There's no Toilet Paper by Doug Lansky, ed.

So, I picked this one up thinking it was going to be some funny travel stories, like we all have, and was disappointed to find that it was a series of stories by professional humorists, like Dave Barry, and sarcastic travel writers, like Bill Bryson, and not merely humorous anecdotes regarding travel mishaps and misunderstandings. "Too over the top".

A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean by Gary Buslik

When Rick Steves speaks or writes about travel, you can be fairly certain that he demonstrates a high level of respect and love for the countries and cultures that he visits. On the contrary, Buslik seems to hold most of the places he visits and the people he meets in contempt. Granted, he's not only sarcastic about foreigners in his writing - he says nasty things about his wife and friends, as well.

I know that the purpose is supposed to be comedy, so one can forgive him some poetic license, but it wears thin pretty rapidly for me, and I gave up on it about halfway through. There's plenty of sarcasm going on in my own head some days, I don't need to increase the traffic.

How to Live on Mars by Robert Zubrin

 I've read a few books written by expats, telling others how to live successfully in a foreign land, so I can be pretty sure that it's true that this is the most useless book for expats I've ever seen. Not because it contains inaccurate information. No, quite the contrary. It's perfectly accurate, but it's Mars! You can try to be a stranger in a strange land if you like, but it will be a very long time before you can book passage there.

Like most attempts at humor, I think Zubrin finds it difficult to maintain the level of levity past the few chapters, and the book devolves into a much more serious discussion of how to obtain oxygen, water and other resources from the Martian environment, the most versatile type of transportation, habitat, and power supply, and other survival issues.

He draws on a wealth of knowledge which I believe he has obtained as a scientist working for NASA, and pokes a bit of sarcastic fun at bureaucracies along the way. I'll probably pick up one of his more serious works about space faring and planet settling one of these days before the Martian cruise lines start running.

Eat the Rich by P.J. O'Rourke

 I don't read enough of O'Rourke. Those books of his which I have read, however, I have enjoyed, and Eat the Rich is no letdown, either. O'Rourke takes us on a journalistic journey through the wilds of Wall Street, Albania, Sweden, Russia, Tanzania, Cuba, Hong Kong and Shanghai, touring the economic landscape in his understated humorous way.

His conclusion, after all his exploration, seems to be that the worst people to put in charge of an economy...are economists. The best thing a government can do for an economy is just to get the heck out of the way, it appears.

Interesting factoids from around the globe:

Though we all think that the stock market is either all in a bear cycle or all in a bull cycle, with shares changing hands everywhere, "There are 207 billion shares registered on the Ne York Stock Exchange. In an absolute buying and selling frenzy, less than 0.6 percent of those shares changed hands. Investment usually stays invested."

In O'Rourke's dry humor "...the study of economics is divided into two fields, microeconomics and macroeconomics. Micro is the study of individual economic behavior, and macro is the study of how economies behave as a whole. That is, microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally."

An interesting method for teaching economics was related by nineteenth century expert Alfred Marshall,

"(1) User mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of enquiry. (2) Keep to them until you have done. (3) Translate into English (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics."

A treatise on the nature of money,

"Anything that's used to measure value, if it has value itself, is commodity money. Societies that didn't have fifty-dollar bills picked one or two commodities as proto-simoleons. The Aztecs used cocoa beans for money, North Africans used salt (hence salary), medieval Norsemen used butter and dried cod, and heir ATM machines were a mess."

On dining in a Russian restaurant,

"The next night I went to Uncle Gillie's, which had California cuisine in perfection. My chicken had not only been allowed to range free, it had been given aroma therapy and stress counseling."

and Russian business practices,

"Russia does not yet have an effective system of civil law. The only way to enforce a contract is, as it were, with a contract - and plenty of enforcers. What would be litigiousness in New York is a hail of bullets in Moscow. Instead of a society infested with lawyers, they have a society infested with hit men. Which is worse, of course, is a matter of opinion."

The money quote, wherein according to Marx's theory of Surplus Value, anytime you hire someone, you are exploiting him.

"The terrific corruption that now exists in Russia was not caused by the collapse of Marxism-Leninism. It was caused by Marx and Lenin."

Experts occasionally blame lack of education for Tanzania's woes, but Tanzanians,

"were exposed to science, math, and technology by Muslims, beginning in the eighth century. That's 800 years before anyone who could read or recite multiplication tables arrived in North America. True, Arab traders came for the purposes of stealing slaves and pillaging ivory. But the harbingers of civilization rarely arrived anywhere in order to deliver Girl Scout cookies."

On baboons,

"I wondered if this troop was us four million years ago. If so, the baboons are probably plotting revenge upon thepredators. 'Soon as we evolve, we take the natural habitat and pave its ass.'"

On Hong Kong,

"Laissez-faire isn't Tanzanian administrative sloth or Albanian popular anarchy. Quite a bit of government effort is required to create a system in which government leaves people alone."

All joking aside, O'Rourke's sum total of what is required for a person or a nation to prosper is the following six ingredients:

• Hard work
• Education
• Responsibility
• Property rights
• Rule of law
• Democratic government

A good and entertaining read, though a bit dated, being published in 1998, though my impression is that what we've seen in the last decade and a half is pretty much more of the same from these countries and areas where he traveled.

Azazel by Isaac Asimov

 Most of the stories in Azazel first appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine a few decades ago, and were all collected in this volume for the first time in 1988. I don't know who came up with the idea first, but it dates back to the story of the Monkey's Paw, at least, that one should beware of any wish fulfillment method, especially demons, and even sitcom genies' wish granting can have dubious results.

Asimov's friend, a 'Freddy the Freeloader" sort, George, has somehow or other summoned a very small demon, two centimeters tall, but far larger in the scope of his mischief. Against his better judgement - he has no better nature - George keeps trying to help his acquaintances to be smarter, stronger, wealthier, or more famous, as the demon is restricted from directly benefitting George with his wishes, and George keeps hoping that success will one day rub off on him, at least to the extent of the victims beneficiaries paying for drinks and meals.

The banter between George and Asimov's fictional self is bitingly satirical and quite amusing - I wish I could be so insulting without being crude - and the inevitable collapse of the demon's "improvements" is always quite innovative. I'm not sure whether it was more amusing to wait for these stories of Azazel to appear as long anticipated treats in the monthly magazine, or to gobble them up all at once in one long sitting.

Filled with bits like,

"His ex-mistress sang cantatas at the local church...I thought at the time that her morals didn't quite suit the surroundings, but Morrison said they made allowances for sopranos."

and,

"I am, by nature, a courteous man, so I greeted him with a grunt and a glare, which he accepted in a calm way."

More fun than a barrel of...well, demons.

M*A*S*H Goes to New Orleans by Richard Hooker and William E. Butterworth

It begins with a kidnapping, and gets steadily more amusing and twisted from there. Hawkeye's wife, Mary Pierce, is about to deliver their fourth child, and is understandably not amused by the idea of her husband assisting during the delivery, so she has a chat with the guys from The Swamp. Trapper, Spearchucker and Duke put together a plot to get Hawkeye out of town for the duration, and Mary first drugs him with a doctored hot cocoa, then they bundle him up in a straightjacket and put him on a plain for New Orleans, where the annual meeting of the TA & VD (Tonsil, Adenoid and Vas Deferens) Society is taking place.

By an amusing set of coincidences, the French Quarter hotel which is hosting the TA & VD convention is also hosting a missionary conference, where Hot Lips Houlihan is one of the medical missionaries, and a Knights of Columbus grand gathering where Archbishop Patrick Mulcahy is representing the Vatican, and the President of the TA & VD Society is...Frank Burns. It gets far more convoluted before it's all through.

Great lines,

"Mr Wachauf had gone to meet his Maker as a result of the energy shortage. He had been standing under an electromagnetic lift supervising the loading of a fifteen-ton six-foot square mass of compacted automobiles into a railroad car at the precise moment the Southeastern North Dakota Power Company had been forced to reduce power to its clients."

Strong drink,

"Do you still make them (martinis) by exposing the gin for thirty seconds to the smell of an old vermouth bottle cork?"

Which reminds me where I got my favorite dry martini recipe, after all these years.

There is an amusing paragraph or two about why the manager of the hotel doesn't like to have religious groups stay there. They brown bag their meals and don't spend any money at the bar, and "The cold truth of the matter...is that the black ink comes from the boozers."

Which reminds me of my conversation with the longtime owner of the Three Rivers Resort. She told me that the original owners were a family of home-schoolers who couldn't stand all the partying people who came there to raft the river, so they sold it to..a Mormon family who also had little tolerance for the hard-drinking party animals who sold it to her and her husband, a pair of retired California school teachers, "We sell them all the beer, wine and cigarettes they want."

But I digress.

Hooker and Butterworth introduce us to the first of the "new" characters in the M*A*S*H universe, "Horsey" de la Cheveaux, a Cajun oil multimillionaire whose family's land grant in Bayou Perdu dates back to the time of Louis XIV, and who was patched back together at the 4077th by Hackeye and Trapper, back in the day.

This book actually begins a pattern which continues through the rest of the series, as various characters, for diverse reasons, end up gathering unwittingly in a series of cities, worldwide. As they say, it's all about the journey, not necessarily the destination.

M*A*S*H Goes to Maine by Richard Hooker

 This is the original sequel to M*A*S*H, written by Richard Hooker, before William E. Butterworth went crazy on the series and created a dozen or so "zany" adventures starring our favorite characters. The story picks up a year or so after Hawkeye has returned to Crabapple Cove and he is working at the VA hospital in Spruce Harbor, Maine for a bunch of fools and other bureaucratic types. He decides he needs to strike out on his own, but first must pass his thoracic surgical boards, so he moves to the big city just long enough to study and master heart and lung operations, then returns and opens up his own hospital and clinic, where he convinces Duke and Trapper and Spearchucker to join him in putting this tiny town on the medical map.

The humorous side of the book deals with broad sketches of the native Maine characters, and giving the medical mal-practitioners their long overdue comeuppance, but there is a more serious side explored when Hooker tells several tales of Hawkeye's surgical adventures, which are probably taken from Hooker's own experiences as a doctor.

Another good, quick read, which may make you crack a smile, let loose a chuckle, or wipe away a tear.

M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker

 Over the years, aside from the core collection of science fiction and fantasy, my library has contained a number of oddball comedic series, such as the Flashman novels, by Fraser, the Doonesbury comic strip collections, and the M*A*S*H collection, by Richard Hooker. I found myself in the mood for some light summer fare and decided to re-read them, which I seem to do about once a decade. Hooker wrote three novels by himself, of which this is the first, and then "co-wrote" a number of others with William E. Butterworth. Of course, after the first novel was published in 1968, there was a famous movie based upon it in 1970, and then a long-running TV series which ran for over a decade, so most of the characters and setting are well known to people of a certain age.

The story begins with the arrival of two new doctors, Hawkeye and Duke,  at the M*A*S*H 4077th, and, as one might not guess from the way things went in the TV series, ends with their departure from Korea and return to the States. Hawkeye is from Maine, while Duke is from Georgia, but they both suffer from a bit of contempt for the regular Army and its officers, aside from the CO of the "double natural", Col. Henry Blake, who is probably the only commander in Korea who could put up with the trouble this duo causes, even before the arrival of their partner in crime, Trapper John.

The saving grace of this trio, if they have one, is their utter devotion to saving the lives of the young men who are sent to their surgical unit with horrendous injuries. They also, at heart, seem to be truly decent human beings, as evidenced by their campaign to raise money to send their Korean houseboy, Ho Jon, to the U.S. so he can attend college, and by some pro bono surgeries for non-war wounds. They drink, gamble and womanize in their spare time, which is not greatly appreciated by their arch enemies, Frank Burns and Hot Lips Houlihan.

You can probably still find copies of this novel at the antiquarian booksellers or possibly even your local library, just for a cool read in the dog days of summer. The book is missing most of the political commentary on war itself that we saw in the last few years of the TV series, which is refreshing.

The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines

 I think that The Stepsister Scheme, and the rest of the Princess Novels are supposed to be something like Fractured Fairy Tales, but for adults. I really wanted to love it, as I had already purchased the second  and third books in the series at a library book sale a while back, and didn't want to feel my money was wasted.

This is a story about what happens after "happily ever after". Our heroine is Daniell (Cinderella), who really is living the fairy tale dream of wedded bliss, just past the honeymoon stage, with Prince Armand, but whose happiness is shattered by an assassination attempt by one of her evil stepsisters, who are of course jealous of her good fortune and feel she has stolen "their" prince.

Helping foil the attempt on her life is Talia (Sleeping Beauty), who found her prince to be not so charming, and Snow (Snow White), who is now pursuing a career as a good witch, not a bad witch, in service of Queen Beatrice, who seems to collect the odd fairy tale princesses.  It turns out that Armand has been kidnapped by the stepsisters and dragged off to the Fairy Kingdom, and the three embark on a quest to find him and bring him back.

Aside from some semi-humorous moments, the book didn't really turn out to be as comedic as I'd dreamed, and none of the three ladies really grabbed my attention as strong heroines, or garnered my sympathies. Only dogged determination got me to finish this one, and the sequels will probably remain on my shelves, ignored and dusty.

Stray Souls by Kate Griffin

 Though I haven't read any of his stuff in ages, I really enjoyed Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories, and that's probably what this novel by Griffin reminds me of the most strongly. A very quirky, and British, sense of humor gets this novel off to an amusing start, when Sharon Li, a novice shaman decides to form a Facebook group called Magicals Anonymous, and holds their first meeting in a community center in London.

Some of the attendees include an OCD vampire with germophobia, a necromancer with a skin condition and a druid with allergies, who couldn't handle the herbs and potions - failed his exams. Grendel the troll loves ethnic cuisine and a banshee named Sally wants to broaden her horizons taking community college courses in modern art. We also have were-pigeons. Sharon's mentor is Sammy the Elbow, a profanity spewing goblin.

It's difficult to sustain humor throughout an entire novel, but Griffin gives it a good try. Along the way, however, she builds an interesting new mythos surrounding and infusing the city of London, where the spirits of the past are often more real than the commuter at your elbow. This isn't your ordinary action-packed urban fantasy novel with a hack and slash tomboy heroine. When Sharon and her friends are called on to dispatch the villains of the story, their approaches are, to say the least, innovative.

Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese

The author was kind enough to provide me with a copy of this book for review. Within a few short pages, I realized I was in for a fun ride. My only hope was that Kroese could keep up the comedic pace throughout.

Christine Temetri is a reporter working for Harry Giddings' flagship publication, The Banner, a religious news magazine. Her assignments are usually covering apocalyptic pronouncements from nutcase cultists, and the novel starts with her attending the scheduled "end of the world" somewhere in the hinterlands of Nevada. When, as we might expect, the end of the world fails to arrive, she heads back to her apartment in Glendale (CA not AZ), where she finds that it has been vandalized and set on fire. The vandal is a fallen angel, and things just go downhill from there.

After getting her breakfast nook carpet replaced with linoleum (by another fallen angel in disguise), which contains a pattern that creates an interplanar portal, she goes in to the office to deliver an ultimatum to her boss about all the pointless assignments he's been giving her. Seeming to concede, he sends her off to Israel, to cover the Olive Branch War, and interview the Israeli general, Isaakson. Just before an errant Syrian missile destroys the tent where the interview is taking place, Isaakson gives her a locked briefcase and tells her to take it to Mercury. When the missile lands, Isaakson is killed, and Christine wakes up in the hospital, with the briefcase nearby. As it turns out, it's one of the four attache cases of the Apocalypse, War.

Mercury turns out to be a fallen, or maybe just AWOL, angel, who really isn't all that excited about seeing the Apocalypse take place on schedule. Together he and Christine must puzzle out the assassination plots against the Antichrist, Karl Grissom, a 37 year old film school dropout who lives in Lodi with his mother, and save the world from immolation.

This book reminds me of Pratchett at his best, and Kroese does, indeed, manage to keep up the wit through most of the novel. If you like your religion straight, no chaser, you're probably going to find the whole thing enormously heretical, but I laughed most of the way through.

Some bits I found amusing:

From a footnote, "People of a 'scientific' bent have been known to ridicule those, like Harry, who believe unlikely notions such as the idea that the Universe was created in six days, and that the first human being was formed by God breathing into a lump of clay. I should be noted that the latest scientific theories entail that (1) all of the matter in the universe was once compressed into an area smaller than the point of a pin, and (2) life came about when a chance collision of molecules accidentally lined up three million nucleic acids in exactly the right order to form a self-replicating protein."

And when Christine is talking to Harry after finding a backwards swastika in ketchup on her kitchen floor,
"'Did you hear what I said?' Christine asked tersely. 'Dyslexic Nazis vandalized my condo.'
'Oh!' exclaimed Harry. 'I thought you said...' He trailed off as he realized that he had most likely misheard her again."

In a "helpful" explanation of multiple planes (dimensions),
"It might be more helpful to think of a plane as a sheet of paper that is rolled up as a cylinder, and then stretched out like a garden hose. And then, ah, tied up with several thousand other hoses, crushed flat again, crumpled up like a tissue, and then had holes punched in it at various places. And then the holes are filled with, oh, say, macaroni."

During a tour of the Infernal Plane,
"'Quite the operation you have here,' observed Christine.
'Nine hundred thousand Corruption Representatives,' said Nybbas proudly. 'The result of an eight-hundred year job retraining program. Most of these CRs were performing unskilled demonic activity only a few centuries ago,' he said, gesturing broadly."

Speaking of Lucifer's rival, Tiamat,
"He's had her doing his grunt work down there for the past two thousand years. Spreading plague, burning witches, breaking up Van Halen..."

And, finally,
"I think I've figured out a way for everyone to live happily ever after."
"Everybody?"
"Well, most almost everybody. And not so much happy as only mildly disgruntled."

Forgive my extensive quoting, but rest assured the whole book is filled with crazy stuff like these. I'm passing this copy on to selected friends to read next.