Oil Taxation Acts, 1991

Book Description

More zany and exciting adventures of Narue: cute schoolgirl, good student...super-powered android-fighting alien!

Book Description

From the creators of the highly popular website thesmokinggun.coma wildly entertaining collection of previously unpublished documents (court transcripts, FBI files, morgue and police reports, etc.) that hilariously illuminate some of the most important, scandalous, or bizarre news stories of recent years.

Customer Reviews:

Tedium and Boredom: Now Available in Handy Book Form!.......2002-04-22

In case [URL} is not sufficient, you can now get an additional dose in convenient paperback! The premise is enticing enough: secret, surprising and salacious documents - a veritable treasure chest of dirt, sleaze, and slime! Who could resist the temptation? But, if the reviews of other readers are the basis, I may be alone in finding "The Smoking Gun" boring and tedious. About as compelling, I guess, as reading unedited police reports and law suits - which is exactly what it is. I guess when it comes right down to it, I really don't find a letter from Sean "Puffy" Combs' doctor - as an excuse for a canceled tour - all that interesting. The contract Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman require their household help sign? Wow - how have I managed to live without knowing the extent of liabilities associated with release of Cruise/Kidman personal information, in detail by the type of media deployed! And the details of loser Parker Stevenson's alimony from estranged wife Kirstie Alley, insuring Stevenson continuance of their lavish life style? ("FAO Schwartz would keep a staff and the store open for two hours exclusively for Kirstie and me. We spared no expense, as we enjoyed our "private" shopping spree. Our FAO Schwartz jaunts would cost us approximately $15,000.") Um, fascinating, I guess?

I'll concede - the book has it moments. The last chapter, "Patently Absurd" includes some gems like the "human gas filter pad for wearing in the underwear" and a method for bar coding humans. And the "strap secured condom". Glad to see the US patent attorneys hard at work.

On balance, I should have realized that we're already overexposed to the excesses and absurdities of life in America - especially where celebrities are involved. The additional manifestation in raw legal documents, police reports, and court transcripts is simply more than I care about knowing, and frankly is not all that revealing, anyway.

A Gallery of the Weird.......2001-12-17

If there's that one person on your Christmas list for whom it's impossible to buy a gift - say, your conspiracy-theorist, rubber-necking, fascinated-by-the-strange kind of friend - the search for the perfect present may be over. The Smoking Gun, a website dedicated to bringing people actual copies of government documents about celebrities and normal people involved in a variety of strange situations, released a "best-of" book, The Smoking Gun: A Dossier of Secret, Surprising, and Salacious Documents from the Files of the Smoking Gun. Chock-full of all kinds of dirt, human stupidity, and general hilariousness, this is exactly the book for the person who has "everything."

Want to know the details of Marilyn Monroe's autopsy? What about Martha Stewart's attempt to run down a gardener who refused to take her advice? The police report of the first officer on the scene of Kurt Cobain's suicide? President Nixon's background check from when he was thinking of joining the FBI? Tim Allen's sobriety test from 1997? The details of every attempt Dennis Rodman made to force himself on a woman? It's all here, in its original black-and-white glory, ready for your perusal.

Like a train wreck, you just can't tear your eyes away from The Smoking Gun's insane offering of all that makes our species better than the monkeys - or so we think, anyway. It's amazing, sick, and fascinating all at the same time. And, you've got the stocking stuffer for the person who has it all - because, chances are, they don't have Mike Tyson's arrest report. Just don't stay up all night reading it yourself.

Funny as all hell!.......2001-10-13

This book is pretty dam slick. I liked it mostly because I have been a fan of the website for a few years and its pretty good to have the material right in front of you.

Can you handle the truth?.......2001-10-09

Bastone, Green & Glauber's book enters the leagues of Ripley's Believe It or Not, Ricky Jay's examination of con artists and circus folks, and Woodword & Bernstein's investigation into Watergate. In other words, it's fun, outrageous and incredibly revealing. Meticulously researched and entertainingly presented, the team paints a decidedly different picture of what we know and what we think we know. Fans of the web site will not be disappointed with what they find here; a must for muckrakers, malcontents and truth seekers.

outrageous!.......2001-10-04

Sorry to gush but I absolutely loved this book. The smoking gun gives you the inside skinny on all sorts of things you didn't even know you wanted to know about. It's a book that is made up of documents: arrest reports on the famous, infamous and simply bizarre, contracts, memos, all sorts of stuff. I laughed out loud and my jaw dropped several times. A very fun read.

Smoking Gun: A Dossier Of Secret, Surprising, And Salacious Documents Form The Files Of The Smokinggun.com

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Smoking Gun: A Dossier Of Secret, Surprising, And Salacious Documents Form The Files Of The Smokinggun.com
William Bastone , and Barbara Glauber
Manufacturer: Diane Pub Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Humor | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0756773229

The Smoking Gun: A Dossier of Secret, Surprising, and Salacious Documents

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The Smoking Gun: A Dossier of Secret, Surprising, and Salacious Documents
Barbara Glauber, William Bastone Daniel Green
Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OUDJRW

Book Description

This encyclopedia includes every actor and actress who had a regular role in a television western from 1949 through 1959. The entries cite biographical and family details, accounts of how the player first broke into show business, and details of roles played, as well as opinions from the actors and their contemporaries. A full accounting of film, serial, and television credits is also included. The appendix lists 84 television westerns, with dates, show times, themes, and stars.

Book Description

Reading Pop collects together key essays on the interpretation of pop songs previously published in the journal Popular Music. In sixteen varied studies by many of the best-known scholars, all the most influential approaches are represented. A newly written introduction by leading pop academic Richard Middleton puts them into context and outlines the main debates. A select bibliography of other writings on pop music analysis adds to the usefulness of the book, which will become a central text in popular music studies.

Customer Reviews:

More people should (try to) read this book........2005-12-18

This is one of several books I've read on music analysis. What separates this one from the others is the focus on pop music. It provides a solid foundation for how to analyze a song, not just review it from the traditional "I liked it / I didn't like it" perspective.

Using many familiar songwriters, and comparing works against other music genres, helps to drive home the author's points. The only criticizm I'll make is that I agree with the other reviewer - this book is heavy on academic verbosity. I could see this scaring away some potential readers.

Academia Goes Pop.......2002-09-07

This volume is an uneven affair but a valuable contribution to the oft-neglected examination of popular music. While many academicians lament the dwindling attention and support given to cultured music-- i.e. classical, and to some extent to jazz-- these same musicologists and ethnomusicologists are missing the vitality of the current world. Music has genuinely become a soundtrack to our lives, bursting forth from all kinds of sources and in so many venues. Try conducting daily life in markets, stores, restaurants, cafes, even streets without being exposed to contemporary pop music. The authors of the pieces in "Reading Pop" have in fact realized the ubiquity of pop music and address its role in modern life.

There are interesting data contained in many of these essays. The many elements that make some pop music memorable are explored. This includes the music and/or lyrics of such artists as Randy Newman, Prince, James Brown, Peter Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. Theories about what is important in contemporary popular music are put forth; the ideas are valuable. There is an informative and well-written chapter about torch singers by John Moore. Also included is a "Method Of Analysis" chapter by Philip Tagg. It looks at musicology and compares modes of folk, pop and art music transmission. Tagg provides a checklist of features that might be analyzed in pop music, and gives examples of how these features might be described in rich and meaningful ways. Tagg unfortunately falls prey to his own jargon.

Actually, most of the book suffers from a particularly virulent case of "academ-ese." Esoteric jargon from the ivory tower suffuses the prolix writing. The sentences are structured in knotted prose, running on and on in complex clauses and sub-clauses that are too often difficult to disentangle. The obnoxious reliance on trendy phrases and supposedly clever writing devices-- heavy uses of slash marks and words with some syllables parenthesized: these are pretentions that reflect poor style and bad habits.

Four sentences illustrate this problem, sentences from the editor's own introduction to the book: "Interestingly, if any emergent analytic paradigm may be represented as currently possessing the potential for dominance, it is, in my view, 'dialogics.' Congruent with theories of discourse, mediation, and (post)modern ethnography, its recent prominence is nevertheless associated with a more specific influence, that of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's materialist seminology posits-- against structural formalisms and sociological and economic reductionisms alike-- that meaning is always both socially and historically situated, and generically specific. Heteroglot networks of discursive conventions resulting from never-ending, historically contingent exchanges create a kind of giant intertextuality, operating both between utterances, texts, styles, genres, and social groups, and within individual examples of each."

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on December 1, 2001. The length of the article is 1369 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. (Book Reviews).
Author: Lawrence A. Wayte
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2001
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: 58 Issue: 2 Page: 367(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music

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Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music
Richard Middleton
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OLI2EG

Book Description

Nearly 300 mathematical brain-teasers from the fields of arithmetic, algebra, plane and solid geometry, trigonometry, number theory, and general recreational mathematics. From simple to complex; all challenge the reader to devise solutions more elegant than the ones provided. Offers hours of brain-bending amusement. 270 problems. 121 illustrations. Solutions. List of Sources.

Customer Reviews:

Not all such quickies.......2005-07-04

Many of these problems are indeed quite elegant, but way too many (generally the geometric ones) require the use of theorems that even many math majors may not know -- this is more for the "contest math" genius in high school more than necesasrily a math major, and even they may not know the theorems required.

And not all of these problems are necessarily "quickies". For instance, one asks multiplcation of a very large number by 125 -- the quickie solution is to multiply by 1000 and divide by 8, but this is not even so "quick".

Problems with easy, quick solutions if you approach it right.......2000-07-11

The best problems conform to the following pattern:

1) Easy to state and understand.
2) Appear difficult to solve and in fact are hard to solve if the approach is wrong.
3) Easy to solve if the proper techniques are applied.

All 270 problems in this collection satisfy these criteria. Taken from the `Quickies' column in Mathematics Magazine, these are excellent problems that will tax you if you approach them from the wrong direction. However, once stated, the solution is obvious, and often can be understood by someone with only an advanced high school mathematics background. These problems or their logical variants, form a pool of problems from which you can find many to serve as either challenge problems or even slightly offbeat examination problems. My favorite is the following:

Ten letters are placed in ten pre-addressed envelopes at random. What is the probability that exactly nine letters were placed in the proper envelope?

The answer is zero, since if nine are placed in the correct envelope the tenth must have been as well.

I first read this book about ten years ago and was impressed with the brevity, elegance and at times obvious nature of the solutions. When reading it again in preparation for this review, those emotions were revisited.

Book Description

The Elements of Java Style, written by renowned author Scott Ambler, Alan Vermeulen, and a team of programmers from Rogue Wave Software, is directed at anyone who writes Java code. Many books explain the syntax and basic use of Java; however, this essential guide explains not only what you can do with the syntax, but what you ought to do. Just as Strunk and White's The Elements of Style provides rules of usage for the English language, this text furnishes a set of rules for Java practitioners. While illustrating these rules with parallel examples of correct and incorrect usage, the authors offer a collection of standards, conventions, and guidelines for writing solid Java code that will be easy to understand, maintain, and enhance. Java developers and programmers who read this book will write better Java code, and become more productive as well. Indeed, anyone who writes Java code or plans to learn how to write Java code should have this book next to his/her computer.

Customer Reviews:

Common Since is NOT Enough.......2007-08-22

As stated in the previous review this "pamphlet sized" book is invaluable to programs working in any sized group. Not only do you need programming style rules, these are pre-defined for you, so there is no time wasted with your team trying to decide on one. I am a project manager over a several groups of computer and software engineers, and after hearing more style arguments than I care to remember this book is now law at our company, it is also followed by our c/c++ programmers in a fashion of sorts... style is important, it does need guidelines, and if you dont follow them you may not have a job for very long... its common since!!!!

Useful short guide to formatting.......2007-01-13

Other reviews here that attack this book for not being a good design guide are missing the point. This book is a set of practices to make your code easier to read and work better in groups. Each chapter is about some kind of convention (formatting conventions, documentation conventions, etc.). You're not going to learn to program with this guide; you're going to learn to make your programs more usable in a group environment. Yes, it is a pamphlet-sized book: that's the point.

I purchased a copy for every developer in the company.......2006-09-09

Clear, consise and short enough that developers will actually take the time to read, and filled with enough common sense that very few disagreements come from the developers about this.
We use this book as the basis for our corporate coding standards for our on-shore, off-shore and near-shore. The standards page on our wiki is very short and contains only the few places where we've chosen to deviate from the standards in the book.
If you've ever tried to have a team develop standards from scratch, you know what a painful process that could be. This book got the whole team (in multiple countries) on the same page very quickly and let us focus our time on getting down to the business of writing software.

Good code standard resource to start with.......2005-10-26

Several years have passed since this book was first published. Many things have changed in the Java world since then.

However, it looks like development at a corporate level of a software product without adherence to some sort of development and code standards is disappearing. This book contains a very good set of rules and code standards one can start with.

Not that it is important to follow exactly some specific already existing guideline but it is rather vital to have one and keep going with this set of standards. The book suggests a wide range of various well described code standards so that a Development team might build their own set of rules using the book as an example.

I would like to recommend any Development team to have this small but helpful book in their library.

Not enough.......2004-07-30

I'm very disappointed at the amount content in this Book. Sun posted a Java style guide that was essentially the equivalent, but free. Equivalent in terms of topics covered while there were some noticable difference such as variable naming.

One of the redeming qualities of the book though is that it can serve as a coding standard thus saving one from tidious chore of deciding on your own standards. In the end does it really make that much of a difference as long as everyone on your team is following the same standard?

Best part of the book is the title.

The Elements of Java Style Pack of 10 (SIGS Reference Library)

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The Elements of Java Style Pack of 10 (SIGS Reference Library)
Allan Vermeulen , Scott W. Ambler , Greg Bumgardner , Eldon Metz , Trevor Misfeldt , and Jim Shur
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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