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, […]

Our pal Erica is a lifelong loser science fiction fan. One of her tattoos is the Rebel Alliance symbol, others include Trill spots (think ST: DS9) up the back of her neck and shoulders, and a white one on the webbing between her thumb and forefinger of some symbol from the Principia Discordia. She attends […]

The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction has been announced, and it’s Cormac McCarthy’s latest, The Road. Even Oprah has championed it, backing the newly released paperback edition, but don’t let that turn you off. McCarthy is a modern classic, whose work will be taught in universities and high schools, if it isn’t already. It […]

“A Child’s Garden of Grass” is an out-of-print “Official Handbook for Marijuana Users,” being republished online in installments. It is a trove of totally false information, which means it has assuredly been quoted for years by officials as gospel.
I – THE HISTORY OF GRASS
Grass was first discovered in Twin Falls, Idaho in 1907 by a […]