Don't remember who once said something like this: "A smart person is not who knows smart answers, but one who knows how to ask smart questions." Asking questions is an art that can ultimately bring prosperity and fun to our lives. This little book ain't stupid to ask normal 'stupid' questions. Instead, it asked some seemly stupid, but thought provocative questions. I enjoy most part of it.

Question such as "If you had a third eye, where would you put it?". This is a question that can trigger an intensive discussions with so many possible answers. This is not only where you want 'the eye' to grow out/in on your body, it is also about how you are going to use it. And, this eye is not necessarily part of your body. It can be in Bill Gates' or Michelle Pfeiffer's head. Can the eye be portable or have a wing of its own to be wherever and whenever I want it to be? This one question is a piece of work on its own!

The only reason I gave this book four star instead of five because many questions from the book are not universal. You have to grow up in certain part of the world at certain period to appreciate the questions. For example, a question like "Who is the better boyfriend, Kramer..." You have to see the TV show (I am not going to advertise for it) to know what the author is talking about. These questions are the real 'stupid' ones I suppose.

This book has more values than faults. It can make a great gift for friends, family, or yourself. It can be a perfect 'kill-time' toy, or a primer for a 'Philosophical moment'. Either way, you will be smarter every time you read it. Remember, stupid people don't ask stupid questions. They just give you stupid answers without thinking. Only smart people ask stupid questions, such as "Why apples fell from the tree?" and "Why men have two legs instead of six."

My fiance (now husband) and I found this book to be a great way to get to know eachother. We found the questions to be somewhat silly, but thought-provoking. I'd really recommend this book to anyone who wanted to learn more about their partner, or to just start conversations in general. It is a lot of fun to go through.

I thought this book was very good. Some of the questions were very funny, but I thought that a few didn't make sense. Overall the book was very interesting and funny.

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel has four primary uses:

(1) To let you fantasize safely about what you would do in a life-threatening situation you probably won't face, but have seen in the movies (survive after being lost in a jungle, escape a mob, survive a kidnapping)

(2) Provide humorous scenarios that you will probably never face to give you a good laugh (being abducted by a UFO, handling a runaway camel, getting rid of a leech in your nose)

(3) Practical advice for challenges that many travelers will encounter (stopping a car with no brakes, handling a runaway horse, foiling thieves)

(4) Reducing risk of harm from unlikely events that you probably do think about (escaping a hotel fire, what to do after falling onto a subway track, surviving an elevator fall).

I was impressed that although I did not expect to learn anything I could ever use, the book actually had several sections which I wish I had known about when I faced travel challenges in the past (handling scorpion stings, what to do in a hotel fire, how to stop a runaway horse that someone else is on, making a shelter in the snow, avoiding having your carry-ons stolen at the x-ray machine). I suspect that I will be able to use this information in the future.

Another benefit I got was to realize that I could handle some emergencies that I would normally consider well beyond me. In these days when travel seems more dangerous than before, this book may also be worth carrying to play the role of Dumbo's magic feather -- to build a little confidence. For example, I don't like to fly in small planes. I think I could follow the instructions in the book for crash landing a small plane in water, as long as someone could help me. But I could never remember all of these details in a crisis. Having the book along will help me relax a lot more on my next small plane flight.

People with phobias about certain travel situations may find the knowledge that they gain here can help reduce their anxiety.

One of the best parts of the book came in the foreword by David Concannon of the Explorers Club who described the many hideous things that had happened to him in order to encourage you to realize that the unexpected does happen, you need to accept what is beyond your control, always have a contingency plan, and no matter how bad things are . . . they could get worse. As a result, you will probably spend more time thinking through the potential challenges that you will face on future trips, and be better prepared to handle these challenges.

My favorite funny parts in the book were the runaway camel, passing a bribe, foiling a UFO abduction, trailing a thief, losing someone following you, jumping from a moving train, escaping from being tied up, ramming a barricade, surviving a volcanic eruption, surviving a tsunami, getting rid of leeches, and crossing a piranha-infested river. Indiana Jones, move over!

Even if you never travel, the book "will provide good information and entertainment for the armchair survivalist."

Be prepared!

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel'

By Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

This book would be for a frequent traveler, and if you were one, you would want to keep this book nearby at all times. There are lots of things that you're probably not going to need, but they're vary interesting to read about. Some examples of the situations are how to deal with run away camels and UFO abductions.

Lots of the things that this book will talk about are going to be useful like escaping a high rise or hotel fire, or stopping an airplane hijacking, or how to escape when tied up.

I would recommend this book to travelers, or people who are thinking about traveling to a secluded jungle type place. Even though I don't travel much, lots of the things are useful to know. Recommended ages, 8 and up.

A lot of the topics probably will never apply to us in our whole lifetime, i.e. how to control a runaway camel, how to cross a piranha-infested river, etc., so I could simply read them & laugh out loud. It contains useful info, though, such as strategies for packing & flying. I'm not a frequent traveller & could've used those tips, especially since I just got back from a vacation. Of course, I had thumbed throught the table of contents prior to my vacation (and prior to purchasing it), & the topic "how to survive an airplane crash" did not appeal to me at that time--it made me antsy as I was about to go on a plane! I did not want to visualize or even think about airplane crashes at that time! :) But hey, I bought the book afterwards, & I love it.

I'm hoping the "Worst Case" series doesn't degenerate much further. The original actually *was* pretty useful, but this, the third or so in the series, is just humor, with little that's actually useful on a date.

What are my dating worst-case scenarios? Getting spaghetti sauce on one's shirt, getting too drunk, inadvertently bringing up something controversial, discovering some Awful Truth about your date that makes you want to get up and run away, etc. Some of these are addressed ("How to leave a date in a hurry", "How to tell if your date is really married"), but too few to make sense. The rest are just silly (like "how to tell if your date is really a woman"). Frankly, I view this book as an enjoyable foray into bizarre problems, but not actually something useful. For all that, it IS terribly funny. The style is different from the earlier two books, but it's still hilarious imagining someone in these situations (like a guy running around a girl's apartment hoping to figure out her name from her mail before she wakes up.. advice which totally disregards that a lot of women don't go by their "official" first names!).

This is my favorite "Worst-Case" book and probably the most practical. I think it will make a great gift for the holidays. It makes for interesting reading and is a conversational piece. If you wanted to, I'm sure that you could read the whole book in a couple of hours.

Some of the advice is very practical, helpful and important for serious dating like: How to Determine If Your Date is Married, How to Deal with Bad Breath, How to Deal with a Drunken Date, How to Survive If You Are Stopped by the Police, and How to Survive Snoring.

Others are mostly amusing (especially the diagrams!) like: How to Determine the Gender of Your Date, How to Escape From a Bad Date, How to Spot a Fake (Boob job and hair pieces), How to Fend Off Competition For Your Date, and How to Remove Difficult Clothing...and of course the faking of the Big "O".

Some things that are in the book may not be such a good idea in the first place like How to Have an Affair and Not Get Caught. Maybe you can avoid the whole problem by not having an affair, right?

And the bit about How to Determine if Your Date is a Con-Artist...the entire thing about the eye patterns is such a bunch of neuro-baloney. Trust your intuition and if he seems kind of weird then he probably is.

All in all this is a fun read, a great gift, a practical guide to a few situations that may apply to you or one of your friends, and if you live on the dating "edge", this probably can save your behind....at least temporarily until you wise up.

Like a professional baseball player, this book helps an enlightened woman anticipate rare situations so that she can respond with action instead of react in panic. And for this, we can be thankful that this book exists.

In today's pop culture society, I'm sure this is destined to be a National Best-Seller.

The Worst-Case Scenario : Dating and Sex describes situations that made laugh, like I haven't in a long time: How to find out if your date is serial killer? How to carry your drunk date? and many more.
Reading this book I thanked god for being married, but than once again, Marriage can be the subject of another book in this great series...

I received this as an early Christmas present, read about 10 entries, and threw it in the trash. I really wish I'd received something a little more pedestrian and a lot less audacious. Reading the improbable situations literally made me ill. One included situation (jumping from a moving train) actually happened to a friend of mine and he had serious brain injuries as a result. If the book/calendar was supposed to be funny, I must be humor-impaired. Definitely not for the faint of heart.

This book isn't meant to be a survival bible. It's a dayplanner. It's fun. Best practical features are big spaces for writing appointments, tear resistant cover and it's spiral bound so it lays flat. It's best fun features - not only do you get a new survival tip every week, but there are fun survival based milestones on the calendar. Like the day the boyscouts were founded or when the life raft was invented. I love the book, the planner is great. It makes a great gift. There is a disclaimer right in the beginning that these are only for extreme situations, lots of the tips are very practical- we dont learn in school what to do if our car goes underwater and even though we've watched macgyver we're not expecrts. this book gives you information to keep in the back of your mind to pull out if by any chance one of these horrific situations happened to you - or really improve your score in trivia games.

Don't bother purchasing this calendar. It neither functions as a calendar (it doesn't display either the week or month ahead) or as a surival guide.

Take my tip and give it a miss.

For those who love the Worst Case Scenario books, prepare yourself for disappointment. The books are filled with hilarious "how to" diagrams and instructions, but this calendar only has those for about half of the days--the remaining days are marked by anecdotes presented as "Today in Survival History" and "Today's Hero." These things are just not very interesting or funny and bear no consistency with the spirit and humor of the books and how-tos. They are just plain lame.

So consider this:

HOW TO AVOID BEING BORED BY THE WORST CASE SCENARIO DAILY SURVIVAL CALENDAR

1. Don't purchase it (stick with the books);

or

2. If purchased, carefully and completely tear off the pages entitled "Today in Survival History" and "Today's Hero" and deposit them in the nearest waste receptacle by wadding them up into compact, ball-shaped mounds and either throwing or placing them in such waste receptacle. If unsuccessful, re-attempt with greater force and/or accuracy.

I do recommend this one isntead of buying the book, because reading one by day will make it more easy to remember, however I gave it 4 stars because I dont like the idea of not giving you a worst case scenaria situation for every day, because in some days you will get an history fact about survival, tough you may like it.

Being a big fan of Classic TV shows I was intrigued when I heard about this book but to be honest I thought it was ok for a one time read but pretty boring and I think the idea of the book was good but the book itself wasn't good it just completely failed to keep me interested and I feel like I have sucker written on my forehead! When I find a book that I really like I keep it for display on my bookcase but this book just wasn't good enough for my bookcase so I gave the book away to a family member who also likes classic TV shows and I think he read it once and wasn't too interested with it either and while visiting recently I found the book thrown on a bookcase behind some other books and I reread some of the pages and I'm like even more disappointed now then when I first read it a a couple of years ago! It's a shame this book was so disappointing because it really could have been so much better!

These guys call themselves "TV gurus"? Please. They seem to remember bits and pieces and make up stuff that they can't remember. "Where's the beef?" was from a WENDY's ad, not Burger King. And Christopher Lloyd played Reverend Jim Ignatowski, NOT Jim Kowalski. Do not waste your money on this, unless you have a good red pen for corrections.

I love this book. Parts are silly, and another reviewer found some typos, but this book just makes me smile every time I pick it up. This is not some definitive guide to lines, characters, or plots, but pages and pages of observations from past shows.

If you didn't watch way too much TV in the past, then these quips probabaly fall flat. But if just reading the title of the section on 'How to tell the difference between Heather "The Fall Guy" Thomas and Heather "T.J. Hooker - Melrose Place" Locklear' makes you laugh, then it's a riot.