Ah, Zombies. I have no idea why I’m fascinated by Zombie movies and stories but be it horror, like Romero, or comedy, like Shaun of the Dead, I’m a fan. When my brother-in-law recommended a Studs Terkel like recounting of man’s struggle against a zombie epidemic, World War Z by Max Brooks — I knew [...]

This seemed like a very strange Amazon Kindle reco this am.
Executor’s Guide: Settling a Loved One’s Estate or Trust (2nd Edition) (Kindle Edition) appears to be a guide to things I’ve never considered needing to think about.
The Executor’s Guide will show you how to get organized, get the help you need and make [...]

Back in school, reading was considered an activity for geeks and outcasts. But that changed for me after an accidental discovery of a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on my cousin’s bookshelf full of computer books. On the Road is an adrenalin rush of unadulterated yakking by Kerouac, written in two weeks while [...]

I always end-up running out of things to read on vacation. I hoped to have that beat by bringing my Amazon Kindle on vacation, but alas — it had not arrived yet (I got it the day after I came home, will take it traveling soon. I love it at home).
I lugged a ton [...]

Joel is headed out on a dive trip this week. As we’re both dive enthusiasts and its been a bit since our Editor-in-King has been underwater, I think he is a bit fearful.
I’m pretty confident about diving, but I always realize the risks. Nothing makes me sadder than being on a boat full of jock-headed [...]

Yesterday I plowed through Neil Strauss’ “The Style Diaries,” one half of the “Rules of the Game” set from the author of the book that pushed the current pick-up artist culture into the mainstream, “The Game.”
The Style Diaries are a collection of eleven essays, all but two of which were written during the period in [...]

Having read only the first story in The Jungle Book, I grabbed a copy of “All the Mowgli Stories” off our shelf, which collects the Mowgli bits from both of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books. What great stuff! It’s brutal without being gory, fantastic but grounded in reality, and only a little bit totally racist. (Kipling’s [...]

From Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising Schroedinger’s Cat, an excerpt I think might be useful to have in the back of your mind this week:
Since a great deal of primate behavior was considered just awful, most of the domesticated primates spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing.
Some of the primates [...]

Good on Mark Frauenfelder for telling me something I wanted to know: that the “Dangerous Book for Boys” by Conn and Hal Iggulden is actually all that dangerous. (Not a surprise in our litigious society, but I had held out hope since the book original ran in the UK, where every boy at 13 is [...]

The Brady Campaign, the nation’s foremost anti-gun group, maintains that around 39% of this country’s population are gun owners, and that in this country there are somewhere around 192,000,000 guns. The NRA’s numbers are much higher, but regardless, figues like these seem to have given photographer Kyle Cassidy the inspiration for his forthcoming book, Armed [...]

I just put down Timothy Ferriss’ book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” to find myself indolent between self-loathing, ideas, and hope. The books is a challenge to reanalyze my life to achieve the goals I have immediately—or at least before a far-away retirement. While I want to disparage it to give myself an excuse to ignore it, [...]