I didn't buy it then but I did order it recently off of Overstock.com in hardback for a ridiculous price. I also threw in Gladwell's "What The Dog Saw" which is a collection of his writings for The New Yorker. I could read Gladwell all day. His series of books are all in my top 10 - The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. All genius. Books for a numbers geek!
So I don't want to ruin the book for would be readers so if you plan to read and want to be surprised don't read much more. The subject matter is equally priceless this time - fascinating even.
The economy of prostitution opens the book. It details how and why you have your $10,000 Ashleigh Dupree types and your $5 crack whore types. It details pricing as per location just a few city blocks apart and why the prices relative to everything else have fallen so much since the 30's and 40's....and why oral used to be double the cost of conventional.
Another section is about the guy who profiled terrorists based on their money trail. They had no idea how stupid they were being after people started paying attention post 9/11. There is one mistake the guy wouldn't tell, but other ones were very interesting. For instance, they have no life insurance! Why would they? Most of them are planning to die. Pretty funny. They also don't make any transactions during their praying times or temple times. Holy terrorist nuts don't miss a service or a prayer.
Maybe the best part of the book is debunking global warming or at minimum cheap ways to fix the latest trend. It was amazing to me to read about the articles Newsweek and the like were printing in the 70's about global cooling. Hilarious. It was determined that a huge volcano eruption caused that cooling by creating a makeshift shield in the atmosphere of particles. It lasted several years. A lot of the particles were carbon related. Some top global warning scientists have now changed their minds and accepted these new findings....that everyone trying to use less carbon is actually making the temperature rise because there is less of a shield in the atmosphere without all the particles.
Every cheap answer seems to be instead of not releasing carbon, releasing something like 1.5% more carbon into the high atmosphere than what is there right now. That would be enough to reverse the last decade or two of temps rising. I'm not a scientist, well technically I am, but if the biggest table pounders for global warming are signing off on this theory - it's hard to deny. Of course Al Gore won't even recognize the science, but he laughed at the people who wouldn't recognize his science. Fat loser.
Finally, another short part that made me laugh was about teahcing economics to monkeys with special coins. They tied the last chapter to the first by having documented accounts of a male monkey giving a coin to a female monkey, humping her unmercifully for 8 seconds, and then the female monkey took her coin and bought food with it. Priceless! I'm off to read "What The Dog Saw".
Stilladog, what did you see?
1 comment:
What kind of spam is Wing Tang Chow posting out here?
Anyway the Dog saw...
Mommy kissing Santa Claus.
Dozens of rainbows popping up out of the Grand Canyon.
Liberace play the piano.
The World Series.
A dead rat dressed in baby doll clothes with a pen knife stuck through it's chest inside a metal lunch pale, outside Burn's Drug Store.
A snake swallow a frog whole.
A woman smoke a cigarette with her genetalia.
The 100th playing of the Army-Navy football game.
A kid get run over by a car and get his leg snapped in two.
A drunken Dunbar hillbilly pull a shotgun out on a Hare Krishna selling peanut brittle.
Members of the Pittsburgh Pirates snorting cocaine in the bullpen.
Frenchy Fuqua wearing the shoes that had a goldfish in the heel.
Nobody except me walking across the 6th Street (now Roberto Clemente) bridge in a -50 below wind chill.
Stevie Ray Vaughan stung out on drugs give up trying to play a set after 45 minutes.
A parrot steal my butter right off my plate at a restaurant on Grand Cayman.
A squirrel blow himself up on an electrical transformer.
And that's not counting some of the stuff I saw after eating a "mushroom" snack. But I'm not sure how much of that stuff was actually seen vs. imagination.
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