuous.”{BARGAIN} Whatever Hollywood ends up paying me for the rights to the story of my life.“It’s easier to go back to fantasizing about perfection . . .than to accept that perfection is just a fantasy.”“Boyfriend thinks I’d rather be right than happy.Boyfriend’s right.But I’m not telling him that.”Through blog entries, film scenes, poems, and to-do lists, Anita Liberty documents the perils and pitfalls of dating, sex, relationships, artistic success, and the kind of true love that sucks the creative life out of you to the point where you just end up staring at a blank computer screen and thinking gooey thoughts about your new boyfriend even though you should be writing.

The Ferrari in the Bedroom


Jean Shepherd - 1972
    But he was so much more, a comic Garrison Keillor-like figure whose unique voice transcended the airwaves and affected a whole generation of nostalgic Americans.The Ferrari in the Bedroom is Shepherd's wry, affectionate look at the hang-ups and delusions of Americans in the 1970s. From his sardonic assessment of fads such as the nostalgia craze ("Thinking that the old days were good is a terrible sickness. Everything was just as bad then as it is now.") to a modest proposal for the foundation of S.P.L.A.T. (The Society for the Prevention of the Leaving of Animal Turds), Jean Shepherd provides a generous measure of his special brand of wise and warm humor as an antidote for some of America's more ridiculous obsessions.

The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 - When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone


Mike Shropshire - 2008
    But for the baseball cognoscenti, there are just a few "must-have" classics: BALL FOUR by Jim Bouton. THE LONG SEASON by Jim Brosnan. WILLIE'S TIME by Charles Einstein. And SEASONS IN HELL by Mike Shropshire, which was a hilarous first-person account of Mike's travails serving as a daily beat writer covering the hapless 1972 Texas Rangers. Now, in The Last Real Season, Shropshire captures the essence of a different time and different place in baseball, when the average salary for major leaguers was only $27,600...when the ballplayers' drug of choice was alcohol, not steroids...when major leaguers sported tight doubleknit uniforms over their long-hair and Afros...and on July 28th, 1975, the day that famed Detroit resident Jimmy Hoffa went missing, the Detroit Tigers started a losing streak of 19 games in a row. On the day that the Tigers blew a 4-run lead in the bottom of the ninth, Shropshire recalls: "I drank three bottles of Stroh's beer in less than a minute and wrote that 'Jimmy Hoffa will show up in the left field stands with Amelia Earhart as his date before the Tigers will win another game.'"And so it goes. Filled with just the kind of wonderful baseball stories that real fans crave, this is the funniest baseball book of the year.

Trail Magic and the Art of Soft Pedaling: Mountain biking 3,000 miles along the Continental Divide


Scott Thigpen - 2014
    Twenty-five years later, he was sedentary and rapidly gaining weight. Hello Couch, meet Potato. It was time for a change, for both his body and his mind. Determined to start moving again, Scott climbed on a bicycle one summer afternoon and started pedaling. By the end of the driveway, he was gasping for breath. A year later, Scott was still trying to stay upright on a mountain bike when he watched Ride The Divide, a movie about an event so daunting, so exhilarating, so tough that few attempt it. But Scott couldn’t stop thinking about it. The Tour Divide, a nearly 3000-mile mountain bike race along the spine of the Continental Divide, was his new dream. Known as one of the toughest races in the world, the Tour Divide is an unsupported off-road event. If your tire is flat, you fix it. If you run out of water, you must find more. If you’re caught in the middle of nowhere, exhausted and blurry-eyed? Find a spot to nap amidst nature and try not to bother the Grizzlies. Starting from zero, Scott trained for two years while maintaining a busy family life and career. Scott was preparing for the ride of his life. In June of 2013, he climbed on that bicycle again, this time to race against 167 other people from all over the world on a trek that would take him from Canada to Mexico in 22 days. Captured through Scott’s vivid words and wondrous illustrations, this is the tale of one man’s quest to break free of the typical life and conquer his wildest dream.

How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps


Lawrence Krubner - 2017
    When inexperienced entrepreneurs ask my advice about their idea for a tech startup, they often worry "What if Google decides to compete with us? They will crush us!" I respond that far more startups die of suicide than homicide. If you can avoid hurting yourself, then you are already better off than most of your competitors. Startups are a chance to build something entirely original with brilliant and ambitious people. But startups are also dangerous. Limited money means there is little room for mistakes. One bad decision can mean bankruptcy. The potential payoff attracts capital, which in turn attracts scam artists. The unscrupulous often lack the skills needed to succeed, but sometimes they are smart enough to trick investors. Even entrepreneurs who start with a strong moral compass can find that the threat of failure unmoors their ethics from their ambition. Emotions matter. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. In this book I offer both advice and also warnings. I've seen certain self-destructive patterns play out again and again, so I wanted to document one of the most extreme cases that I've witnessed. In 2015 I worked for a startup that began with an ingenious idea: to use the software techniques known as Natural Language Processing to allow people to interact with databases by writing ordinary English sentences. This was a multi-billion dollar idea that could have transformed the way people gathered and used information. However, the venture had inexperienced leadership. They burned through their $1.3 million seed money. As their resources dwindled, their confidence transformed into doubt, which was aggravated by edicts from the Board Of Directors ordering sudden changes that effectively threw away weeks' worth of work. Every startup forces its participants into extreme positions, often regarding budget and deadlines. Often these situations are absurd to the point of parody. Therefore, there is considerable humor in this story. The collision of inexperience and desperation gives rise to moments that are simply silly. I tell this story in a day-to-day format, both to capture the early optimism, and then the later sense of panic. Here then, is a cautionary tale, a warning about tendencies that everyone joining a startup should be on guard against."

Free Kindle Books


Creep Creepersin - 2013
    This is the story of one man's quest to get the entire Amazon Kindle library for free and the repercussions of what an insane obsession could bring.

The Junket (Kindle Single)


Mike Albo - 2011
    He lands an enviable gig writing about shopping and fashion for the city’s major newspaper, but an ill-fated promotional junket gets Albo into hot water. He becomes a gossip item and finds himself caught in an acrimonious war between Old and New Media. Here's a gimlet-eyed account of the back-biting media scene, a glimpse into the inner workings of the fashion crowd, and a candid portrait of what it takes to survive as a writer in today’s chattering and watchful New York City."I was perilously close to exposing a secret underground economy of promotion: favors and junkets and banquets and gifts that keeps the city in motion, and keeps underpaid writers at work. Basically, I became the Silkwood of Swag."

You've Done What, My Lord?: Hilarious tales from a country estate


Rory Clark - 2000
    However, when James Aden takes up the position of Deputy Agent he does not realise the full extent of what the job entails.He finds himself spending his days negotiating with royalty, farmers, and even wildlife, as well as the imperious Lady Leghorn. In order to survive, James must come to terms with his role quickly, and not let himself get too distracted by Sophie, the pre-college assistant.