Cruel and Unusual Idiots

Author: Leland Gregory
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 0740792091
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Some wonder why and some wonder why not. But it's the latter ones who make you scratch your head and say, 'What in the world were you thinking?'" Former Saturday Night Live writer Leland Gregory skewers cruel crooks and the idiotically inane. From absurd 911 calls to presidential philosophizing and political pandering to foolish felons, Leland Gregory generates the best laughs by exposing the worst of human nature. Inside this collection, Gregory offers more than 275 accounts of human stupidity at its most malicious and peculiar: * In August 2006, 40-year-old Darrel Rodgers was treated at a Bloomington, Indiana, hospital for a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his left knee. Rogers explained that he shot himself seeking to relieve the pain in his knee, which probably stemmed from shooting himself in the same knee ten years earlier. * And, because some of the stories are just that unbelievable, each anecdote, quote, or factoid is presented with relevant background information--including its verified news source.

Hey, Idiot!

Author: Leland Gregory
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 0740792032
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
Over 200 true stories of boneheadedness and buffoonery from the New York Times-bestselling author of Stupid History! Former Saturday Night Live writer Leland Gregory has shown us gray matter-challenged examples in everything from the criminal world to the hallowed halls of government. This time, though, everyone, everywhere is fair game if they've exhibited outrageously stupid behavior. Consider: * The forgetful fireman who left cooking oil on the stove and returned from a call to find the station house burned to the ground * A lung cancer patient who caused an explosion when he lit up a cigarette—in his oxygen tent * A 58-year-old billiards player who was suspended from competition after testing positive for a muscle-building hormone * F. Edward Hebert, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who said, “The only way we’ll get a volunteer army is to draft them” Hey Idiot! lets everyone from bosses to public officials, doctors to sports heroes, skewer themselves with their moronic words and actions.

Unusually Stupid Americans

Author: Kathryn Petras
Publisher: Villard
ISBN: 0307417611
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
A hilarious collection of lists, statistics, news items, quotations, and facts detailing stupid acts of Americans from all walks of life—by the authors of the bestselling The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said Everyone knows that America is “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but sometimes that means we’re free to be as bravely stupid as we want! In Unusually Stupid Americans, Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras assemble choice bits of stupidity, U.S.A.-style, including •the top seriously flawed American advertising moments, including Pacific Airlines’ brilliant “You’re scared of flying? So’s our pilot!” ad campaign, which led the airline to bankruptcy within two months of the campaign’s inception •the Martin Luther King, Jr., celebration in Florida, where a plaque was un-veiled that was intended to honor the actor James Earl Jones but instead read, “Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive” (an unfortunate slip-up, as James Earl Ray was King’s assassin) •and much more!

Cruel Women, Stupid Men

Author: Dan Roentsch
Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub
ISBN: 9781451519099
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
Nefertiti Snorkjutt, a dominatrix who thinks she is just a dedicated feminist. Desmond Cork, the rock scholar who believes the Donnas ate the Ramones. Barry Fest, the executive editor of the Belverton University Press, groomed for cunnilingus by his tattooed goth assistant. You may have heard of them -- and Congressman Slappy Goering, and the television cop-show Perp & Vic, and the ink message discovered on the labia of Dr. Wharton-Stone -- but if you haven't, it's probably because you aren't one of the billion people who read their blog. A burlesque of the "group blog" phenomenon, Cruel Women, Stupid Men follows three professors at Belverton University as they attempt to break through to their benighted fellow-citizens, and as this attempted breakthrough devolves into descriptions of their own ribald misadventures. "What [Dan Roentsch] has done is seize on a new form that was never intended for fiction and adapt it in order to create a brand-new literary form that may change forever the way we look at how stories can be told." -- From the Preface by Mick Arran

Lunatics, Imbeciles and Idiots

Author: Kathryn Burtinshaw
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1473879051
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
“Reveals the grisly conditions in which the mentally ill were kept . . . [and] harrowing details of the inhumane and gruesome treatment of these patients.”—Daily Mail In the first half of the nineteenth century, treatment of the mentally ill in Britain and Ireland underwent radical change. No longer manacled, chained and treated like wild animals, patient care was defined in law and medical understanding, and treatment of insanity developed. Focusing on selected cases, this new study enables the reader to understand how progressively advancing attitudes and expectations affected decisions, leading to better legislation and medical practice throughout the century. Specific mental health conditions are discussed in detail and the treatments patients received are analyzed in an expert way. A clear view of why institutional asylums were established, their ethos for the treatment of patients, and how they were run as palaces rather than prisons giving moral therapy to those affected becomes apparent. The changing ways in which patients were treated, and altered societal views to the incarceration of the mentally ill, are explored. The book is thoroughly illustrated and contains images of patients and asylum staff never previously published, as well as first-hand accounts of life in a nineteenth-century asylum from a patient’s perspective. Written for genealogists as well as historians, this book contains clear information concerning access to asylum records and other relevant primary sources and how to interpret their contents in a meaningful way. “Through the use of case studies, this book adds a personal note to the historiography in a way that is often missing from scholarly works.”—Federation of Family History Societies

"S" Is for Stupid

Author: Leland Gregory
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449406734
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
An A-to-Z treasury of dumb, disastrous, and hard-to-believe human behavior from the New York Times-bestselling author of Stupid History! * A doctor’s actual diagnostic notation: The patient is married but sexually active. * “Shooting Reported at Firing Range” —The State, Columbia, South Carolina, August 4, 2006 * Arrested for public urination in Bowling Green, Ohio: Mr. Joshua Pees. —The Sentinel-Tribune, Bowling Green, Ohio, September 5, 2001 From absurd 911 calls to presidential philosophizing and foolish felons, Leland Gregory generates the best laughs by exposing the worst of human nature. This best-of collection features fifty percent new material and fifty percent fan favorites, arranged alphabetically by topic. And because the stories Gregory chronicles are just that unbelievable, each anecdote, quote, or factoid is presented with relevant background information, including its verified news source.

The Village Idiot

Author: Steve Stern
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199828
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022 "A frothy picaresque that ... vibrates to the “sweet celestial confusion” of Soutine’s painting: delirious and earthy, reverent and irreligious." -- The New York Times Book Review A wild, effervescent, absinthe-soaked novel that tells of the life of the extraordinary artist Chaim Soutine Steve Stern’s astonishing new novel The Village Idiot begins on a glorious spring day in Paris 1917. Amid the carnage of World War I, some of the foremost artists of the age have chosen to stage a boat race. At the head of the regatta is Amedeo Modigliani, seated regally in a bathtub pulled by a flock of canvasback ducks. But unbeknownst to the competition, he has a secret advantage: his young friend, the immigrant painter Chaim Soutine, is hauling the tub from underwater. Soutine, an unwashed, misfit artist (who incidentally can’t swim) has been persuaded by the Italian to don a ponderous diving suit and trudge along the floor of the river Seine. Disoriented and confused by the artificial air in his helmet Chaim stumbles through the events of his past and future life. It’s quite an extraordinary life. From his impoverished beginnings in an East European shtetl to his equally destitute days in Paris during the Années Folles, the Crazy Years, from the Cinderella patronage of the American collector Albert Barnes, who raises him from poverty to international attention, to his perilous flight from the Nazi occupation of France, Chaim Soutine remains driven by his unrelenting passion to paint. To be sure, there are notable distractions, such as his unlikely friendship with Modigliani, who drags him from brothels to midnight felonies to a duel at dawn; there are the romances with remarkable women who compete with and sometimes salvage his obsession. But there is also, always on the horizon, the coming storm that threatens to sweep away Chaim and a generation of gifted Jewish refugees from a tradition that would outlaw their longing to make art. Wildly inventive, as funny as it is heart-breaking, The Village Idiot is a luminous fever-dream of a novel, steeped in the heady atmosphere of a Paris that was the cultural capital of the universe, a place where anything seemed possible.

Canaduh

Author: Leland Gregory
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449402046
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
From absurd 911 calls to presidential philosophizing to his New York Times best-selling Stupid American History, Leland Gregory generates the best laughs by exposing the worst of human nature. Now, Gregory--sets his sights north to the frozen tundra of Canada to skewer Canadians, in Canaduh: Idiots from the Frozen North. Inside Canaduh: Idiots from the Frozen North, Gregory offers hundreds of accounts of Canadian stupidity at its most random and bizarre, starring French-speaking Quebecois, Yukon fur trappers, and Arctic Circle Eskimos. Because the stories Leland chronicles are just that unbelievable, each anecdote, quote, or factoid is presented with relevant background information--including its verified news source.

Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle

Author: Christopher Britt
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030731065
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
This book reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. The modern intellectual--who had once been associated with humanism and enlightenment—has in our day been replaced by media stars, talking heads, and technical experts. At issue is the ongoing crisis of democracy, under the aegis of the société du spectacle and its vast networks of politically-induced idiocy, industrially-produced biocide, and militarily-provoked genocide. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum with electronic technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. This postmodern tyranny reduces intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models of inquiry, while increasing the segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence; it also accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition.

Stupid California

Author: Leland Gregory
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 1449400361
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Best-selling author Leland Gregory--who has so entertainingly highlighted humanity's stupidity in the areas of crime, business, love, politics, cruelty, and history--is back with Stupid California. This time, Gregory builds a case for the common suspicion that Californians, from movie moguls to beach bums, have a special affinity for idiocy. Culled from print, online, and broadcast sources, Stupid California is a hilarious collection of true stories, trivia, and factoids about the Golden State, such as: * "California's state animal is the California grizzly bear, which is also on the state flag. The bear was honored in 1953, a full 31 years after the last known bear in the state was killed." * "During the 1980s, in a bold stroke against terrorism, the Chico City Council banned nuclear weapons, enacting a mandatory $500 fine for anyone detonating a nuclear weapon within city limits." Silly, shocking, weird, and amusing, Stupid California is ideal for both kinds of people--those who love California and those who hate it.