I am not making this up.

[nitrah55]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/books ... st.html?hp

This year's winner for the weirdest book title.

[ulysses5019]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/books ... st.html?hp

This year's winner for the weirdest book title.

I kinda liked some of the "losers".

The work beat out stiff competition from the four actual books on the shortlist: “Curbside Consultation of the Colon,” “The Large Sieve and Its Applications,” “Strip and Knit With Style” and “Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.”

[ulysses5019]

I knew I should have continued reading further before posting:

The Diagram Prize began in 1978 as a way for Bruce Robertson, co-founder of the Diagram Group, an information and graphics company, to combat his ennui at the Frankfurt Book Fair. That was a bumper year for odd titles — nominees included “100 Years of British Retail Catering” and “50 New Poodle Grooming Styles” — but the runaway winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Nude Mice.”

I'm sure the latter is on the ES bookshelf.

[tanstaafl2]

The article is quite amusing.

“How to Avoid Huge Ships,” in which an old sea captain offers shipping-lane safety tips to pleasure-boat sailors, has a select but fervent following and late Thursday was ranked No. 1,381,925 on Amazon.com.

“This is a must-read for anyone who encounters huge ships daily and does not want to get run over by them,” one reader says on the Amazon Web site. Another raves: “I never leave the house without this indispensable little book. It has literally saved my life many times while walking down Peckham High Street and Ealing Broadway.”

The British are indeed very strange people. Too much time cooped up on a small, wet, cold, foggy island perhaps.