Isn't this the kind of thing he would make fun of in his stage act?

This calendar proves that George Carlin, is truly an awesome comedian. This calendar is filled with all of his best humor.

I enjoyed George Carlin's BRAIN DROPPINGS, but his latest
effort is even better . . . NAPALM & SILLY PUTTY is a MUST
for anybody who likes the thinking person's comic--and even
those who don't . . . his hilarious new collection of quips
often had me laughing out loud.

He asks such tough questions as:
Who does a male ladybug dance with?
When Reagan got Alzheimer's, how could they tell?

he shares philosophical musings:
In America, anybody can be president. That's the problem.
No one quite knows what's next, but everybody does it.

He provides information:
An art thief is a man who takes pictures.
McDonald's breakfast for under a dollar is actually more expensive
than that. You have to factor in the cost of bypass surgery.

And he shares observations:
You rarely see one oat all by itself.
One nice thing about being dead is that you immediately become
eligible to appear on stamps and money.

ok, ok . . . stop begging . . . here's one more:
Whenever a guy says, "Are they keeping you busy?" I always
tell him, "Well, your wife is keeping me pretty busy!" And that
seems to hold him for about half an hour.

There are sooooooo many more i'd like to share . . . however,
since some--if not a lot--of these might tend to upset
some folks, I'll just recommend that you get the book;
i.e., if not easily offended.

First, a thought...Javascript and wireless web incompatibility. This book is full of it. Javascript was invented many years ago and is designed to run on the user's machine. This puts a load on the user's processor and for those with slower machines, the load is sometimes too much. Wireless phones don't support javascript and they most likely never will. SVG was created to be a high quality, small and highly compatible format for cell phones and other wireless devices. This book is full and I mean full of javascript to handle almost all of the web and appication solutions.

Now another thought....XML. A new technology which was designed to be portable, compatible and server side, which means no trouble with the user's computers. regardless of how intimidating XML might seem, it is the future and needs to be addressed. SVG was designed to be used with XML and XML was designed for both web and application development. The focus on PHP, Perl and other scripting languages was given too little focus. Old information and technology does not constitute a good resource. This book was a poor example of the true power of SVG and will lead many new developers into the pitfall of using javascript which is doomed for extinction.

The authors seem to have had a problem in deciding what to write, a tutorial or a reference manual, and ended up writing something that's neither. I hesitated between a 2 or 3-star rating, and gave the authors the benefit of... Well, not the doubt.

The book consists of six parts: "SVG fundamentals", "Programming SVG Client-Side", "Producing SVG Server-side", "Case Studies", "Looking Ahead", and "Appendices". You will need to download most of the Appendices ("B: SVG Elements Reference", "C: SVG Attributes and Properties Reference" and "D: SVG Document Object Model (DOM)") as only appendix "A: Glossary" is actually included in the book.

Each of the chapters that discuss the actual language ends with a discussion of the part of the DOM that applies to what was discussed in each chapter. Unfortunately, this is too boring to read as tutorial, and at the same it is too unorganized to be used as a reference (the 'discussion' of the entire DOM spreads out over almost 20 chapters).

With respect to the tutorial part of each chapter: whenever I came across parts that were likely to trip my trigger, I was disappointed to read that all the really interesting details "are provided in the SVG 1.0 Recommendation." However, your mileage may vary.

My recommendation is to read some online tutorials (IBM DeveloperWorks and/or the one by David Duce and Ivan Herman) to get an idea of what SVG is all about. Then, if you are interested in doing some SVG 'programming', continue by downloading the aforementioned SVG 1.0 Recommendation and possibily even the SVG Unleashed Appendices. That should give you enough information to avoid the purchase of this book.

Targeted to the experienced Web programmer, SVG Unleashed deftly equips the reader with the practical knowledge required in order to create and manipulate Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) programmatically, both on the client and the server side. Part I of SVG Unleashed provides a thorough reference of SVG syntax, elements, coordinate systems and animations, with coverage of the XML Document Object Model(DOM) and the SVG DOM application to each element or attribute. Part II of SVG Unleashed introduces client-side SVG programming with particular emphasis on the use of ECMAScript/JavaScript. In Part III of SVG Unleashed readers learn to use several server-side languages to create SVG documents. Part IV of SVG Unleashed demonstrates SVG programming through several case studies. User Level: Intermediate, 1152 pages

This book is a good reference but not for those who are not proficient already in MAX. As others have stated, the examples often skip steps, assume knowledge of the workings of the program and show "this is what you should end up with" pictures that don't relate at all to what the instructions give. I get the impression also that each chapter was written by a different person because they cover material that has sometimes been discussed or later chapters cover basic material that was left out at the beginning. If you are beginner, don't buy this.

Well, Boss Hog may get confused easily, but don't let him shy you away from an excellent text. I still recommend this book to people learning Max 3. The tutorials in the first several chapters are very intelligently written, and attempt to tackle very complicated concepts in a very concise manner. The text has helped me master more advanced concepts and tools of both Max the program and animation in general. The section on character work, while a regurgitation of what you'll find in Illusion of Life, Timing for Anim, and Foster's works, is still helpful to the beginner. The first third of the book is also an excellent source of principles that any budding animator who's transitioning to 3D would be wise to read. I've been animating professionally for 7 years, and I think that this text is great. If you get lost on the tutorials, then just read the text and LEARN the PRINCIPLES since that's really the important thing that these experts have to share with you!

This book is Great. It provides an indepth explanation of the concepts and abilities of 3D Studio Max2. It is definately for the more advanced user and is definately a must. The first Vol is like a big encyclopedia that explains the concepts but does not provide real hands on learning methods, This Vol. is by far the best of the 3 and is an important tool in every animators libary.

I though this was George W's gaffes, but it turns out his father mispoke quite a bit himself. A little bit too politically motivated, these people obviously had no idea how much worse things could get when his son would be elected, er, annointed, or ah, democratically- you know what I mean!

Is intelligence learned or inherited? It's a question that has puzzled scientists and philosophers since the beginning of time. On the one hand, you can argue that this book proves the latter conviction, since it's obvious that Papa Bush is as grammatically challenged as baby Bush, but on the other hand, who taught Baby to speak? Seriously though, this book is hilarious, a welcome companion piece to more recent versions attacking the more recent Bush. I've owned it since it came out and it still makes me laugh. If you can find it, buy it.

If you are looking for symbolism or imagery I might suggest a different book, but for some of the funniest quotes this side of Yogi Berra I definitly recommed "Bushisms". (Of course if you are a big Bush/Republican fan AND have NO sense of humor this one may not be for you.)

"Blue of Noon" is the story of Henri, an amoral man living in Europe during the 1930s. He is supposedly married, but spends his time with similarly amoral women, lacking clothing, inhibition, shame, and even proper hygeine at times. He zips between London, Paris, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, and frankly, engages in nothing but immoral self-satisfying activities in every spot.

At various times, he agonizes over his relationships with his wife, his sexual partners, and his deceased mother. He becomes embroiled in a Communist revolutionary plot in Barcelona, with one of his sexual partners, a Jewish woman, involved in its planning and execution. He reveals his necrophilic obsession to two of his partners, further revealing the exact, even more sickening, subject of his obsession to one of them. He has sex, he gets sick, his women have sex, they get sick, everybody has sex, everybody gets sick. For the punchline, near the end of the novel, Bataille throws Nazis into the picture, showing us that all the depravity of fascism is comparable to the depravity he has shown us all along. Though published in 1957, the book was originally written in 1936.

This reviewer isn't buying it. Not a word of it. Not the story, not even the "1936" part. For one thing, the writing style is actually more mature than that of "L'Abbe C", published in 1950. Bataille is most probably trying to show off that he detected the evil inherent in the Nazis "way back when". I don't give him that much credit.

For another thing, I think he uses Nazis as an easy way to score "scary" points. One might intellectualize his choice by saying Bataille is trying to tell us that no matter how disgusting humans may act, at least we're not as bad as Nazis. Imagine a murderer begging leniency because he's not a Nazi. He's still a murderer. It seems Bataille is using Nazis to justify the pornography he just wrote, as if the world is such a horrible place that pornography is just another little bit of it, and tries to throw a philosophical wrench into the works, as if saying life is meaningless in the face of all the horrible things fascism is doing to us in Europe, but I suspect it was all done just for the hell of it. I frankly don't see any rhyme or reason to the thematic choices he makes.

I have nothing against the depravity or explicit nature of the book. "Been there, done that", right? It's not even all that explicit, there's probably less sex in this book than the average mainstream novel today, and he's certainly not advocating committing even the slightest harm to anyone. There are a few disturbing or distasteful ideas here and there, but one never gets the sense Bataille really means what he's writing. One gets the sense he's simply trying to come up with every juxtaposition of immoral behavior and social taboo he can, just to tweak the reader's moral compass a bit, trying to get a cheap rise out of his audience. Maybe this was an interesting exercise in 1957 (or "1936"), but given the state of depravity which existed in Germany during the 1920s, and the state of sexual liberation which swept Europe from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, I strongly doubt it.

Perhaps the target reader for this book will be the person interested in twisted versions of 19th-century literature (Bataille wrote like someone living 50 or 100 years before his time), or the works of De Sade (albeit in highly shortened format, this book being only 126 pages).

I'm pretty fondly disposed to Bataille, but Blue of Noon was a disappointment. The title and the cover are wonderful, and having read Story of the Eye and L'abbe C just before it, I expected great things. But what I received instead was a drawling, shabby, painfully tedious and remarkably unmemorable narrative ramble. It isn't as disturbing as Story of the Eye, and it isn't as interesting as L'abbe C, and it feels much shorter in the surreal atmospheric magic that made those two books worthwhile. If you've already read and enjoyed Bataille, you may want to check Blue of Noon out, but it is not one of his better works.

I don't really know how to begin this review. There's not really a good angle to approach this remarkable and beautiful book. What do you do when the very things that attract you to a woman disgust you and yet they turn you on at the same time. In this novel Henri and his wife, whom he sometimes refers to by giving her the name "Dirty" are driving each other insane. They love each other but the very intensity of their personalities makes them fated to never be at peace. This is the root of their despair, that they both realize the futility of being with each other. Henri sinks into dissipation and having relationships with women he thoroughly despises. The first, a woman named Lazare, he refers to as a "raven of ill omen". She is so ugly and despicable but he loves her in a way simply because she reeks of death. He wants to surround himself with an environment that reflects his state of mind. Dirty is dying and you sense that in reality her spirit has already passed on and its simply her image dragging Henri into her own horrible hell. Most of the book takes place in Spain just as the Spanish Civil War is beginning and there are all kinds of portents of the coming World War which adds to the darkness of the characters. This book was brillantly done. The characters seemed so real because they did hurt each other, because they did have unhealthy obsessions which they revel in instead of hiding them within. They give full vent to their joys just as much as their miseries. This is the first book I have read by Bataille and I am curious to see what his other work is like.

This book is full of small and large mistakes: "debulging" tumors (for "debulk"); "bare hugger" (for Bair Hugger); it states that the middle cerebral artery is part of the posterior circulation, which is a ridiculous mistake showing a very poor understanding of cerebral circulation (the posterior circulation comes from vertebral and basilar arteries; the anterior circulation is everything that comes off the carotid). The outrageously controversial claim that "dermatomal SSEP's" routinely improve during surgery is made as if it were fact, with no evidence offered. There are lots of pictures, but very few of them are of actual waveforms.

The aneurysm section is very misleading, and fails to make clear the main points: the main danger in these surgeries is ischemia during temporary clipping. Tibial nerve SSEP should be used for ACA and ACOM, median nerve for MCA, both for the PCOM.

The book has some interesting things in it, but you can't trust it. Also costs too much. I recommend instead books by Marc Nuwer; Loftus and Traynelis; Aage Moller (Evoked Potentials in Intraoperative Monitoring"; Russell and Rodichok; Clinical Neurophsyiology by Jasper R. Daube; or DeLisa et al.'s Manual of Nerve Conduction Velocity and Clinical Neurophysiology, 3rd edition. Any one of them would be much better and more useful, and especially more reliable.

The Book serves as an excellent guide to Intraoperative monitoring. The entire procedure as carried out in a real OR setting is explained vividly. It also introduces bio-electrical signals and the devices used in IOM. Well illustrated, it elicits IOM right from the basics to the advanced issues involved in the procedure. Pitfalls with apparatus usage and signal interpretation is also discussed at length. The review questions take the cake !

Although this book is well organized and, generally well written, it is not a good course for the American woodworker. The book is written by a Welchman. He uses species of wood and walking stick designs that are Welch. There are some good ideas about the process. But the book is very narrow in scope.

Everything you need to know on how to make canes & walking sticks. What I like about this book is that it takes you from the beginning-- identifying trees and how to select the wood for your staves and handles. Sure, some of the species are found in Great Britain and not the U.S.A., but he tells you what characteristics to look for in a species that would be desirable for making a cane. The pictures are beautiful and the text interesting and clearly written so as to make his directions easily understood.

A collection of interesting essays (and representations of her works) on the artist and her life give the reader good, broad and varied sense about who Mary Cassatt was and how important she was in helping America to discover impressionism. MC is an artist that merits to be better recognized and this book serves a good purpose. - Yet for people that have already studied MC and want to learn more on detailed aspects of her art, this book will probably not be sufficient - Griselda Pollock has written a book i found very useful called 'mary cassatt painter of modern women' which has some well-founded arguments about her works and intentions and is very interesting and more original than this collection of well presented and nevertheless good essays.

The editor, Andrew Ross, describes this book as "an expanded edition" of a special issue of the journal "Social Text". Potential readers should be warned however that it is also an expurgated edition, from which Alan Sokal's celebrated parody of of recent socio-cultural jargon has been suppressed. One understands Professor Ross's chagrin at the cruel and unusual joke that Professor Sokal practised on him. However, the unadvertised deletion of Sokal's contribution is a hoax on the buyers of "Science Wars" who naturally expect to find in it the one item of the original publication that has received worldwide attention.

The subsequent reviewer found the current tome missing in scholarship, merely by not having reprinted Sokal's piece from the social text issue of the same name (science wars). If one cared to read through the book, however, one would notice a number of quite specific reasons for this: among these that the book is meant as a counter argument to Sokal, Levitt & Gross's readings of their fave foe: pomos and other dangerous 'leftists' (what does this mean?). It is no secret that these authors are fired by a profound hostility and unwillingness to engage with the material with which they are dealing. This has already been shown ad nauseam in the litterature (see for instance Callon's review in social studies of science). Nevertheless this book stands as a nice response to some of the worst nonsense that has come out of the sokal/gross tradition. Specifically one should not miss Hart's devastating analysis of Gross et al's 'scientific neutrality' and their analytical abilities in Higher Superstition. Other pieces such as Mike Lynch's are good too; some however, are merely perpetuating the current stand off in a nasty 'war' (among these both of Ross's pieces). So is this review, I presume. That said, I should stop. Read both sides before you judge, you might get to know a good bit about rhetorical wars from the putatively neutral and objective scientists (sokal, gross, koertge etc).

This collection is a travesty indeed. Great poems no doubt, but abysmally read. Furthermore they should have put all the introductions together separate and apart from the poems. It's nice to hear intros the first time around. But who wants to hear the intros everytime you listen to the poems? Sometimes I want to hear just a stream of poetry without any interuptions and this format makes that impossible. It's incredible that such a great concept could be so terribly executed.

I could not get this back to the store for a refund quickly enough. While the poem selection is great and the poem introductions are narrated well, the choice to use "modern poets" as the readers made this compilation utterly unlistenable. The only one that I found acceptable was Anthony Hect--the others were notably bad. In particular, I found Jorie Graham's "readings" to be abysmal. She reads each poem as if it were simply a string of unconnected words, giving equal stress to each, with halting pauses between them, never breaking out of a drowsy monotone. Other readers were not much better.

There are three major flaws in the readings:

1) The readers are no better than the average untrained person, and often much worse. (You've just got to hear them for yourself to appreciate how bad they are.)

2) Successive poems by the same poet are read by different "readers." It's jarring to hear 3 or 4 poems from Poet X, each in a wildly different voice.

3) No regard is given to matching the sex of the poet and reader. In general, it is really annoying to hear your favorite poet read by the wrong sex. In particular, making this mistake on "gender specific" poems (like having a woman read Poe's "Annabel Lee") is unforgivable.

Why is this all so upsetting? Because it is practically impossible to find poetry collections on CD, making this a serious waste of limited resources. If you are looking for a good collection on CD, buy "81 Famous Poems CD" by Audio Partners (ISBN 0-945353-82-0). It's a good collection on two CDs and is read by professionals: Alexander Scourby, Bramwell Fletcher, and Nancy Wickwire. In the meantime, we can only hope that the producers of this collection will eventually come to their senses and re-record the poems with the services of trained professionals.

If you are prepping for the GRE in literature or are trying to gain a basic understanding of literary periods and poets, this audio-collection is a must. It features a brief introduction about each poet's life. It also includes a brief introduction about the theme of each poem. The fact that you have to listen to these introductions before listening to the poem inculcate the poem and aids retention. If literature has turned into a cumbersome and overwhelming task, this collection will not only provide you with a sense of direction but will also make literature far more pleasurable.