In Encyclopedia Paranoiaca, master satirists Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf have assembled an authoritative, disturbingly comprehensive, and utterly debilitating inventory of things poised to harm, maim, or kill you – all of them based on actual research about the perils of everyday life. Beard and Cerf cite convincing evidence that everyday things we consider healthy – eating leafy greens, flossing, washing our hands – are actually harmful, and items we thought were innocuous – drinking straws, flip-flops, neckties, skinny jeans – pose life-threatening dangers. Did you know that nearly ten thousand people are sent to A&E each year because of escalator accidents? And if you're crossing your legs right now, you're definitely at serious risk.
Now that some American students have to fill in questionnaires for consensual lovemaking, going on a date is more of a minefield than ever before. This book aims to tell readers the truth about politically correct sex and is anecdotal, topical and amusing.
A playful easy reader in the tradition of Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop that teaches the basics of word construction.From award-winning humorist Christopher Cerf comes a super-simple, delightfully silly Beginner Book in which the rhymed text and the position of the words on the page teach the basics of word construction. Written in the style of Dr. Seuss's classic Hop on Pop with rhyming words placed directly above each other to show their shared construction, A Skunk in My Bunk! combines phonics and word recognition to make learning to read easy--and fun! With bright, charming illustrations by Nicola Slater, kids will be delighted to read for themselves about a goat in a coat in a boat in a moat, a pig in a wig dancing a jig, a skunk in a bunk, and much, much more!Launched in 1957 with The Cat in the Hat and written specifically for emergent readers, Beginner Books combine an exacting blend of simple words and fun pictures that encourage children to read--all by themselves.
An essential handbook for the nineties, providing a fool proof guard against those politically incorrect faux pas which can ruin social and professional life.
The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation - Expanded and Updated
445bladzijden
16 uur lezen
Did you ever have the uneasy feeling the experts are not . . . well, expert? "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." --Irving Fisher, professor of economics at Yale University, October 17, 1929 "Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel." --Irving Thalberg's warning to Louis B. Mayer regarding Gone With the Wind "We don't like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out." --Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962 "With over fifty foreign cars already on sale here the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself."--Business Week, 1968 "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." --President of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 "Bill Clinton will lose to any Republican who doesn't drool on stage." --The Wall Street Journal, in a 1995 editorial The Experts Speak systematically catalogues, footnotes, and sets straight these and a couple of thousand other examples of expert misunderstanding, miscalculation, egregious prognostication, boo-boos, and just plain lies. The experts have been wrong about everything under, including, and beyond the sun: time, space, the sexes, the races, the environment, economics, politics, crime, education, the media, history, and science. In this expanded and updated edition (now more error-filled than ever), we see just how much the experts don't know. But the book also goes deeper, presenting a through-the-looking-glass chronicle of human knowledge: the story of what was and is so, as seen through the story of what we wanted to and did believe.
