Weird-o-Pedia

Author: Alex Palmer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510722254
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Check out the weird and wonderful facts in this massive encyclopedia of alphabetized oddities: HUMANS ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS THAT ENJOY SPICY FOOD (there’s a reason no one sells Tabasco-flavored cat food). NAPPING CAN SAVE YOU FROM A HEART ATTACK (assuming you are not operating heavy machinery at the time). PSYCHOLOGISTS CAN ASSESS YOUR PERSONALITY FROM HOW YOU DIP FRIES IN KETCHUP (nice fries, sociopath). SURFING THE INTERNET ACTUALLY MAKES YOU SMARTER (but not as smart as reading this book will). Now the next time someone tells you smugly that Pluto isn’t a planet, you can counter with any one of these hundreds of weird facts and remain king or queen of the cocktail (or kegger) chatter.

Politics Weird-o-Pedia

Author: Tim Rowland
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631583905
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
Government and politics might seem twisted today, but they’ve always been strange. There’s something about public office that, throughout time, has transcended normalcy. Politics Weird-o-Pedia presents some of the oddest and most interesting political absurdities and tidbits from around the world, from Peter the Great’s tax on beards to a lawmaker’s mistress whom he kept on the congressional payroll despite her admission that “I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone.” Eminences include: Some of America’s Founding Fathers wanted to jail newspaper reporters. A Mongolian conqueror liked to build cement walls out of the bodies of his vanquished opponents (while they were still alive). An all-female resistance to nuclear missiles in Britain resulted in a protest that lasted for nineteen years—long after the missiles were gone. Politics Weird-o-Pedia doesn’t stand still for a minute. It is intriguing, funny, and occasionally startling. It is more than a collection of trivia, adding bits of context and historical vignettes that make it clear that no matter how dysfunctional politics and government might seem today—we’ve been through it all many times before.

Sports Weird-o-Pedia

Author: Lew Freedman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631583891
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
By any standard of normal behavior, sports cannot escape the definition of weirdness. Sports achievements have the capacity to inspire and excite watchers, whether through athletic brilliance or magnificent team performance, but there are times when our athletes and teams go wacko on us, and the most peculiar things break out with no warning to provide wide-eyed astonishment or laugh-out-loud responses. Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs landed on the disabled list due to a back injury caused by sneezing too hard. Minnesota Vikings football stalwart Jim Marshall ran the wrong way with a recovered fumble. Former NBA player Dennis Rodman spearheaded American diplomacy with North Korea. The lyrics and music creators of “Take Me Out to The Ballgame” authored one of the most sung songs in American history without ever having seen a baseball game. And more! While those spontaneous combustions may result from someone rising from the weird side of the bed, they’re often the most memorable.

Food Weird-o-Pedia

Author: Alex Palmer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510765735
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Hundreds of weird and wonderful facts in this massive encyclopedia of food and drink oddities! A perfect gift for foodies and trivia fans alike! Food Weird-o-Pedia offers up hundreds of off-kilter bits of info about food that will make you rethink what you know about even those dishes you’ve been eating your whole life. Organized in sections such as “Between-Meal Tidbits: Curious Facts about Snacks” and “Spice Up Your Life: Unexpected morsels about condiments, sauces and spices,” each chapter offers an alphabetical encyclopedia of strange facts that will give you plenty to chew over whether reading from cover-to-cover or just flipping to a random page during a lunch break. Learn weird and obscure facts about fruits, vegetables, baked goods, meat, dairy, seafood, junk food, condiments, sauces, spices, beverages, desserts, and more, such as: Cherries may have killed the twelfth president of the United States. Why we call that vulgar sound we make by putting our tongue between our lips and blowing out a “raspberry." Enzymes on the inside of a banana peel actually encourage splinters to move toward the skin’s surface. Dark soy sauce contains ten times the antioxidants of red wine and contributed to a decrease in risk of cardiovascular disease. The most egg yolks ever found in a single egg is nine. Frank Sinatra was buried with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. Hershey’s Kisses get their names from the smooching sound and motion the machine made when it popped the candy onto the conveyor belt. And many, many more! Every one of us has a deeply personal relationship to the food we eat, each as unique as we are. But there is also a lot that can surprise us about what we put in our body—unexpected facts about staple fruits and veggies, strange backstories to our favorite sweets, and ways of whipping up a familiar dish that are downright weird. These odd aspects of the food we eat are what this book is all about. Food Weird-o-Pedia is sure to provide plenty of fodder to impress friends and family over your next meal—whatever it is you’re eating.

Rural Rebellion

Author: Ross Benes
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700630457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
After Ross Benes left Nebraska for New York, he witnessed his polite home state become synonymous with “Trump country.” Long dismissed as “flyover” land, the area where he was born and raised suddenly became the subject of TV features and frequent opinion columns. With the rural-urban divide overtaking the national conversation, Benes knew what he had to do: he had to go home. In Rural Rebellion Benes explores Nebraska’s shifting political landscape to better understand what’s plaguing America. He clarifies how Nebraska defies red-state stereotypes while offering readers insights into how a frontier state with a tradition of nonpartisanship succumbed to the hardened right. Extensive interviews with US senators, representatives, governors, state lawmakers, and other power brokers illustrate how local disputes over health-care coverage and education funding became microcosms for our current national crisis. Rural Rebellion is also the story of one man coming to terms with both his past and present. Benes writes about the dissonance of moving from the most rural and conservative region of the country to its most liberal and urban centers as they grow further apart at a critical moment in history. He seeks to bridge America’s current political divides by contrasting the conservative values he learned growing up in a town of three hundred with those of his liberal acquaintances in New York City, where he now lives. At a time when social and political differences are too often portrayed in stark binary terms, and people in the Trump-supporting heartland are depicted in reductive, one-dimensional ways, Benes tells real-life stories to add depth and nuance to our understanding of rural Americans’ attitudes about abortion, immigration, big government, and other contentious issues. His argument and conclusion are simple but powerful: that Americans in disparate places would be less hostile to one another if they just knew each other a little better. Part memoir, journalism, and social science, Rural Rebellion is a book for our times.

Useless Sexual Trivia

Author: Shane Mooney
Publisher: Gallery Books
ISBN: 9780684859279
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Never Knew to Ask Did you know that in Middle-Eastern Islamic countries it is not only a sin but also a crime to eat a lamb that you've had sex with? Or that the world vanilla comes from a Latin word meaning "vagina" because of the vanilla pod's resemblance to the female genitalia? Or that Grand Tetons literally means "big tits"? You've probably never even thought about such things. But here they are, in this unusual compilation of strange facts about the facts of life that will make you laugh out loud while your hair stands on end. Highlights include: * Just the Factoids, Man -- For instance, the number of human ova necessary to repopulate the world could fit into a chicken egg. * When Sex Goes Horribly Awry -- Don't be caught with your pants down. Learn once and for all the words you didn't find on your SATs, such as "acrotomophilia," "oculolinctus," and "taphephilia." * Animal Lust -- There is more to sex in the animal kingdom than doing it doggie style. Did you know that a barnacle's penis is 150 percent of its body length? * They Said What?! -- They said plenty: "I knew her before she was a virgin." (Oscar Levant on Doris Day) * Sex Styles of the Rich and Famous -- Forget Bill and Monica. Adolf Hitler was a coprophiliac. * Sex in History -- Catherine the Great did not die under a horse, but she did love to have her feet tickled and her bottom slapped. * Around the World -- It's good to know, for the next time you're invited to the dinner party of a North-African Siwa man, that he believes you will find him irresistible if he laces your food with his semen. * Crimes of Passion -- Did you know that in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, it is illegal to have sex with a truck driver in a tollbooth? Wonderfully outrageous and absolutely deadpan, this book is, unbelievably, all true.

Weird-o-pedia

Author: Alex Palmer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 162087332X
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 236

The Sex Effect

Author: Ross Benes
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1492647438
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
A gripping exploration of the relationship between sex and our society, with a foreword by bestselling author A.J. Jacobs Why do political leaders become entangled in so many sex scandals? How did the U.S. military inadvertently help make San Francisco a mecca of gay culture? And what was the original purpose of vibrators? Find out the answers to all these questions and more as journalist Ross Benes delves into the complicated relationship between everyday human life—including religion, politics, and technology—and our sexuality. Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, and more, The Sex Effect combines innovative research and analysis with captivating anecdotes to reveal just how much sex shapes our society—and what it means for us as humans as we continue to struggle with the wide-ranging effects our sexuality has on the world around us.

Literary Miscellany

Author: Alex Palmer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1628732210
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Wouldn’t it be great to be a fly on the wall as the great writers took pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)? While reading this work, you’ll be just that. Here are behind-the-book stories and facts about authors, publishing and everything literary that will entertain both casual and serious readers. Among the questions asked and answered: • When Did Literature Finally Get Sexy? • Is Coffee or Opium Better for Literary Creativity? • Why Are the Best Autobiographies so Embarrassing? • Why Do Some Detectives Use Their Minds and Others Their Fists? Who knew that bestseller lists and children’s books could be the source of intense controversy? Or that even the biggest writers had to scrape by, with odd jobs and inventions like the Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrapbook? In Literary Miscellany, examine the trend of “fake memoirs,” with a list of who lied about what, and a rogues’ gallery of hoaxers dating back centuries. From epic poetry and Homer to pulp fiction and Harry Potter, Literary Miscellany is a breezy tour through the literature of today and yesterday, packed with enough interesting facts to entertain both the erudite professor and pleasure reader.

Fungipedia

Author: Lawrence Millman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691195382
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
"This little book is big fun."—Michael Pollan An illustrated mini-encyclopedia of fungal lore, from John Cage and Terence McKenna to mushroom sex and fairy rings Fungipedia presents a delightful A–Z treasury of mushroom lore. With more than 180 entries—on topics as varied as Alice in Wonderland, chestnut blight, medicinal mushrooms, poisonings, Santa Claus, and waxy caps—this collection will transport both general readers and specialists into the remarkable universe of fungi. Combining ecological, ethnographic, historical, and contemporary knowledge, author and mycologist Lawrence Millman discusses how mushrooms are much more closely related to humans than to plants, how they engage in sex, how insects farm them, and how certain species happily dine on leftover radiation, cockroach antennae, and dung. He explores the lives of individuals like African American scientist George Washington Carver, who specialized in crop diseases caused by fungi; Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, who was prevented from becoming a professional mycologist because she was a woman; and Gordon Wasson, a J. P. Morgan vice-president who almost single-handedly introduced the world to magic mushrooms. Millman considers why fungi are among the most significant organisms on our planet and how they are currently being affected by destructive human behavior, including climate change. With charming drawings by artist and illustrator Amy Jean Porter, Fungipedia offers a treasure trove of scientific and cultural information. The world of mushrooms lies right at your door—be amazed!