Corny Names & Stupid Places


Book Description

This book is a hilarious collection of the world's most outrageously funny street sign names, places and people.




The Audio Expert


Book Description

The Audio Expert is a comprehensive reference that covers all aspects of audio, with many practical, as well as theoretical, explanations. Providing in-depth descriptions of how audio really works, using common sense plain-English explanations and mechanical analogies with minimal math, the book is written for people who want to understand audio at the deepest, most technical level, without needing an engineering degree. It's presented in an easy-to-read, conversational tone, and includes more than 400 figures and photos augmenting the text. The Audio Expert takes the intermediate to advanced recording engineer or audiophile and makes you an expert. The book goes far beyond merely explaining how audio "works." It brings together the concepts of audio, aural perception, musical instrument physics, acoustics, and basic electronics, showing how they're intimately related. Describing in great detail many of the practices and techniques used by recording and mixing engineers, the topics include video production and computers. Rather than merely showing how to use audio devices such as equalizers and compressors, Ethan Winer explains how they work internally, and how they are spec'd and tested. Most explanations are platform-agnostic, applying equally to Windows and Mac operating systems, and to most software and hardware. TheAudioExpertbook.com, the companion website, has audio and video examples to better present complex topics such as vibration and resonance. There are also videos demonstrating editing techniques and audio processing, as well as interviews with skilled musicians demonstrating their instruments and playing techniques.




A Place Called Peculiar


Book Description

From Bug Tussle, Alabama, to Donnybrook, New York, this pop-culture history offers a highly entertaining survey of America's most unusual place-names and their often-humorous origins. The author traveled the country, recording the best stories and legends he encountered. The only nationwide survey of its kind, it's a great browsing book with a state-by-state format for easy reference




Sal and Gabi Break the Universe


Book Description

Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents a brilliant sci-fi romp with Cuban influence that poses this question: What would you do if you had the power to reach through time and space and retrieve anything you want, including your mother, who is no longer living (in this universe, anyway)? How did a raw chicken get inside Yasmany's locker? When Sal Vidon meets Gabi Real for the first time, it isn't under the best of circumstances. Sal is in the principal's office for the third time in three days, and it's still the first week of school. Gabi, student council president and editor of the school paper, is there to support her friend Yasmany, who just picked a fight with Sal. She is determined to prove that somehow, Sal planted a raw chicken in Yasmany's locker, even though nobody saw him do it and the bloody poultry has since mysteriously disappeared. Sal prides himself on being an excellent magician, but for this sleight of hand, he relied on a talent no one would guess . . . except maybe Gabi, whose sharp eyes never miss a trick. When Gabi learns that he's capable of conjuring things much bigger than a chicken--including his dead mother--and she takes it all in stride, Sal knows that she is someone he can work with. There's only one slight problem: their manipulation of time and space could put the entire universe at risk. A sassy entropy sweeper, a documentary about wedgies, a principal who wears a Venetian bauta mask, and heaping platefuls of Cuban food are just some of the delights that await in his mind-blowing novel gift-wrapped in love and laughter.




Molecules with Silly Or Unusual Names


Book Description

This popular science book shows that chemists do have a sense of humor, and this book is a celebration of the quirky side of scientific nomenclature. Here, some molecules are shown that have unusual, rude, ridiculous or downright silly names. Written in an easy-to-read style, anyone ? not just scientists ? can appreciate the content. Each molecule is illustrated with a photograph and/or image that relates directly or indirectly to its name and molecular structure. Thus, the book is not only entertaining, but also educational.




The Place Names of New Mexico


Book Description

The indispensable traveler's guide to the history of places throughout the Land of Enchantment.




The Texanist


Book Description

A collection of Courtney's columns from the Texas Monthly, curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, advising "on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team's jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it's served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos?"--Amazon.com.




Portrait of a Silver Lady


Book Description




The Lost Continent


Book Description

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.




A Confederacy of Dunces


Book Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).