Showing posts with label parody. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parody. Show all posts

20% Off Discounts: Buy Cheap Motel of the Mysteries Review

Motel of the Mysteries

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Motel of the Mysteries Review

This book was actually a gift from my Mother who knows I enjoy things archaeological and historical. Since she`s more than a trifle eccentric and has a marvelous sense of the absurd, I've a sneaking suspicion she was poking a little fun at me--which is something I probably need once in a while for my own good.
The Motel of the Mysteries is a wonderful send up of the fields of archaeology and history. It's aim is doubtless to entertain, at which it's vastly successful, but over and above that the book makes quite clear what archaeology legitimately can and cannot do. I think it also points out that what is taken as "The Reality" of the past is often as much a function of current cultural biases and of the personal motives of individual researchers as it is of what actually occurred in the past. (This was made quite clear to me when I saw Knossos on Crete for the first time and realized that a great deal of imagination had gone into the reconstruction of the "Minoan" buildings there).
My favorite parts of Motel were Archaeologist Carson's interpretation of the hotel bathroom as the inner sanctum of a religious structure and the subsequent depiction of his assistant--ala Heinrich Schliemann with the Trojan treasure and Leonard Wooley with the Ur III treasure--wearing bathroom accoutrements as religious paraphernalia.
The author also pokes fun at museums and at all of us, when he includes a collection of "Souvenirs and Quality Reproductions" available for sale at the end of the book. My favorite is the coffee set based on the "sacred urn" (toilet). Goodness knows I've purchased my fair share of quality reproductions on my travels throughout the world!
This should be suggested reading for every college history and archeology major and required for those seeking degrees over BA in these fields!

Motel of the Mysteries Overview

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

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Purchase Cheap Go the F--k to Sleep Review

Go the F--k to Sleep

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Go the F--k to Sleep Review

I had the pleasure of reading a promotional copy of Go the F*#k to Sleep as did many other people it seems. Immediately after finishing, I knew I had to come onto Amazon and pre-order this book. I haven't read anything else by Adam Mansbach before, but this introduction has me hooked. As the father of 2 children, I've more than once screamed the title of this book in my own head. I've never actually shared these thoughts with anyone other than my wife, so it's good to finally know that this not-quite-inappropriate rage isn't unique to me.
In this small book, Mr. Mansbach has illuminated and put into perspective one of the greatest frustrations everyone faces in the first few years as a parent -- putting their child to sleep. I honestly can't imagine a non-parent getting much enjoyment out of this book. I feel the humor lays purely within having experienced firsthand the adventure of putting a child to sleep every day for weeks . . . months . . . and years. If anything, I'd think some people would be horrified by the fact that parents would not only identify with the situation presented, but have said the title of this book many, many, many times. The reality is that we all regularly have angry thoughts we would never say aloud (in both social and professional situations). Thinking these thoughts can be a way of coping with displeasing situations -- of de-stressing.
The contrast between Mr. Mansbach's brutally honest and wonderfully lyrical prose and Mr. Cortes' beautifully genuine paintings creates another level of hilarity. Richard Cortes' artwork in these pages is so sincere and sublime that I truly believe a non-English reader who picked up this book would have no idea it was meant for adults.
I was ultimately astounded that Go the F**k to Sleep proved to be a near-cathartic experience for me. In the few weeks since I've read this book, I've found that putting my children to sleep isn't nearly as disheartening as the task had been before. Rather, when my son now asks me for a fifth stuffed animal and "Where mommy?" for the tenth time, a smile creeps onto my face just thinking of this book. This book has allowed me to not only laugh at my children's ingenuity and endurance at avoiding bedtime, but at my annoyance at the whole farce as well.

Go the F--k to Sleep Overview



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41% Off Discounts: Best Buy for The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius Review

The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius

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The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius Review

Yes, a lot of the content is available for free on the website but there is almost 160 pages of new content in the book. The book is 368 pages. And the type is small. You honestly don't deserve this much content for under nine dollars. Just buy it. I need to buy jewels.

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40% Off Discounts: Best Price Just My Type: A Book About Fonts Review

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts

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Just My Type: A Book About Fonts Review

You are looking at it right now, and if it is doing its job, you don't even notice it. It might represent a creation that has taken centuries to come to its current state of perfection, or it might be something that a dedicated specialist worked on for years and brought out a decade ago. It represents artistry directed within a circumscribed realm. I am talking about the font in which these letters are presented. Thirty years ago, fonts were usually the interest of only a select few in the printing world, but now every computer is charged with fonts and everyone gets to be an amateur typographer (technically, the font is a specific set of metal parts, or digital files, that allows reproduction of letters, and a typeface is the design of letters the font allows you to reproduce, but you can see how the words would get used interchangeably). Simon Garfield is not a professional typographer; his role is bringing out fine nonfiction about, say, stamp collecting, history, or the color mauve. But he has an amateur's enthusiasm for fonts, and communicates it infectiously in _Just My Type: A Book About Fonts_ (Profile Books). This is not a collection of type designs, though there are many illustrations. In most cases it won't help you in finding out what font you happen to be looking at (but it will tell you how to do so in surprising ways). It is a book of appreciation for an art that is largely invisible, but is also essential.
I would not like to read pages set in any of the fonts in one of Garfield's last chapters, "The Worst Fonts in the World." On the list is Papyrus, which caused a stir when it was used extensively in the film _Avatar_. The expensive film used a free (and overused) display font, and font fans noticed. There was also a font war (also known as a "fontroversy") when in 2009 Ikea decided to change its display font from Futura to Verdana. The change inspired passionate arguments in mere bystanders, "like the passion of sports fans," says Garfield, and the _New York Times_ joked that it was "perhaps the biggest controversy to come out of Sweden." The biggest of font wars has had a comic edge to it, and it is the starting point for Garfield's book. Comic Sans is a perfectly good font. It looks something like the letters you see in comic books, smooth, rounded, sans serif, clear. Because it caught on and was quickly overused, there has been a "ban Comic Sans" movement. Even the heads of the movement, which is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, admit that Comic Sans looks fine, say, on a candy packet; but they have also seen it on a tombstone and on a doctor's brochure about irritable bowel syndrome. If you see a font and you wonder which one it is, you can take steps to identify it. Lots of people like to do this. It is especially useful to examine the lower case g. (The other character that reveals a lot is the ampersand, which, maybe since it is not a letter or a punctuation mark, appears in exuberant eccentricity even in some calm fonts.) That g has a lot of variable points; it might have a lower hook or it might have a loop, it might have a straight line on the right, or the upper loop might have an ear that rises or droops, and this doesn't even get into whether the upper loop is a circle, a long or wide ellipse, or has uniform width. Take a look at the g letters shown here, or in your regular reading matter, and you will be amazed at how variable a selection of even only a few can be. If you have your g, you can look it up in font books, but there are so many fonts now that no book comes close to showing them all. There's an application for the iPhone which allows you to take a picture of the letter in question, upload it somewhere, and then get suggestions of possible matches. Or you can go to a type forum and ask there, because there are lots of people devoted to hunting down this sort of thing. And they take it so seriously that, as on many internet forums, they get rather snarky about disagreements.
If you don't pay attention to fonts (and most of them do their work best by not calling attention to themselves), Garfield's entertaining book might get you started. There are chapters about the difficult matter of copyrighting a font, because if you design a good font it is easy to copy it, and there isn't much that can be done about font piracy. Font designers work for love, not money. There's a chapter on "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy white dog" and other phrases that show all the letters, or particular words that display a lot of the letters most important to font design. There's plenty of history starting with Gutenberg and the historical Roman types from which are descended many of the fonts we read every day. Between the chapters are "font breaks" to praise Albertus or Gill Sans and to tell about how they came to be designed, with plenty of anecdotes and other funny or sad stories. This is a delightful, amusing book about a whole world most of us take for granted.

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