Finding the humor in life is a skill honed and presented by Shirley Nicholson in "Thoughts While Waiting in the Doctor's Office." In this collection of thirty-six essays and memoirs, Nicholson entertains by capturing the funny events in her life and through her observations. From puberty to dating, from marriage to honeymoons, from housework to pets, Nicholson writes about these events with warmth. She pokes fun of her tooth fairy stint, her klutziness, and her parenting skills. In "I Was a Teenage Car Thief ," she tells the story of inadvertently becoming a car thief when a salesman at her father's store gave her his car keys and permission to drive the car. She retrieved the vehicle from the location where she thought the salesman said he parked his car, drove it around town, and later returned it to the store's back lot. When the salesman left for the day, he returned and announced that the car parked in the back lot wasn't his. Without realizing it, Nicholson had stolen a car. Laugh along with "Thoughts While Waiting in the Doctor's Office" as Nicholson reveals the day-to-day wit in her comic strip of life.

It was the pathetic mews of a hungry mother cat, scrounging in a dumpster to feed her kittens that first caught Bob and Kathy Rude's attention. They found the hungry cat and several more hungry felines while helping out at the family restaurant one summer. The chance meeting between the hungry strays and two government computer programmers led to the creation of Rude Ranch Animal Rescue, one of the United States' hardest working No-Kill Animal Sanctuaries. Read on to meet these original Rude Cats and find what can go right and wrong when you try to help a few stray animals and inadvertently start an animal sanctuary.

The Burma-Shave craze reached its zenith during the 1950s, with more than 7,000 signs posted across the United States.

To market Burma-Shave, Allen Odell, an advertising wordsmith, devised the concept of sequential signs to sell his shaving cream. Typically, six signs were erected, with each of the first five containing a line of verse, and the sixth trumpeting the brand name.

Burma-Shave signs appeared in every state except Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. The creative people at Burma-Shave, as well as customers who sent in jingles of their own, ultimately created more than 600 of the rhymes.

In the world of advertising, Burma-Shave stood as unique, creating signs that became a part of the popular culture.

Although the Burma-Shave company is no more, these fun little rhymes hold great nostalgic value for those of us who fondly remember them from our Sunday drives.

AK-47 in a Wild Why World is a collection of essays on political and socio-economic condition of the Modern Africa, humour and poetry with a nationalistic touch. The approach, very blunt and sometimes acerbic. The book argues about an unknown fear trapped in the heart of every black African with a vicious grip on 3 out of every 5; the thought of a life wasted under economic hardship, a scary and degenerating environmental nightmare, the scare from an imaginary superior powers chained in a grander fear of losing political and vain physical relevance, the fear of a hell, a hell of poverty and misery influenced by ignorance, greed and crass illiteracy. According to the author, to run away from this fear, a great conflict ensued, a conflict of the soul and self in the midst of a society gone wild with itself. In the madness of this self induced conflict emerges a great run that has set every black African on a race out of motherland to cold places of comfort - A spider web comfort. The book states categorically that unless the black African sit down and address the myriads of problems plaguing the entire continent, and build a positive cultural and economic system the great Africa will spiral into further darkness. The idea of humour laced into this frank discussion according to the author is only to remind us that we are living in a world that is getting hostile every minute of the day, unintelligent arguments, misunderstandings, strife and things that are insane to ever imagine we could do to each other. Humour is that idea that reminds us that all the struggles leads nowhere but more struggles and stress. The only way to prove that vanity of life is to find time to share some joy.

What happens when you take genuine Facebook quotes, gather them together, and try to connect them? You get a heated confrontation between rival time-travelers. You get the untold romance of chess-champion computer Deep Blue. You get a secret society of comedians bent on world domination, not to mention vital, brutally untrue information about international politics, artificial sweetener, cyborgs, the lifestyle of the modern geek, the meaning of your dreams, and other issues of equally tremendous importance. The Jumping-Off Point weaves from one quote to another, generating a picture of a world you never knew existed...because it doesn't.

"Wriggly Rex" is the funniest Senate candidate who ever battled a strait-laced young staffer, a bare-knuckled opponent, and Old Beelzebub-all at once: an alcoholic lecher or a lecherous alcoholic, depending on his company and the time of day.

Idealistic young aide Ernst Funck thinks that electing a conservative is a dream job. But nothing could have prepared him for Rex's string of embarrassing disasters.

When Rex holds a drunken press conference to roast his supporters and the press, Ernst realizes that he can't win the election without controlling Rex.

Buck Cheatem, the oil millionaire who funded Rex's campaign, wants his money back if Rex loses. Freddy Farnarkler, the conservative think tanker, wants a deeper relationship. The Rat Squad makes an evil appearance.

Bunny, the office manager, is an equal-opportunity destroyer-her wheelchair a battle chariot. Porky, the campaign strategist, makes Ernst a rival. Rex's wife Blanche and girlfriend Angel both work in the campaign, as if Ernst needed another problem.

Will Ernst pull out a win in spite of Rex? Or will he have to find that witness protection program for losing campaign staffers? Their final confrontation provides the answer.

Dorothy Parker holds a place in history as one of New York's most beloved writers. Now, for the first time in nearly a century, the public is invited to enjoy Mrs. Parker's sharp wit and biting commentary on the Jazz Age hits and flops in this first-ever published collection of her groundbreaking Broadway reviews.Starting when she was twenty-four at Vanity Fair as New York's only female theatre critic, Mrs. Parker reviewed some of the biggest names of the era: the Barrymores, George M. Cohan, W.C. Fields, Helen Hayes, Al Jolson, Eugene O'Neil, Will Rogers, and the Ziegfeld Follies. Her words of praise--and contempt--for the dramas, comedies, musicals, and revues are just as fresh and funny today as they were in the age of speakeasies and bathtub gin. Annotated with a notes section by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society, the volume shares Parker's outspoken opinions of a great era of live theatre in America, from a time before radio, talking pictures, and television decimated attendance. Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918-1923 provides a fascinating glimpse of Broadway in its Golden Era and literary life in New York through the eyes of a renowned theatre critic.

Princeton and Rutgers played the first game, in 1869. But it was at Yale where football evolved and no institution has a more meaty history of the sport. Yale was the first college to record 800 victories, that milestone reached in the year 2000. Sixty-six years before, a more significant triumph came unexpectedly to the Bulldogs on Princeton's field and from that contest emerged "Yale's Ironmen."

They were supposed to lose by at least three touchdowns to an undefeated opponent being touted as a Rose Bowl candidate. The eleven Yale starters played all 60 minutes, an uncommon feat never duplicated thereafter in major college football.

The game was played against the background of the Depression. Yet Princeton's Palmer Stadium was full that warm November afternoon for the first time in six years. 'I guess people wanted to get their minds off their troubles," said the Yale quarterback, Jerry Roscoe, who threw the winning touchdown pass to Larry Kelley, the latter the first winner of the Heisman Trophy.

How did this game, this success, affect the lives of those eleven men of iron? Who were they? What happened, as World War II descended and snared them?

Real life is the birthplace of the best stories. The tales related in Lines From the Times are drawn from real life. Lacking the length of a short story, these tales are pithy reflections on life as it is encountered by the author. From a little girl's conversation on a park bench, a grown man flying a kite in the church yard, a daughter's attempts to rein in an indulgent grandfather, a homeless man or a drug-influenced woman seeking direction, an adventure getting children off to school, strangers passed along life's journey, all combine to entertain and delight. These are not sermons by any means, but hey are parables of life where one finds a lesson taught, a prejudice challenged or a value uplifted. Lines From the Times is a mirror held up to our age reflecting our beauty and our blemishes. There's love in these pages; there's sadness for love not shown. There's acceptance here; there's rejection. We can find ourselves tucked inside the stories, ourselves at our best and at our worse.

Behind a thin veneer of respectability, life in a small English village is not all it may seem. Through the eyes of Chumleigh the cat, the rural goings on are recorded in this funny and poignant diary, with an element of adult humour. From a cats perspective, Chumleigh tells all about life in his house and the antics of his neighbours. From domestic disharmony to a cannabis farm in next doors garden shed, he sees it all and shares it all in his diary. This is a cat who enjoys the finer elements of feline existence like tuna, sleeping in the warm and cat treats. But life doesnt always pan out the way he would like. Supported by a rich cast of locals, as odd and individualistic as still found in many small villages, Chumleigh charts a year in his life. Traumatic visits to the vet, turf wars with the local ginger tom and a desire to eliminate a neighbours yappy dog are all set down with great humour and insight. If youve ever lived in a village or owned a cat, this will make you laugh. If youve never lived in a village and never owned a cat, this will be a wonderful insight into what you have been missing. The Secret Diary of Chumleigh the Cat is a year in the life of a cat who never ceases to be amazed at just what goes on around him!

The first of its kind to explore the Nobel Prize experience

"Dad, some guy is calling from Sweden." It was 2:30am on October 13th, 1998, the youngest son in the Laughlin house had answered the phone. His dad had just become a recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics.

Frantic and funny events of the next two months are chronicled as the Laughlin's academic household morphs into a madcap staging area for the family and thirty guests who will be in attendance during Nobel week. From tickets to Stockholm to clothing measurements, Nobel lecture preparations, attach assistance and a quick trip to the White House for a formal reception with President and Mrs. Clinton, readers will laugh out loud while gasping in awe.

The glorious Nobel ceremony and elaborate banquet is held each winter with a viewing audience of tens of millions. An intimate dinner with King Gustaf in his royal palace follows the Nobel evening in which Anita Laughlin finds herself the King's dinner partner for what becomes an evening of hilarious surprises, and yes, reindeer.

This book is laced with cartoons drawn by Bob Laughlin that evoke collective feelings of surprise and bewilderment as he and his wife ascend the steep learning curve of Swedish protocol together.

Dr. Kuhn has written a book about her life and travels as a foreign language teacher. In essence, it is a book of memories, autobiographical in nature. She describes many of the 45 trips in detail, but she also groups many of the trips togeher. In 1973 when she began taking students to Europe, she had a good background of working with students and knowing how they think and act. (or so she thought) There is an interesting list of things to take, where to put the items, where they can be bought and the prices of the items. There is also a list of personal rules and regulations that were required of all students. They were called Mademoiselle's Rules or Mlle's Rules. Then there is a comprehensive list of Trip Procedures, giving all the do's and don't's of traveling. Students were allowed to "sample" beer and alcohol as long as their parents had signed a permission slip, but students will always try to outthink the teacher and circumvent the procedures. Dr. Kuhn describes many of the things that went wrong on both student trips and adult trips, along with things that didn't seem funny at the time, but in retrospect seem humorous today.