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by A.J. Jacobs
Yupper, right from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle Show is this collection
of Fractured Fairy Tales. Some are hilarious, some are funny,
and honestly, some are just dumb. It's a pleasant laugh down
old Memory Lane for those of us who watched Bullwinkle on Saturday
mornings or while skipping classes in college.
List price: $9.95
Our price: $7.96
You save: $1.99 ( That's 20% for those of you who spent your
educational years watching cartoons!)
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by Will Cuppy
I can't recommend Will Cuppy enough. Sadly,
this enormously talented spoofer of both Nature and History Academia
is practically unknown today. However, in the 1930's and 1940's
when he was writing for the New Yorker and other magazines,
he was the Dave Barry of his generation, only smarter. He wrote
the outrageous "How to Become Extinct", "How
to Attract the Wombat" and
"How to Tell Your Friends From The Apes." The first
two are out of print, although I have cherished copies of my
own, and the last is only available in a pricey ($21.95) large
print edition. His facts are accurate and his information wonderfully
meticulous, but his presentation and snide footnotes make the
reading fun. Explaining the extinction of a Pleistocene wombat,
he explains that this particiular wombat "weighed around
2,000 pounds. This was too much wombat and he was discountinued."
You'll laugh out loud, trust me.
The Decline and Fall is more wordy and perhaps less funny than
the Apes book, but it just may be that I appreciate the science
humor more than the history humor.
His wry reflection on how the victors write history is reflected
in this quote from a section on the Punic Wars: "The Carthageneans
were ruled by their rich people and were thus a plutocracy, while
the Romans were ruled by their rich people and were therefore
a Republic."
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