Many people are depressed at tax time - April is the cruelest month and all that. But the really depressed might like to pick up a copy of an award winning book - “Better Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence,” by David Benatar (Clarendon Press). Of course it did not even win the award - it was merely a finalist in the competition -
“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” was named the winner Friday of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for oddest book title.
The book, written by Buffalo, N.Y.-based artist Julian Montague and published by Harry N. Abrams, offers a mock-scientific taxonomy of the varieties of lost shopping carts, from the simply discarded to the elaborately vandalized.
“Then there’s plow crush - where a cart gets crushed by a snow plow - and train crush,” Montague said.
“Stray Shopping Carts” received one-third of the more than 5,500 votes cast by members of the public on the Web site of trade magazine The Bookseller.
Runner-up was “Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan,” by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom).
As for the other finalists, there was “How Green Were the Nazis?” - Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (Ohio University Press) This is a study of the environmental policies of the Third Reich, and one supposes some sort of graduate thesis that got a bit out of hand.
It hard to know what to make of “Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans” - Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters). Perhaps this is a labor of love, or these three in central England are quite mad.
You have to love “Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium” (Kluwer). It just sounds funny, but then, perhaps useful things were said there. Much can be learned from seaweed - but that’s juts a guess.
Still, David Benatar, with “Better Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence,” should seek professional help. Or else he’s very realistic about life.
On the other hand, the real pip of a story along these lines also comes from the UK - from Chatham, not from Coventry with its fanciful ice cream trucks -
Literary purists may quake at the prospect of a Charles Dickens theme park complete with a Great Expectations boat ride and Ye Olde Curiosity Gift Shop.
But Dickens World, a 62 million pound complex built in the naval dockyard where his father once worked as a clerk, is confidently predicting 300,000 visitors a year to this new attraction dedicated to the Victorian author.
“We are not Disneyfying Dickens,” insists manager Ross Hutchins as he dons hard hat and fluorescent jacket to tour the site, a hive of activity as the Fagin’s den playground and Newgate Prison’s grimy walls are given their finishing touches.
“If Dickens was alive today, he would probably have built the place himself,” Hutchins said of the theme park in Chatham, once a big unemployment blackspot after the dockyards closed in the 1980s but now a major regeneration target.
“In fact, if Dickens was alive today, he would probably have been working for television as a scriptwriter. He was very much a populist,” he said of the author of classic tales like “Oliver Twist”.
This may work -
There was certainly no shortage of job applicants with 950 people chasing up to 60 jobs in the theme park.
Hutchins said: “One man was so mad about Dickens that he applied for the job despite living on the west coast of America near Seattle. I did e-mail him back and said don’t you think 4,800 miles might be a bit of a long commute for you?”
Indeed, that’s a long commute, by why stay out here on the West Coast? The news from Stockton was just discouraging -
Local diners with adventurous palates have less than two months to try rattlesnake, alligator and other exotic meats.
The restaurant Taboo by the Delta is closing its doors June 1 when its owner retires after 10 years in business.
Along with gators and rattlesnake, Taboo served shark, frog legs and turtle.
The name of the restaurant reflects the hidden allure of “things that are forbidden. Things that would hurt you,” owner Jesse “Boo” Burkett said. “People just buy into it.”
Burkett said he stopped serving kangaroo and black bear in 2004 after the California Department of Fish and Game told him it was illegal.
Ah well, best to retreat to Dickens World - all the current fun is gone. David Benatar may have been onto something. But then, one can always look forward to the Nineteenth International Seaweed Symposium.
