Pedia Press is a pretty neat concept. It allows anyone to compile hand-picked Wikipedia pages and transform them into books that are instantly available for purchase. The super-simple process takes about 10 to 15 minutes. I’ve already produced a few volumes of my own. Each one, detailed below, has made the world a better place.

Inanimate Immortality. This baby retails for $33.04. It explores the world of taxidermy, androids, sex dolls and other items that mimic or commemorate life. Key sections include robot fetishism, glove puppetry, and shrunken heads. My favorite passage is from the Icelandic Phallological Museum: ”Although the museum does not yet have a Homo sapiens specimen, in the interest of advancing phallological knowledge, a patron (Páll Arason, born in 1915 and currently 94 years old) has donated, presumably posthumously, an affidavit for his penis.”

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Tags: books & writing by Michael Cade
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It’s a moment that every baseball player dreams about. Tenth inning, game tied at one, bases loaded, two outs. Hero time, right? Kendry Morales, a young first baseman for the Los Angeles Angels, found himself in this exact situation on Saturday. Morales is a promising player who is in only his second full major league season. He stepped to the plate to face Brandon League, a reliever for the Seattle Mariners. What happened next boggles the mind. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. She goes off on a rant about “the great left-wing liberal socialist conspiracy.”

9. His speech begins, “Hello, I’m Glenn Beck…”

8. Her speech is 90 minutes of “Knock Knock” jokes.

7. He’s Obama, just not the Obama.

6. His claim to fame: he’s the surviving member of Milli Vanilli.

5. He advises the females in the auditorium to take Home Economics ’cause “nummers is hard!”

4. He’s a Goldman Sachs V.P. who claims he can triple your graduation gift money in three months.

3. First name: Kate. Last name: Gosselin.

2. After applying lipstick to the edges of his thumb and pointing finger, he lets the entire speech be delivered by Mr. Hand.

1. He’s wearing his cap, but forgot his gown.
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, education, ends & odd by Bob Sullivan
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An explosion kills a number of oil workers and BP is accused of causing the tragedy through a mix of indifference and incompetence. Sound familiar? It should, because this happened back in 2005, when a BP explosion killed 15 (the most most recent explosion only killed another 11, so by this measure their performance is improving). BP’s record is filled with incidents where they jeopardized the environment — see Prudhoe Bay — but the truly shocking thing is that they’ve caused so much human death in such a short time. How did they get away with this? As has happened so many times in recent years, props must be given to the Bush administration. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government by Sean Cunningham
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This week I am devoting my column to one amazing clip I saw from an upcoming movie.  Please allow me to explain.  Now that I am a dad, I am soon going to be suffering through movies made for kids.  And everyone knows the formula to a great kid’s movie- talking animals, dancing animals, sunglass-wearing animals, groin shots, and fart scenes.  This clip takes the beloved, always funny, always painful, and always crowd pleasing shot to the groin to a whole new level. [Read more →]

Tags: animals, movies by Marty O'Connor
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Happy birthday to Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond thrillers.

Fleming was born on May 28, 1908. He died on August 12, 1964. 

You can read three of my On Crime & Thrillers columns that dealt with Ian Fleming here  

Tags: on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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When I think of Boston I think of George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

For more than a dozen years when I worked for a Defense Department command in Philadelphia, our regional headquarters was located in Boston. During that time I visited the city quite often.

Boston has fine bars and restaurants and fine historical and cultural scenes, and I’ve had some fine times there – yet to me Boston will always be first and foremost the home of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. 

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Tags: on thrillers and crime by Paul Davis
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In 1979 it was decided that the decades-old practice of naming hurricanes after women was unfair. Whether it weighed down the moral standing of women to associate them with inchoate and uncontrollable mayhem or if it was man-kind who was shorted by being overlooked, we cannot say but we have long exercised gender-blindness using alternating male and female names alphabetically so it is no surprise that early in the storm season we should be battening hatches against Hurricane Barack. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, politics & government by Ken Watson
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A lot of my friends have been complaining to me about their husbands lately. The stories all sort of blur together and it seems as though most of them (the husbands in question) do the same dumb shit. Now — we all know I don’t have a husband. And for those of you who didn’t know that bit of information – now you do. So you may wonder what qualifies me to even create such a top ten. It’s simple — for all intents and purposes, I am a wife and I have a wife — I’m the perfect person for the job. [Read more →]

Tags: advice, family & parenting, going parental by Jaclyn Roth
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A 19-year-old crashed his car when he and his three passengers tried to hold their breath for the entire drive through “Garbutt, a rural Rochester-area hamlet that’s just three-tenths of a mile long.” The driver, Bryan Parslow, fainted and crashed into a boulder.

The story notes that Parslow is “no stranger to bad luck. He’s a paraplegic who was paralyzed in 2008 after falling out of a window in Brockport while attending college.” The bad luck is noted twice, in a sub-head as well as in the body text.

I don’t think “luck” means what the writer of the article thinks it means.

Tags: trusted media & news by Scott Stein
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