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Brooks does an amazing job of emulating Studs Terkel’s style while telling a gripping tale of the events leading up to, during and immediately following the war on the zombies. He offers incredible detail in minute aspects of all things Zombie, as well as covering the globe and our various cultures.

I’d hate to ruin this book for you all — I’d suggest reading it. I downloaded it to my Kindle and was not disappointed. If work hadn’t gotten in my way, I’d have finished it in one sitting.

I don’t know if I’ll enjoy it as much but eventually I’ll read his Zombie Survival Guide as well.

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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 progress one step at a time. Let it help you navigate an unfamiliar land of legal procedures and terminology. It explains:

*preparing for the job of executor or trustee
*the first steps to take
*claiming life insurance, Social Security and other benefits
*making sense of a will
*what to do if there is no will
*how to determine whether or not probate is necessary
*caring for children and their property
*taxes
*an overview of probate court proceedings
*dealing with family members
*handling trusts
*looking up your state’s laws
*working with lawyers, appraisers, accountants and other experts

Thanks Amazon…

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Who was there before the hipsters? Beatniks and their pack of adventure-driven contemporaries roaring to get themselves a taste of travel, pure air, what it means to be living — what life is all about. On the Road is a good travel companion just in case you want a kick of that same adrenalin rush, almost as good as hitting the road yourself.

Catalog Page [Amazon]

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I lugged a ton of scifi stuff I picked up from reading recommendations all over the net, but never have time to read at home. Never takes long before I’ve burnt through it all. This is what I found in a giftshop: 50 Ways to Save the Ocean.

The book manages to put a great, inclusive presentation around recommendations that all too often come off as preachy. When people find the right tone, and I believe the authors have, this kind of informations becomes a lot of fun. Its short lists with a descriptive introductions around categories of ways to fine tune your life towards to eco-friendly. While many of the things aren’t Ocean-specific, they go to great lengths to explain how dependent our ecology is upon the sea.

Certainly a fun under-the-umbrella-on-the-beach read and it shared a few new ideas. Certainly made me more sensitive to the amount of plastic that I’m throwing away on a daily basis. I believe the number they shares was that the averae American throws away 70lbs of plastic a year. If true, that is crazy. I’m sure it’ll get passed around the family.

50 Ways to Save the Ocean (Inner Ocean Action Guide)

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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 morons pouring beer on their chests during a surface interval and yammering about who went deepest. I tend to try to dive very respectfully of the ocean and reef; take only photos and bring back only memories (or a scallop I harvested on the rock, with a license.)

A great book to read that gave me a much deeper understanding of why beer and cigarettes are dumb during a surface interval: Bove & Davis’ Diving Medicine. Its a bit technical but I found it to be a great source of the next-level-up in detail from most dive books.

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The Style Diaries are a collection of eleven essays, all but two of which were written during the period in which Strauss was learning the tricks of the trade that he later recorded in The Game. Unlike The Game, however, Strauss says The Style Diaries are “less about getting the girl and more about the nature of desire itself.”

And they’re great.

I think that it’s easy to forget that Strauss has real chops as a legitimate writer in the cloud of chatter and controversy that surrounded The Game. The experiences he details in The Style Diaries are touching, squirmingly honest, and fully, murkily human. I think it’s easy to forget that the goal of self-betterment, even in the pursuit of love and sex, does not necessarily portend skeeviness. (Although it often does! I’m just saying: absolutes are always useless most of the time.)

Of course, The Style Diaries are only half of the tiny, pocket-sized package, and while great, probably not worth $25 for an hour’s worth of reading. The other half is the embarrassingly named “Stylelife Challenge,” a set of exercises designed to be done over the course of 30 days, sequentially, with the goal of landing a date before the month is over. I think it’s a great format for a self-help book and one that I had considered trying before when I was toying with the idea of doing some sort of Dethroner-brand Get Your Shit Together guide, albeit with much more convoluted sealed envelopes scheme.

I haven’t yet cracked open The Stylelife Challenges partially because I plan on writing about each day and putting it up here. (There’s a forum that Strauss’ company runs, but it’s all too monolithically branded for me. [He says on his heavily-branded website.]) But before I tuck into it, I was wondering if any of you guys would be willing to go through it at the same time so we can compare experiences, either virtually if you’re not in New York, or in meatspace if you are.

You can buy it through Amazon (as I did) by clicking the links above and I’ll get a cut, but making money isn’t my real hope here. It’s just that I have been reading and consuming and applying a lot of self-help type of stuff lately, and while I feel like it’s generally been a positive thing, I’m sort of sick of not having anyone to talk to about it.

I’ll probably start the workbook Monday.

Previously: Interview: Neil Strauss on Why “Pick-Up” is a Horrible Word [Dethroner]

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It is amusing that hunting, death, and violence are not shirked from at all—there’s a very vivid description of skinning a certain tiger—but discussion of Mowgli’s marriage is glossed over as a “story for grown-ups.” Guess we’ve been uptight about sex but not violence far longer than television or movies!

Anyway, I’m only about halfway through the Mowgli stories, but as I have a bent for fantasy and the outdoors, I’m almost ashamed I haven’t read these earlier, especially since they can be had for free online. I look forward to going back after finishing this Mowgli collection and reading the other Jungle Book stories that don’t star the man-cub. More kid’s literature should involve hunting and killing your enemy.

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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 got caught by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught.

Those who got caught were called “no-good shits”.

The term no-good shit was a deep expression of primate psychology. For instance, one wild primate (a chimpanzee) taught sign language by two domesticated primates (scientists) spontaneously put together the signs for “shit” and “scientist” to describe a scientist she didn’t like. She was calling him shit-scientist. She also put together the signs for “shit” and “chimpanzee” for another chimpanzee she didn’t like. She was calling him shit-chimpanzee.

“You no-good shit,” domesticate primates often said to each other.

This metaphor was deep in primate psychology because primates mark their territories with excretions, and sometimes they threw excretions at each other when disputing over territories.

One primate wrote a long book describing in vivid detail how his political enemies should be punished. He imagined them in an enormous hole in the ground, with flames and smoke and rivers of shit. This primate was named Dante Alighieri.

Another primate wrote that every primate infant goes through a stage of being chiefly concerned with biosurvival, i.e. food, i.e. Mommie’s Titty. He called this the Oral Stage. He said the infant next went on to a stage of learning mammalian politics, i.e. recognizing the Father (alpha male) and his Authority and territorial demands. He called this, with an insight that few primates shared, the Anal Stage.

This primate was named Freud. He had taken his own nervous system apart and examined his component circuits by periodically altering its structure with neuro-chemicals.

Among the anal insults exchanged by domesticated primates when fighting for their space were: “Up your ass,” “Go shit in your hat,” “You’re full of shit,” “Take it and stick it where the moon doesn’t shine,” and many others.

One of the most admired alpha males in the Kingdom of the Franks was General Canbronne. General Canbronne won this adulation for the answer he once gave when asked to surrender at Waterloo.

“Merde,” was the answer General Canbronne gave.

When primates went to war or got violent in other ways, they always said they were about to “knock the shit” out of the enemy.

via Reason

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Even better, Mark has assembled a list of older project books for boys going back over 100 years that actually are sort of dangerous, or at least have projects with an element of risk involved. Trust me, boys are going to do two things when they’re at an impressionable age: not read books they don’t have to and fill up plastic lighter fluid containers with gasoline and kick them across the yard to leave an impossible-to-cover track of scorched earth in the backyard. Nobody should be afraid of a book explaining the fun of, say, explosions. Boys already know.

Dangerous Books for Boys [Boing Boing]

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As the introduction states, “this book isn’t about guns, it’s about people.” From the samples afforded us on the book’s website, a diverse array of gun owners have been profiled. From the avid antique collector, to the punk rock husband and wife who own a tiny .22, to the methuselah who didn’t purchase his first firearm until he was cancer-stricken, presumably in his late 70’s, every type of household can be an armed household.

Armed America, while seemingly comprehensive, evidently doesn’t pose any bias or judgment upon the issue of gun control, never tries to wrestle with the question of gun ownership or where any legal lines should be drawn. Instead the author simply accepted invitations from American gun owners to come and shoot them in their homes, took interviews, and laid out telling quotes from each which, collectively, somehow paints a portrait of the importance of guns to the American identity.

Interestingly, pre-orders for Armed America appeared on Amazon.com on the day of the Virginia Tech shooting.

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Dethroner was created with one over-arching goal: to create a business that would allow me to do what I want with my life, which is to travel around the country and planet, learning new things, and document them in writing and pictures. I’ve lost the plot a bit over the last few months, falling too easily into patterns I learned while working at Gawker Media as a blogger, instead of making smart decisions in pursuit of the goal as a business owner. 4-Hour Work Week comes on the heels of several hand-delivered slaps to the face by circumstance. Which is great—it’s time to stop wallowing that things haven’t worked out as effortlessly as I’d hoped.

Atypical optimism after the jump.

Ferriss’ concept can be summed up easily: establish self-sustaining sources of revenue, such as internet-based retail operations; minimize both your reoccurring fiscal and informational expenses by cutting fat and outsourcing responsibility at every opportunity; use your new-found freedom to travel, learn new things, and enjoy life’s adventures.

For me, as a writer, I’ve learned that diversifying is the secret to a strong freelance life. I have regular magazine work, occasional long-form/front-of-the-book pieces, and Dethroner. That works primarily because I want to do all those three things, but I’m doing the two former things to pay for the latter. (Making Dethroner pay for itself is an ongoing project, the ups-and-downs of which are best saved for another post.)

What I should now, according to Ferriss, is to add businesses unrelated to writing, or at least aligned in parallel to my skill set. (Technical knowledge, dick jokes.) I already have about half-a-dozen ideas waiting in the wings, which is frightening. What if one of them turned out to be a success?

There is a sense of guilt I get when I start thinking about living this sort of lifestyle, not just using currency disparity to hire Indian personal assistants, but even having people work for me at all. If I’m able to live the lifestyle I want because other people are working for me, shouldn’t I, too, be working as much as I ask of them? I haven’t quite figured this one out, but I think I’m going to put that aside for the moment to worry about until after I’m fully self-sufficient. (To paraphrase Nathan Rolf, I’m hoping trickle-down economics can be more than just paying a bum a dollar to let me piss on him.)

Even if you aren’t already self-employed, Ferriss has several ideas for regaining control of your time from your employer, mainly involving mild duplicity to slowly weasel your way out of your office, culminating in complete remote working that will allow travel, etc. (I suspect this will be difficult for those who work in steel mills or bordellos.) Again the middle-class guilt appears: why should I let myself live this lifestyle when it isn’t available to so many others? Another opposing-but-unrelated defense: Lots of rich people are assholes.

Anyway, a lot to think about, but I wanted to pass on my tentative thumbs-up. It’s a competently-written and practical read (and occasionally and surprisingly crass, which of course I think is awesome.) I can’t give it my full endorsement until I am writing one from the deck of a chartered dive boat steaming through the Caribbean.

The 4-Hour Workweek [Amazon]
Audiobook [Amazon]
Ferris’s Blog [FourHourWorkweek.com]

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She lives in my neighborhood and we often meet for breakfast to discuss the week in all things space opera and fantasy, because, y’know, I’m that kind of geek too, albeit to a lesser degree; unlike Erica, I haven’t begun a blog called, “Babyldork Galactinerd,” devoted to the shows, movies, and books of that ilk.

Her reviews are usually pretty compelling, frequently funny, and her character and plot insights (and spoilers) abound. She approaches her media from a quasi-academic perspective, often punctuated by a teenager’s adulation of whichever cute actor in a particular show she has a crush on. It’s fun reading if, like us, you’re a totally unapologetic nerd. I’m looking forward to her dissection of last night’s episode of Heroes.

Babyldork Galactinerd [blogspot.com]

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A few years ago under the recommendation of friends, I read McCarthy’s disturbing story of an isolated sociopath, Child of God, and I’ve been unable to let go of the story ever since. I’m not saying it was an enjoyable read per se; it was harrowing, bleak, occasionally difficult to digest, morbid in spurts, dissociated, and utterly depressing to the last page. And, undeniably brilliant.

I expect nothing less from The Road, a tale about survivors in a post apocalyptic America. Cannibalilism, looting, extinct wildlife, starvation abound thematically. And yet, it’s said, hope prevails, that ultimately it’s a story about the love between a father and his son. Newsweek says that this is “the logical culmination of everything he’s written.”

I’m in, I’ve got to check it out. He’s a quick read, I’ll probably have my own review back here inside of the week. Meanwhile, has anyone else read McCarthy, perhaps even this book?

The Road [amazon.com]

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I – THE HISTORY OF GRASS

Grass was first discovered in Twin Falls, Idaho in 1907 by a small Polish immigrant by the name of Wayne Krulka. The discovery occurred in early May, while Wayne was working late in his study one evening, trying to find a shorter route to India.

A Child’s Garden of Grass [OnMarijuana.com via Dosenation]

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Bill writes:

I made a video for my book (just out!) “Whoosh Boom Splat, the Garage Warrior’s Guide to Projectile Shooters” Please check out the link and if you like it, please feel free to tell your readers.

Glad to do it! While we can’t condone shooting your boss with a potato cannon… oh, hell, sure we can. Spud that smug fucker. Tell the cops we said it was okay!

Book Page [Whooshboomsplat.net/WilliamGustelle.com]
Purchase Page ($12) [Amazon]

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From the upcoming book “I Saw You: Missed Connections,” filled with cartoons inspired by posts on Craigslist’s personals section of the same name.

I Saw You: Missed Connections [Flickr]
Book Blog [MissedConnections.blogspot.com]

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Featuring the drinks that made Brennan’s 820 bar the best spot for cocktails in Portland, Oregon. Beets, avocados, and berries take their rightful place a long side the popular citrus fruits. Do it yourself infusions replace flavored alcohols.

DIY infusions sound lovely. Anything that teaches us how to craft our own liquids gets high marks from us. Imbibe Magazine’s blog has an excerpt from Hip Sips that describes the “Ruby,” a chilled martini-like tonic made with beet-infused vodka.

A Taste of Lucy Brennan’s “Hip Sips” [ImbibeMagazine.blogspot.com]

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