Hal - Deliberately Basic

Books that may never be best sellers

“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”
–Abraham Lincoln

While searching for a book recently, I came across certain titles, real books, that have ridicules titles. Some are absurd by the language of previous eras, and some are simply ridicules. Either way, these are not titles that I would recommend for a good read on a cold January afternoon, unless you truly enjoy being bored to sleep, or you are indeed a strange person. They do, however, provide a good laugh.

More than one bookseller group has annual contests for the oddest titles. The British book-trade magazine, the Bookseller, has for more than 20 years run a competition to find the oddest book title of the year.
Source: http://www.z9design.com/humor/oddbook.html
Since 1978, the pseudonymic diarist Horace Bent of the Bookseller magazine, with the sponsorship of The Diagram Group, has managed an annual contest for the oddest book titles. The contenders are often as alarming as the winners.
Source: http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~burkardt/fun/wordplay/title_oddest.html

Here is an example:

2005 Winner: People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders - and What to Do About It, by Gary Leon Hill, said to have sold 15,000 copies.

A good source of public domain books http://www.authorama.com/ had a few titles that are historically uninteresting.

Horatio Alger, Jr: Ragged Dick

Grenville Kleiser: The World’s Great Sermons

James Johonnot: Chapter VI. Defence of Freedom On Dutch Dikes

Other Odd Book Titles

Remember, these are all real books:

God’s Chewable Vitamin C for the Spirit

The Prostate: A Guide for Men and the Women Who Love Them

Attractive and Affectionate Grave Design

Stick Making: A Complete Course

Collect Fungi on Stamps

Tractors and the Men who Love Them

Infection Highlights

Beyond Leaf Raking

Male Genital Organs and their Improvement

And the oddest one I’ve seen in my life thus far:

More Balls Than Hands, by Michael J. Gelb

Hal Brown

The gal who is constantly moving from customer to customer in the local chain restaurant makes about $2.00 per hour. She, usually a she, wears a smile, sees that your coffee cup is filled, and delivers that nice hot breakfast to you. If something is not to your liking, she takes the brunt of your dissatisfaction. How many trips does she make to your table during your meal? How much do you leave her for a tip?

The guy or gal who works at the more upscale restaurant in your town does pretty much the same as the gal above. Maybe he doesn’t even give you decent service, or the food is not really so much better than the cheaper joint. How much does he get for a tip?

Our system of tipping based on percentage of cost is absurd. Two people doing the same job, yet one gets a much higher tip simply because your food costs more. Talk about a non sequitur, this is like saying that because I have experience eating pie, I would be good at baking pies.

Of course the alternative to tipping is not tipping at all. The business owner could pay his employees a fair wage, and eliminate tipping altogether. Using this rational we would come full circle, and the gal working at the cheaper eatery would still make less money. She would, however,  not depend on the gratuitous vagaries of customers, by having a known salary.

Would you pay a little more for your meal at Lobster Rouge or Robert Evans to support a system like this? I would, and be damned glad to do it. On the other hand, I make it a point to leave a nice tip to those who work the menial jobs, the coffee cup fillers and motel cleaners of the world. Do I care about the college graduate who waits on tables in the five star grandiose joint down the street? Not really. He obviously has more choice than the galley slave who was born in the wrong house. More than likely his mommy and daddy worked as servants at the local choke joint to pay for his education. But that is another story for another day.

Hal Brown

Pessimism Redux

I thought I was the last living pessimist, and damned proud of it. Too much sweetness in times of stress has always been to me, an optimism deactivator. I tend to feel the need to asphyxiate the perp who tells me to “turn that frown upside down.”

Having just discovered Barbara Ehrenrich from an article in Harper’s Magazine - February 2007 issue - entitled “Pathologies of Hope”, I feel renewed that someone out there sees the bullshit perpetrated by the pop psych crowd. Her blog is certainly well worth reading unless you are overwhelmed with joy about the world, and full of hope that everything will work out for the best.

In her essay about the cogency of hope and the effect it is having on American people, we see that hope without action is unproductive and dangerous. In other words, be realistic. If your are going over a cliff in your car, hope is probably less than useless. Anticipation beforehand that there is a possibility of going over the cliff may save you. An ounce of pessimism is worth a pound of hope if it keeps you from killing yourself.

Lack of skepticism can cause death at one extreme. Or at least make you into a gullible chump. The passing of tabloid email messages around the Internet is one example of just how willing people are to be duped. I sometimes feel that I am the only person in the world who bothers to check snopes (or any of the various ways to verify information) for validity of a “pass it on” message. And these are often some of the most intelligent people I know, higher than average IQ folks.

This is not to preach gloom and doom, nor deny that there is anything good in the world. This is about denial that there is anything bad in the world, and how that attitude has affected our social behavior. When you refuse to listen to someone who needs to complain, you are being cruel to that person. Would you neglect to help someone hit by a car? Where is the difference?

If you really feel the need to make the world a better place, do something to ease the pain. Don’t deny that most of the people in the world are starving, killing each other, dying from horrible diseases, and maladies - come to think of it, right here in the US. Fuck the whales, listen to someone complain.

Hal Brown

Quiet Please

Are we developing a country of people who are hyper-entertained? I often wonder if the current generation of “Twixt Twelve and Twenty” are losing the innate ability to self-entertain.
Everywhere I look kids have plugs in their ears listening to music, cars create mini earthquakes with booming speakers (I particularly hate that), pods, cell phones, gadgets and now Verizon will be offering television via cell phone. Enough.

My real concern is, what effect this has on the human mind. Research suggests that noise is almost always negative with regard to mental development. Every aspect, attention, memory - long and short term - learning, all have a negative impact from noise, and even music under certain circumstances is noise.

Suppose you were stranded somewhere (Okay, a desert island) with nothing to entertain you except yourself. Before answering, really think about that for a moment - get that damned plug out of your ear and think. Would you go insane? Would you bore yourself to death? Or, could you find ways to occupy your mind, and create your own world with imagination?

Here’s a thought. Buy your kid a cell phone/PDA/mp3player/TV/ass-wiper, remove it from the box, run over it with your car, and give him the box. Then, make him think of something to do with the box, other than physical harm to your colon. Who knows, he might invent a new gadget and become an overnight millionaire.

Hal Brown