Scream & be free

I found Amrit Brar's work on tumblr about a week ago. I saw exactly one post she had made involving a new tarot suite and its minor arcana and within an hour I'd bought one of her books and a patch.

Amrit Brar is SUCH A FUCKING GOOD ILLUSTRATOR, PLEASE GO FOLLOW HER ON A SHITLOAD OF PLATFORMS AND GIVE HER LOTS OF MONEY IF YOU CAN. (Instagram Tumblr Twitter StorEnvy, btw, in case searching was too much effort.)

Anyway, Shitty Horoscopes is an amazing anthology of bleak, funny, hope/ful/less messages about an uncertain future. It's all skulls and knives and roses, it's beautiful and sad, and I wish I could have a new page every day forever. Brar should do all of the horoscopes ever. Astrologers should all cede their jobs to her, she's the only one who gets how indifferent the universe is and communicates that to the reader while still evoking a "lol, same" reaction.

It's amazing?

For a book with so little writing it's incredibly sharply written, each horoscope lands almost like a poem. The illustrations are infuriatingly good, they make me sad that I'm not anywhere near as good as Brar is and make me want to work harder and better as an illustrator.

I'm obsessed. I ordered this book as soon as I found out it existed and immediately grabbed onto it like a hungry little goblin and never wanted it to leave. It's been more than a month since I've read it but it still lives on my desk so that I can occasionally flip through the pages and marvel at the art.

GOOD FUCKING JOB. I LOVE YOU.

Anyway, I'm 100% serious please order all of this book that you can reasonably order, I recommend it as a birthday gift, especially for people who are skeptical about horoscopes.

Cheers,
     - Alli

ORDER IT HERE.

(oh, this entry is called "Scream & be free" because my order from Brar's Storenvy page came with a couple of postcards, one of which was an adorable and tired bat flapping over the legend "scream & be free" and it really resonated with me.

All of the things

I've spoken in-depth about my adoration for Randall Munroe here in the past so I won't go off that much about wonder and science and just how amazing it is that we get to live in and explore the universe. Like it's great, it's fantastic, it's the everyday miracle but I've been over it.

So instead I'll say that Thing Explainer is REALLY FUCKING FUN AND FUNNY Y'ALL. The goal of the book was to explain complicated concepts using the 1000 most common words in the English language, so words like "International Space Station" become "fast sky boat" and "ink" becomes "writing water" and oil becomes "old dead things." The Periodic Table of Elements written in the Thing Explainer style is particularly entertaining (I didn't realize four elements were named after one tiny town) but the book as a whole is a friggin fantastic thing to give as a gift to a kid who's getting into science OR to give to a grownup who's into science who maybe needs to chill on the jargon a little.

There are some fantastic fold-out pages (at least two gatefolds that I can remember but also a couple larger, more complicated vertical pages) and the illustrations throughout the book are done in Munroe's perplexing style - there's warm simplicity in his stick figures accompanied by a terrifying attention to detail in technical drawings and the two meet up in a spectacular fashion. There is an incredibly detailed drawing of the interior of a building with random shark tanks and dinosaurs thrown in for shits and giggles. That kind of thing is everywhere in the book and is part of what makes Munroe such a fascinating and successful cartoonist - his big, complicated, thinky, interactive comics draw huge audiences but so do his comics of two stick figures walking along and talking about programming.

Anyway, Thing Explainer is great and I loved it but it took me over a year to read. Because the details are so fine, and because I know there's humor hiding in every page, I wanted to read it very carefully and make sure I didn't miss anything. Unfortunately this means that each page takes longer to read than ten pages of a Stephen King book would take me. The pages very rarely follow the left-to-right, top-to-bottom structure that most English-readers are familiar with and so it's jarring to jump from one part of a page to the next. I ended up losing my place a lot and got frustrated if I tried to read more than a couple pages at a time. This ends up making the book a good rainy day book or puzzle-replacement book but it does slow down your reading.

I enjoyed the hell out of it but I want to give anyone thinking of purchasing it a heads up - it's not as easy at it seems.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Where you can find it in English and Other Languages.

A promise to myself to stop reading shitty "humor" books

Twede's Diner is the restaurant that was the set of the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks. Every time I go to Washington I make a point of stopping at Twede's and having a cup of coffee and taking some time to stare up at the imposing misty ridge that is Mount Si.

Twede's is an okay diner, it's not great. They really want to capitalize on the fact that they were the set for a cult hit TV show and I've got no problem with that. It's their table reading I've got a problem with. They've got "funny" books on their tables, where the word "funny" is a goddamned lie.

There's a particular breed of awful comedy book that's ubiquitous at diners and greasy spoons close to touristy spots all across America. I know I've run into these things on road trips, usually at a shack that sells burgers and happens to be close to an absurd statue of some kind. I guess they're put on tables to entertain weary travelers who have become numb to the company of their companions and need something non-taxing to look at while waiting for a burger and avoiding playing yet another fucking road game. The problem is that these books are all fucking stupid and Mifflin Lowe's I Hate Fun is one of these books.

This is my husband's book, and since it was published about thirty years ago and I'd be shocked if it was popular enough to have been reprinted I'm guessing it was an inherited top-of-the-tank reader from the apartment he lived in when we started dating. It's full of bite-sized sections describing how various types of "fun" activities are actually physically risky or involve dealing with idiots or just take too much time and effort. It's an activity guide written by Marvin from The Hitchikers' Guide to the Universe, basically.

I can see where this kind of thing might be amusing now - a writer could easily sit down and shit out an essay or so a day that sneers at camping or dancing or sex and getting it in a spread-out format might be okay. But two hundred pages of this kind of shit is a bit much, and that's coming from someone whose favorite activity is bitching about books.

And I Hate Fun really suffers from being a product of its time. Even as recently as ten years ago no one would have been startled by, say, transphobia in a countertop joke book. But I was startled to run across two obviously transphobic jokes in the first five pages of the book, with plenty of examples of homophobia, misogyny, and a few "was that a rape joke?" moments tossed in for good measure. What makes it even more startling is that the book's tone reaches for erudite and civilized - too good for petty things like camping or dancing or going to the theater - but these punching-down jokes made it sound like a Southern Baptist trying to talk like a New York ad exec.

The overall tone of the book is amusing, I'll give it that. I was generally content to smirk along with the continued attitude that just staying home, not bothering to socialize, and reading a book because the outdoors is terrible is the safest and best entertainment option. It was a bit obvious, sure, and it was stretched way too thin to justify a whole book, but there was a kernel of cynical schadenfreude that would have made I Hate Fun into a much better essay than a book.

Anyway. Don't read this book. It's awful. And while you're at it avoid shitty humor books in general. You'll know them because they're basically the only books in the "humor" section at your local book store.

As a side note, finding funny books is damned near impossible. I'm certainly not the first one to notice this or comment on it but we have done the "humor" section a grave disservice. Wacky political quotes, collected newspaper comics, and anything that describes itself as "knee-slappingly" "gut-bustingly" or any other variety of "body-part-damagingly" funny is less than we deserve. I vote for a "funny novels" section or "authors with a sense of humor" section. So here are some books that I thought were actually funny: I've laughed aloud at least once in every Neal Stephenson book I've ever read (and the Baroque Cycle is very funny for quite a lot of its 1700 page run time); I literally cried laughing several times while reading David Wong's John Dies at the End; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is funny in the saddest way you can imagine, as is anything written by Camus; Hunter S. Thompson is reliably amusing and exhausting; Jane Austen is ridiculously funny, she doesn't have a single novel out there that doesn't have at least one tremendously amusing side-story. That's all I can think of right now, but hopefully I'll be able to read more funny books to give my opinions on if I stop spending time reading shitty books like I Hate Fun.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Lowe, Mifflin. I Hate Fun. Price Stern Sloan. Los Angeles: California. 1991.

Flamethrowers don't solve every problem

I really wish that fire could fix everything, which seems to be something that I have in common with John and Dave from This Book is full of Spiders - thankfully David Wong is well aware that fire does NOT solve all the problems in the world and writes compellingly about why we should resist the urge to break out the flamethrower at every opportunity. Don't get me wrong, there's going to be no stopping me from shooting fire out of the next flamethrower I come across, but when that doesn't fix everything I'll make a point of remembering that there are other options (hopefully before I manage to fuck up the fate of the entire world).

If John Dies at the End is a funny little monster book that happens to be chock full of human frailty and strength then This Book is full of Spiders is a goofy little book about zombies that happens to raise lots of valid questions. But I'm probably putting that wrong - there's nothing goofy about This Book is full of Spiders (that is a straight-up lie, people die with spaghetti monsters in their ass and there's a Caddie that can't stop playing Creedence even when it gets stolen by turkey monsters) because it's actually a mature and serious examination of post 9/11 paranoia and the meaning of sacrifice that also totally kicks ass and has a gun that can turn things into mashed potatoes.

If I'm not explaining this well it's because the book doesn't lend itself to being broken down into itty-bitty capsules that are easily digested. This book has edges that will bite your throat and make you choke as you try to swallow them because you're yelling at yourself inside your head "no, not me, I'm not like that, it's all those other people" and that's exactly the point.

This Book is full of Spiders is, of course, delightful but it's a lot darker and less funny than John Dies at the End so if you come into the story hoping that it picks up exactly where John Dies left off you'll be at least partially satisfied - events between the two books match up in chronology and there is, in fact, a flamethrower put to awesome use. However neither John nor Dave are the same lighthearted idiots from the first novel and the differences in their characters from one book to the next is a bit startling, though it does create a rounder read.

I enjoy the hell out of Wong's work and even if Spiders isn't as much of a page-turner as John Dies it's still great fun.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Shit the bomb, Molly!

It's really difficult to explain how much I like John Dies at the End. It seems like such a dumb, silly little book - it's full of meat monsters and demons with idiot senses of humor and assless leather chaps - but it's also full of harsh introspection and questions about relationships.

I don't think anyone looks to books like this to be anything other than ridiculous romps but I keep finding more each time I read it. It's a hefty chunk of words for a horror-comedy novel, clocking it at over 450 pages, and I guess if you're going to cover that much ground in a book a lot of it is going to stray outside of what can easily fit into a single genre or a cover blurb. But I never stop feeling surprised when I start paging through it and realizing how sad it's making me while I'm also having a great time reading it.

David Wong is one of my favorite authors at Cracked. He is one of the few writers for a failed Mad Magazine rip-off who has ever made a significant change in the way that I live my life. A lot of his articles are grounded in the way that humans define happiness and the way to make yourself a measurably better person and I suppose someone who writes those sorts of articles for a dick-joke dispensary is the same kind of person who can cram human drama and important questions about life into a book about two idiots taking a drug that lets them fight a Fred Durst fan named Shitload in order to save the world.

If you haven't read this book, please do. It's unspeakably entertaining and way more literary than it has any right to be and full of magic dark and light and all its own. I'm still kicking myself for not reading it when it was first published instead of waiting a few years because that means that I missed out on a few years of having this great story kicking around in my head.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Wong, David. John Dies at the End. Permuted Press. 2012. OP 2007.

Surprisingly hilarious horror

I read Cracked.com all the time. I think it's funny and full of factoids and written by interesting people. Cracked is the reason that I asked for this book on my Amazon wishlist (and thanks and major props to Fito user AliBear for sending it to me) and the reason that I was willing to give it a chance. I'm not usually open to too many new books, I don't have the patience to buy something only to discover that it's utter shit thirty pages in. Websites like Cracked offer me a pretty decent protection - I'm familiar (to an extent) with the authors on the site before I make an investment in their books. Several of the Cracked columnists have published books recently and I know that I'll probably be happy reading some of them. That didn't keep me from being utterly floored by how much I enjoyed David Wong's John Dies at the End. In fact I'm having a little bit of trouble being patient enough to get through work so that I can watch the movie adapted from the book when I get home. And I've had to fight to stop myself from running out and buying the sequel immediately (I'm trying to work through my "unread" pile before buying more books). This book was AMAZINGLY good.

The novel was a bit more dense than I was expecting, considering that it was written by someone who makes dick jokes for a living. That doesn't mean that there were no dick jokes in the book (there were SO many dick jokes, all of them hilarious) just that the dick jokes took place in an interestingly gradated moral universe that pauses frequently to seriously consider identity, justice, free will, and whether you really need a flamethrower if you're going to fight otherworldly evil (the answer to that is yes. Obviously yes).

I'm a sucker for horror - I was raised on a steady diet of Stephen King books and John Carpenter movies so it's just always kind of been in the background for me. But I'm a REAL sucker for horror with a sense of humor - things like Evil Dead and American Werewolf in London, where you're scared shitless but still giggling like a maniac. When I was reading John Dies at the End I kept laughing out loud and reading the funniest passages aloud to my husband. There was one point when I read for three pages straight because the funny just kept happening. Then I finished the book and tried to go to sleep and couldn't because that shit was fucking scary and it was still tumbling around in my head.

I'm so excited about this book. I'm excited to have read it, I'm excited that there's a sequel, I'm excited that there's a movie, and I'm excited that I'm going to get to experience these things again and again because some nutjob on the internet went out and made something awesome and shared it with all of us. This is SO RAD and I hope you have the chance to be excited by a book like this at some point in the near future. Or you could go read John Dies at the End and be excited about it with me. Either way.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Wong, David. John Dies at the End. Permuted Press. 2012. OP 2007.

It's just not cricket

 Punch Magazine understands that women don't care 

about sports - they just want to secure a good husband.

A few weeks ago I went out to lunch with my husband when we were both bemused to find cricket on television at the restaurant. We got through our meal somehow, though we were both looking over the other's shoulder at big-screen TVs and trying to make sense of cricket; there was so much discussion of bowling and padding and wickets going on between the two of us that it's surprising we managed to put any food in our mouths.

My knowledge of cricket is limited to a vague recollection of a few pages from In a Sunburned Country where Bryson narrates the surreal discovery of Australian Cricket Radio. I struggled to remember anything other than tea-breaks and ovals to explain the odd things happening on the TV (the broadcast was in a language that I couldn't identify, let alone understand).

After this strange, awkward lunch I devised a kind of personal challenge. I want to see if I can figure out cricket without looking it up on Wikipedia or watching English broadcasts. To this end, I decided that the second book I would read on my Kindle was to be Mr. Punch's Book of Sports: The Humors of Cricket, Football, Tennis, Polo, Croquet, Hockey, Racing, &c. so that, through the humor of Punch, I might better understand cricket while also getting a laugh or two in at the society that produced the sport.

Unfortunately, now that I've read it, cricket makes less sense than it did before and I'm pissed at the Victorians.

About half of the book is directed at making fun of athletes and the sports obsessed; the remainder of the book was devoted to making fun of women who had the poor manners to pretend to be athletes in order to find a husband, who just don't understand sports, or who had the gall to actually be competent athletes.

I know that this book is supposed to be humor from another time. I know that it is compiled from a 19th century men's magazine. I know that I'm a woman in a different century looking behind the curtain into the boy's club and I shouldn't be surprised to find that it's rather a mess. But holy shit, the "battle of the sexes" jokes got old fast in this book. And what's even SADDER is that some of these jokes are still bandied about and thought of as having a basis in reality.

Let's get real for a second here - I'm something of a jock, even though I didn't realize it until my mid-twenties. I like to do push-ups, I like to hike, I like to lift very heavy things and intimidate the living hell out of my male co-workers with my badass biceps. I have a uterus, but that is IN NO WAY going to stop me from tackling you.

My little sister, who is cute and girly as hell, who wears pretty nail polish and who is obsessed with cupcakes, is the biggest football fan that I know. I've seen her jumping up and down on furniture during a grueling drive, screaming like a champ to support her team, and, oh yeah, being in the marching band for 3 years at USC (where she played a tenor sax that was about a third her size, and was a jock in her own right).

I may not like baseball, I may actively dislike basketball, and I may not understand the appeal of soccer, but I'm still a hell of a lot more into watching them than my gigantic, bearded, manly husband is, and I'm probably better at playing them too.

Yet, in spite of the fact that women play, watch, and enjoy sports on a daily basis, we STILL have to deal with condescending "don't worry your pretty little head about it, I'll explain it in small words with martinis and dancing" women's sports clinics offered as a service to us so that we have something to do other than worry about cocktail weenies on game day. And condescending bosses who didn't think you would want to be included in a lunch because it was a "sports thing". And condescending male friends who ditch you because they think of watching the game as "a guy thing" and didn't want you to be bored. And any dude who has ever been a condescending prick about sports because "girls don't like sports." We get to experience the dual joy of being excluded from an activity we appreciate as well as from all the nice socialization that surrounds that activity because we have vaginas that might be offended at the sight of cleats or something. It's idiotic.

So I guess the humor in a 114 year old book fell flat because a lot of it is based on sexist jokes that are still being told, and are still not funny or true, today. What I'm trying to say here is don't be sexist, sports people. It's just not cricket.

Ed. Hammerton, J.A. Mr. Punch's Book of Sports. The Educational Book Co. Ltd.
     London: England. 1910.

The De-Textbook; maybe not all it's Cracked up to be

First of all, I'm so sorry for that pun.

I love Cracked. I read the website almost daily, I cite their articles in conversation all the time, and I think it's a great way to fill time and learn more about all kinds of things. However reading this book has made me realize that there's one huge difference between reading the website and swallowing the same factoids that are presented here in book form. That difference is the internet and the wide, wonderful world of hyperlinks.

When you see BS on the web, especially if it's got a link to the cited study right there in the text, it's pretty easy to jump up and go "BULLSHIT!" and then proceed to be an asshole in the comments section. When you're reading the same BS in a book, you've got to remember that you've seen this bullshit before, where you've seen it, hope that you're able to fight your human nature enough to argue against something that you want to believe, and be contentious and pedantic enough to make the effort to write a blog that no one will read just for the sake of proving your point (this is sort of my deal, in case you couldn't tell yet.)

Two things in The De-Textbook jumped out at me right away as problematic for a book that's supposed to break down myths and replace them with totally awesome facts.

The first one comes early in the book, when talking about your body and how you don't know shit about it because all of your teachers lied (or were at least very misinformed). A lot of the information in the chapter is pretty spot-on, but when you get to the end of the Discussion Questions section and the questions turn to medicine, you are given this gem: "Sugar pills and other forms of fake medication have been found to help and even cure everything from warts to heart disease to asthma if the patients just believe that they're taking real medicine."(The De-Textbook, p. 15) Asthma is what really caught my attention here, because the holistic medicine industry is doing its best to convince asthmatics that they don't need inhalers, they just need homeopathy. The problem is that the article that this came from (click on "warts" to see it) links to a Wikipedia page of disorders treated by placebo, which in turn links to a psychological study done on asthmatics (please note, that's a psych study, not a medical study) that proved that placebo worked to treat asthma! Cool! Except that the study was done on 12 people. In 1986. And that recent similar studies have shown that patients may feel better, but their lungs aren't actually performing any better with placebo. Which, if you have asthma, is not really comforting because now you know that you can feel just fine and still end up straight-up dead. And Cracked should know better than to promote this kind of bullshit because just two days ago they published an article that discussed how the majority of medical studies are critically flawed - you know, like the ones they just used to justify telling you that no one knows how medicine works on page 15 of their book.

The second thing that really jumped out at me probably wouldn't have if I hadn't just finished reading a Pulitzer Prize nominated biography of Benjamin Franklin. It's in the American History section of The De-Textbook, and much of it is based on this article about how the founding fathers were dicks - which, while often true, is not really true based on the reasons that the article gives. There is SO MUCH that's wrong, or misleading, or purposefully obfuscated in the book and the article that I'd have to write a few thousand words to explain exactly the ways that it's wrong in, so let's focus on the analogy they use in the book, that England is a patient father with a rebellious son who causes him problems and costs him money.

In the book, the son is rebellious and starts the French and Indian war because he wants to grab Ohio. In the real story, France and Canada are also father and son, and England and France have been at war for a few centuries, and France has encouraged his son Canada to stab the Colonies' in the junk as frequently as possible. Because of this, the Colonies decide to beat the living shit out of Canada, eventually getting the support of his loving Father to stop getting stabbed in the junk (by which I mean seeing hordes of farmers and families slaughtered by Native Americans encouraged by the French at the borders of the Colonies). When it's all done and the son's junk is starting to heal, though one testicle will never be the same, the father says "Dude, I had to come all this way and I hurt my shoulder. You should pay my medical bills." Meanwhile, the son is cradling his swollen, stabbed testicles, which are bandaged with dirty gauze and washed with the sweat of war, and saying "maybe I'd pay for your poor shoulder if I hadn't gotten stabbed in the balls for a year and STILL been the one on the front lines." The father gets pissy and essentially sends his son to a re-education camp, sending in royal governors to take charge of the people who had no political voice and forcing them to pay for the room and board (so mansions and feasts) of the hated re-education governors and generals. All of this is going on while the son's hands are broken and he can't earn a real income because the father broke his hands and took his clothes so that he wouldn't get too independent (the British didn't allow the Colonies to do things like build foundries or make hats because it might allow the Colonies to make their own shit and thus hurt trade in England, so things like beaver fur came from the Colonies, were shipped to England where they were made into hats, and were then shipped back to the Colonies where they not only had to pay the fur-to-hat markup, they also had to pay the two trans-Atlantic crossings markup in spite of the fact that there were perfectly able haberdashers in the colonies). So long story short, portraying England as an indulgent father and the Colonies as a crazy, rebellious, expensive son is more than a little disingenuous.

So these are two big problems that I found in The De-Textbook. Can anyone guess the bigger issue that they raise?

 If this book is supposed to be factual it helps to be, you know, actually factual. There are some things that I know it got right; Longfellow's Paul Revere poem was totally propaganda, the tongue map is stupid, Victorians were into some freaky shit, and Kellogg's Corn Flakes were created by a madman. There's a lot of stuff in the book that is provably true and well documented, but the inclusion of stuff that is provably false and supported only by 30 year old studies on tiny groups of people puts a whole lot of sweet, sweet facts under the suspicion of being bitter filthy lies.

Again, I love Cracked. I think the site is fantastic and there is a lot of information on the site that is well worth reading - some of that ended up in the book (almost verbatim, in a few places) and is good information to have. You SHOULD learn how to poop the right way, and that Einstein was a freak, but you shouldn't have to question every single page because there's no way to verify the information that you're being handed. There isn't even an index, which there REALLY should be because a) the entire construction and marketing of the book is built on it being a TRUE textbook, and I dare you to find a textbook without an index and b) because it would be SO FREAKING EASY to cite your sources in an index or footnotes or something because you are the people who run and curate the website where all of these facts are compiled, though maybe you need a fact-checker and I will selflessly volunteer to be paid for that job if you really don't have enough fact-checkers on your staff.

Also? I know that Cracked is used to having to rely on advertisers and so they edit photos on the site, but pixelating the nipples off the Venus de Milo is a confusing editorial decision. Especially when you DON'T bother to censor cartoon boner drawings photoshopped behind Einstein, or to blur out the side-boob and butt-crack off of the lady who you've added Ulysses S. Grant's head to (and by the way, when you call him a fancy lady instead of an antisocial nutbag because he won't shower with his troops during the war, it comes off as kind of sexist, as does the whole cartoon dicks vs. ancient artwork tits thing).

Oh, there's another reason to have an index instead of just a picture credits page - I couldn't find the uncensored drawing from page 69 (heh). That would be useful. And one of the great things about not having advertisers: here is the results of my search for that drawing, the greatest Wikipedia page I never knew about (NSFW).

For all the issues of fact, the book is funny. And it ends with a great message that the staff is totally right about: the world is incredible and you should go explore it because holy shit, is there a lot of awesome stuff out there.

ED. O'Brien, Jack. The De-Textbook. Plume Books. New York: New York. 2013.

(This post is for Skoolstah, my awesome brother-in-dick-jokes, who sent me The De-Textbook as a gift that I was happy to criticize, but even happier to read. Thanks man!)