The Areas of My Expertise
John Hodgman
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1594482225
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hot on the heels of the #1 bestsellers The Onion's Our Dumb Century and Jon Stewart's America comes The Areas of My Expertise, the brilliant and uproarious #15 bestseller (i.e., a runaway phenomenon in its own right-no, seriously) - a lavish compendium of handy reference tables, fascinating trivia, and sage wisdom - all of it completely unresearched, completely undocumented and (presumably) completely untrue, fabricated by the illuminating, prodigious imagination of John Hodgman, certifiable genius.
Watch a QuickTime trailer for this book.
appreciate that it may be difficult to grasp how COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE may be contained within a single book. Some skeptics have pointed out that most libraries, for example, are physically larger than this book,1 and thus must contain MORE KNOWLEDGE. This seems logical, but I wish to point out . . . FIRST, many libraries contain several copies of the same book, not to mention large areas of empty space called “reading rooms” where the children and the vagrants and the freelance magazine
are probably from Massachusetts. In fact, a certain magazine recently ranked those people the number-one “most incorrect” and “probably gay” people in Massachusetts, and the number-one “most personally against” John Hodgman. So who are you going to trust? Me? Or the probably gay Massachusetts residents who are against me? I have run about five hundred attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger. As a template for your own
Connecticutians that was devoted to drinking and the display of friendship to Elihu Yale, a Boston-born merchant living in England whom they had chosen at random. The Friends of Yale would secretly meet every Thursday evening to plan out lavish new gifts for Mr. Yale—teams of horses, some carved out of gold; chests of tobacco and guns; magic cotton gins; a wise prostitute who would remind Yale of the brevity of life and its beauty, etc.—all shipped, at great expense, to Yale, who did not want
Jupiter. MARS: Probably a government conspiracy. MERCURY: Zero axial tilt? Please. Most agree that this is either a space station or a self-aware supercomputer. Postscript: since the Club Verification Committee verified Saturn and Venus via rocket expedition in 1959 and 1967, respectively, each has been granted its own room in the Club of Nations: The Solarium is now called the Saturnium; The Hall of Venus is on the third floor, left of the Game Room, and is, in deference to the Venutians, kept at
shelter in Johnny’s Café, a dark cavern of a steakhouse in the center of the old stockyards. It was so powerfully air-conditioned inside that the generously padded, fake leather swivel chairs felt like they had spent the night in the refrigerator, and we sat there, sunblind, awaiting our onion rings. It was quiet. The only other party sat at a large, round table nearby: eight men, the youngest perhaps thirty-nine, the oldest in his sixties, all pleased and prosperous-seeming, all eating the prime