Lend Your Way To Wealth: Private Lending In Real Estate--Make Big Profits Lending Money for Bridge Loans

Book Description

Virtually every American, regardless of social status, eats fast food. Cartoonist Mark Pett's Lucky Cow strip embodies the spirit of America's love-hate affair with fast-food joints and the traits they have in common:

" High turnover: Two Lucky Cow employees argue over who has seniority; the one who was hired at 9:30 that morning eventually wins.

" Uniformity: A Lucky Cow employee boasts that a customer can visit any of the restaurant's franchises and they are all the same-right down to the lackluster customer service.

" Cleanliness (or lack of it): People's shoes adhere to the sticky floors, and an employee's skin absorbs so much of the restaurant's grease that water rolls right off it.

" Food quality: The response to a customer's query about the Lucky Cluck Chicken Nuggets being organic is met with, "Well, they're made from organs."

To help ensure that Lucky Cow would feel authentic, cartoonist Mark Pett worked at McDonald's for a month, experiencing fast-food "culture" for himself and interviewing his coworkers about their lives in the business. So it really is "funny because it's true."

Customer Reviews:

One of my favorite current comics.......2007-02-10

Lucky Cow is one of my favorite current comic strips. The humor is great in poking fun at fast-food restaurants, which generally I'm not too fond of. Claire is a good example of the apathetic employee that is dragged in off the street to work, not just in restaurants, but in many businesses across America. Add to that the emphasis on meat, raunch fries, and other high-fat foods, along with a lack of fruits and vegetables, it's easy to see how fast-food places are fun targets for humor. Although to be fair, Lucky Cow does exaggerate for humor's sake. One of the strengths of this strip is that it is a lot more consistent than many comic strips in maintaining good quality day after day. A lot of other comic strips often have klunkers, and days that make me think "What the heck does that mean?" but with Lucky Cow I seldom am disappointed. I'm looking forward to reading the second collection!

Cute, but not very original.......2006-12-05

"Lucky Cow" is set in your average American homogenous fast-food restaurant and focuses on Clare, daughter of the franchise owner. Clare hates her job and does her best to avoid work, complain and provide substandard customer service. Unfortunately, Mark Pett's attempts to skewer the fast-food industry grow stale fairly quickly, and the humor just isn't sustained through an entire collection.

This is not a strip I'd want to see in my local newspaper, and I can't work up any enthusiasm to read another collection of these jokes.

by Tom Knapp, Rambles editor

Funny, funny, funny!.......2005-04-19

Easily my favorite comic right now. I think it ranks with the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, but Lucky Cow is rooted in the real world. (The Far Side sucessfully created an alternate universe, and, as insightful as C & H was about childhood, remember Hobbes was a stuffed animal).

These people are all real! You meet them on the street, on the bus, and of course at McD and Burger King. Except they SAY the things we THINK! I mean, THEY think. It's not like I can relate to these people, right? My work ethic is better than Clare's. I never exhibit the misplaced enthusiasm of her father. And I'm definitely not at all like Neil! Definitely! At least, I don't have any zits . . .

The weekday comics tell stories that actually build through the week. The weekend comics are brilliant satire, often concentrating on making fun of our consumer society. In fact, the Saturday comics that are mock ads are among my favorites. Highly, highly recommended.

Africa; Ngorongoro - Where Cow Poo Is Lucky (Airmail From...)

Average customer rating:

Africa; Ngorongoro - Where Cow Poo Is Lucky (Airmail From...)
Michael Cox
Manufacturer: Scholastic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Unreal!:Eight Surprising Stories: Without a Shirt; the Strap Box Flyer; Skeleton on the Dunny; Lucky Lips; Cow Dung Custard; Lighthouse Blues; Smart Ice Cream; Wunderpants

Average customer rating:

Paul Jennings' Unreal First Book
Dumb Book
go for this book
Unreal (Story 7 Smart Ice-Cream)
Great!! Loved the funny stories

Unreal!:Eight Surprising Stories: Without a Shirt; the Strap Box Flyer; Skeleton on the Dunny; Lucky Lips; Cow Dung Custard; Lighthouse Blues; Smart Ice Cream; Wunderpants
Paul Jennings
Manufacturer: Puffin Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: 0141307625

Customer Reviews:

Paul Jennings' Unreal First Book.......2006-08-31

"Unreal", first published in Australia in 1985, was Paul Jennings' first book, which he wrote while he was a school teacher. It is a collection of weird and wonderful short stories for kids, though it's fun for all ages, I reckon. "Unreal" went on to win a whole bunch of awards, and Paul Jennings went on to become a full time writer, and something of a phenomenon here down under. His books sold millions of copies, and spawned two TV series ("Round the Twist" and "Driven Crazy"). He's done an awful lot for kid's reading down here. I've been a fan of Paul's since I was nine or so years old. I'm grown up now, but still I find his books worth reading and re-reading.

Every single one of the eight stories in "Unreal" is great fun, and are among Jennings' best work, in my opinion. Here's a summary:

"Without A Shirt" features a boy who obsessively ends every sentence with the phrase "without a shirt". His teacher feels sorry for him and the other kids make fun of him. His life, however, takes a strange and unexpected turn the day he has to do a talk in front of the class...

"The Strap Box Flyer" is a story I'd forgotten about for quite some time, but it's interesting. It's all about a greedy businessman who goes from town to town selling glue. He tells his customers it will stick anything together. He doesn't tell them that it will only stick for 4 hours. Great ending to this one!

"Skeleton on the Dunny" is something of a ghost story centred around an outhouse. "Dunny" is an Australian slang word for toilet, used in a similar way to the American slang "the can". Really liked this story when I was a kid.

"Lucky Lips" is all about a sixteen year old boy whose never been kissed, but hopes to change all that with some magic invisble lipstick. Things end up getting a little crazy, though.

"Cow-Dung Custard" is a story designed to gross out, a type of story that Paul tends to write from time to time. This one's about a boy whose Dad is a prize winning gardener. He's a success thanks to his special combinations of animal manure. One of his combinations, "cow-dung custard" is a bit too special, and ends up causing chaos among the townsfolk.

"Lighthouse Blues" is another ghost story. A young lad goes to work as an apprentice on a lighthouse, and every Friday night he hears eerie music played on the saxophone, music whose lyrics seem to be trying to say something to him!

"Smart Ice-Cream" is an interesting one. A know-it-all boy is convinced that the local ice-cream truck is making his peers smarter by way of the ice-cream they eat. A short but sweet story (pardon the pun!)

"Wunderpants" is all about an enchanted pair of homemade underwear. I think that's all I need to say about that one!

Highly recommended to young readers. It's a lot of fun. If you enjoyed it, check out some of Paul Jennings other books like "Quirky Tales", "Uncanny" and "Unseen".

Dumb Book.......2005-07-04

This is the stupidest book ever. The stories were retarded. One story was about some little snot who teased other people and thought he was good. What a loser! This book sucked.

go for this book.......2004-11-09

What odd, delightful, unique stories. Sort of spooky at times, but certainly not typical.

Unreal (Story 7 Smart Ice-Cream).......2001-09-21

I think that this story would be suited to children 7-12 years of age.

In this story there is a very smart boy who always gets 100 out of 100 for Maths and English.
He teases people with pimples and other problems, but Peppi the ice-cream man fixes these problems with ice-cream.
There is a twist at the end that you couldn't guess. Read to find out.

This was an okay story. It is pretty short but has enough infomation to get the story line across. There were a few funny parts that make the story interesting.

Great!! Loved the funny stories.......1999-04-08

This book is great, my favorite story is called "Without a Shirt". It is about a boy that cannot say a sentence or paragraph without ending it with the phrase - "Without a shirt". Of course there is more to the story, but I think it nice to with hold the ending for the reader.

Book Description

If you enjoy a fine cigar, you are in good company. For centuries, cigars have curled their aromatic smoke around the heads of poets and politicians, composers and curmudgeons and comedians. Mark Twain boasted he came into the world asking for a light. Winston Churchill included cigars in his formula for the good life. Will Rogers made them the measure of the country's needs—back when all the country really needed was a good five-cent cigar that didn't cost fifteen cents.

These stories and more are intertwined with facts, firsts, definitions, and literary passages in this amusing, exclusive selection of the world's great cigar lore. So light up, sit back, relax, and enjoy. You'll find Blowing Smoke is a good match for a fine cigar.

Customer Reviews:

You don't have to be a cigar smoker to enjoy this book!.......1997-11-16

I'm not a cigar smoker and the current cigar mania cracks me up--but I do like learning funny and interesting things about any subject. Blowing Smoke showed me how cigars have been a part of the world's culture and history. If you read this book, you'll be surprised to see who said what about cigars. I browsed through the quotes and stories, then ended up starting over and reading the book cover-to-cover. What a fun pleasure this book is!

An humorous, enjoyable journey into the world of cigars.......1997-11-01

"Blowing Smoke" is the perfect coffee-table book for cigar lovers! Full of humor and history, I enjoyed both the fun and the insights to famous people like Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. This book would make the perfect gift for anyone you know who loves cigars.

Book Description

From the critically-acclaimed independent filmmaker, Michael Roemer, comes Film Stories: Screenplays as Story, the highly-anticipated first collection of screenplays. Beyond film scripts, this volume (the first of two) is designed to help film students master concepts such three-act structure, conflict, surprise, rising action, and crisis, while crafting not just a story, but a narrative.

Book Description

Now in paperback, a sweeping look at "primitive belief" versus "scientific knowledge," by the author of the renowned The Trumpet Shall Sound. Called "a classic study" by Booklist, this engaging inquiry into the nature of knowledge shows that "Western science" and "primitive beliefs" may not be so far apart as they seem. Renowned anthropologist and sociologist Peter Worsley begins Knowledges with his ongoing investigation of Australian aboriginal approaches to science and the natural world, and goes on to shatter conventional distinctions between science and culture, knowledge and belief. On the way, Worsley treats us to a lively and accessible examination of pre-European navigation of the Pacific, Western medicine, sub- and countercultures, nationalism, religion, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the iconology of Disneyland.

Customer Reviews:

Good general book, useful to anthropologists and psychologis.......1998-02-08

Peter Worsley's book will be useful to anyone interested in the anthropology of traditional knowledge. It is a good general introduction to the area--heavily based, however, on British social anthropology, with minimal references to the American cognitive and ethnobiological schools or to psychology. Gene Anderson, UC Riverside

Average customer rating:

Intermediate Goldmine

Better Bridge with a Better Memory: How Mnemonics Will Improve Your Game (Master Bridge Series)
Ron Klinger
Manufacturer: Cassell P L C
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Bridge | Card Games | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
Memory Improvement | Stress | Personal Health | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books
Look Inside Entertainment Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
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Improve Your Bridge Memory (Master Bridge Series)

How to Read Your Opponents' Cards

Modern Losing Trick Count (Master Bridge Series)

100 Winning Duplicate Tips: For the Improving Tournament Player (Master Bridge Series)

100 Winning Bridge Tips: For the Improving Player (Master Bridge Series)

ASIN: 0304364762

Book Description

This book will help you strengthen your memory in relation to the conventions you use and strategies you employ in bidding and play.

Customer Reviews:

Intermediate Goldmine.......2004-01-02

This book is loaded with useful information for the slightly above average player but probably has to much jargon for the beginner.
You may not care for all the mnemonics i.e the momory "keys" but quite a few are very useful. Mnemonics are not always used by the author, sometimes only a catchy phase provides the memory aid.
In structuree - the situation is introduced in the heading. Usually a very condensed "condition" is presented. Next comes a tool and/or a memory aid to handle it. Each situation is quickly dealt with. Quite a few pages present more than one idea.
Obviously the problem or tool is not always fully explained, you may have to go to other sources for that. However, the tools just keep coming and coming. It's also a nice introduction to a few advanced concepts.
The best investment in a bride book that I ever made. A geat learning tool. It even has a table of contents and an index (far above many bridge books).

Improve Your Bridge Memory (Master Bridge Series)

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Improve Your Bridge Memory (Master Bridge Series)
Ron Klinger
Manufacturer: Cassell P L C
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

Cognitive Psychology | Behavioral Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books

General | Behavioral Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Entertainment Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
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ASIN: 030436116X

Book Description

Many bridge errors arise from a poor memory, and those who learn to improve their memories will automatically improve their games. This book covers beginner, intermediate, and advanced players; rather than just a course of memory lessons, it helps one learn and remember what is important to bridge players.

A Treasury of Bridge Tips: 540 Bidding Tips to Improve Your Partner's Game

Average customer rating:

Not a book to learn from - ok for intermediate plus level players
First learn the rules, then learn when not to follow them!

A Treasury of Bridge Tips: 540 Bidding Tips to Improve Your Partner's Game
Edwin B. Kantar
Manufacturer: Griffin Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1580000932

Customer Reviews:

Not a book to learn from - ok for intermediate plus level players.......2006-10-24

The book has some good sections, but some parts are covered better in other books. It's not a bad book, just not a great book. It wasn't particularly fun to read (ok there were a few amizing quips).
Many of the tips were in the form of "In this situation with X do Y"

Of all of Eddie Kantars books I liked this least.
I'm not sure who its aimed at.
Its not presented in a way that someone who is unfamilair with the material will learn it. It's more geared towards someone who already knows the material and is looking for tips. It may help you identify some mistakes in your knowledge of fundamentals. The problem is the tips don't always explain why.
"Do it" as opposed to "This is why you should do it" is not all that helpful.

I much prefered Kantars Modern and Advanced bridge defense (Big Red) to his defensive tips book for teh same reason. An abridge version of technical (and dry) material doesn't do the subject justice and is not fun to read. I'd rather read a longer book that includes the "why".

First learn the rules, then learn when not to follow them!.......1999-01-02

Invaluable book of the finer points to the game. #30 tells you when you DON'T respond 4 card suits up the line! This book is crammed with bits of wisdom that would take you 10 years to accumulate thru your own experiences. Make life easy! Let Eddie tell you. The comments are brief. Excellent examples. Great sense of humor as always. I highly recommend to all. I will quote him in my online lessons. IngridH @okbridge

Improve Your Bridge the Lederer Way (Collins Winning Bridge)

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Improve Your Bridge the Lederer Way (Collins Winning Bridge)
Rhoda Lederer , and Amanda Hawthorn
Manufacturer: HarperCollinsWillow
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0002185350

Book Description

The classic book for bridge students and players just out of the beginners' stage has been revised and updated. Readers become reliable partners and challenging opponents with the confidence to play at any table.

I Challenge You: Victor Molo Challenges You to Improve Your Bridge Game

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I Challenge You: Victor Molo Challenges You to Improve Your Bridge Game
Victor Mollo
Manufacturer: Fireside
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

General | Sports | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0671642359

The Times Book of Bridge 1: Improve Your Performance at the Table, Whatever Your Level of Play

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The Times Book of Bridge 1: Improve Your Performance at the Table, Whatever Your Level of Play
Robert Sheehan
Manufacturer: Batsford
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 071348246X

Improve Your Bidding and Play: New Edition (Master Bridge Series)

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Improve Your Bidding and Play: New Edition (Master Bridge Series)
Ron Klinger
Manufacturer: Cassell Academic
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0304363308

Book Description

Here is a new edition of this exhilarating and ingenious guide to improving both your bidding and your play. Sixty hands are presented, and you must first find the key bid. Then, as declarer, you have to work out the best way to play the hand. By the time you have completed the sixty problems you will undoubtedly be a much improved player.

Average customer rating:

Excellent book.

Ten Ways to Improve Your Bridge
David Bird
Manufacturer: Victor Gollancz
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0575070676

Book Description

If you are an average player eager to advance, this book will show you how. David Bird has taken ten key areas of bidding and play and has applied his skills as a player and critic to prove how better results can be achieved. The essential points are summarized in each chapter, with problems to solve to show you how much you have learned.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book........2003-05-21

Deals with 10 different areas such as doubles, signalling, etc that can help an intermediate player get to the next level. Definitely recommended!

Average customer rating:

How to Improve Your Bridge
H. W. Kelsey
Manufacturer: Faber & Faber
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0571114385

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50 Bridge Puzzles (Improve Your Game)
Paul Lamford
Manufacturer: Carlton Books Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0233997261

Book Description

This is a book of ideas and of choices. Knowing which choices to make is not teachable. It's part of that creative instinct we call talent whose secret voice guides us every time we sit down at the keyboard. All stories are not identical. They are shaped by all those unique facets of the human beings who write them. All any writer can do when he wants to share his knowledge with others is be as open and giving as possible; and hope others can learn from that. You hold in your hands most of what I know about writing for games and much of what I believe and practice no matter what kind of writing I'm doing. It is meant to inform, to instruct, and maybe even inspire. It is as much about game design as it is writing for games. The two are virtually inseparable. The book itself has been designed as a quest. We are all of us on a journey toward a destination for which there is no single road. --Lee Sheldon, Author

Customer Reviews:

Breaking through barriers.......2007-07-05

I am working on forming a game development studio, and our team is in the middle of producing our flagship title, an RPG entitled "Revolution's Dawn." I am the main writer of the script, and I just recently finished reading this book. Where I thought my duties as a writer were finished, I now see new openings to provide dialogue and sidequests to fill in the backstory, plot gaps, and other means of enrichment that I didn't see before. Because of having read this book, my team and I can now take this game and bring it into the realm of what we intended it to be-a vehicle for telling a story.

While the title of the book is "Character Development and Storytelling for Games," the book really focuses more heavily on the latter. I was expecting the former, but by no means am I complaining! I have been able to break through blocks in my own role as a writer for this project.

If you are looking for the "right" way to write your story, you won't find it here. What this book does instead is to open doors, and then let you decide whether to walk through them or not. And even then, you still have to choose for yourself what to do once you've walked through them. If you are looking for new openings in crafting your game _and_ writing your story(and synthesizing them both together), this is the book for you.

Very interesting, but could have been shorter.......2006-06-26

I really enjoyed this book, and I think it's definitely worth considering if you're interested in how stories can be told in video games. I've bought plenty of books about video game design and storytelling. (I'm a programmer who's been making video games professionally for about 10 years -- I wish more people would include their personalbackground in their book reviews...) Some books on game design are written by people who obviously have more "static media" backgrounds like books or movies, and don't understand the fundamental problem of making a story in a situation where the audience has freedom to do what they want. Another problem that a lot of people don't understand is that people playing a video game don't necessarily WANT a story, in the sense that they are playing a video game because of the interactivity, and not to watch a 10 minute cutscene to learn some back story. If they wanted to watch a movie they'd pop in a DVD.

I think the author really understands these difficulties. You want to make an emmersive worl, but you need to do it very quickly. So he talks about dialog, and how to convey as much information as possible in as few words as possible. He talks about how to get the player to sympathize with a chaacter, from the situation that characetr is in, to the design of the character art, to the words that the character says. All of the information is very practical, not like some books that leave you with a bunch of high-level nonsense that doesn't work in a real game. I really appreciated that he wasn't one of these "video games are mindless because they don't tell a story" type of guys. Or acting as if video games need to learn how to tell a story in order to "grow up" like movies or TV have. In a straight up action game or fighter, you don't need as much of a story as you do in a more adventure game. Playing a video game is a just a different experience, and the story has a different role, it's NOT the holy grail like some people think. Rather than trying to tell you how to convert video games into novels, he describe ways that you can inject story without taking away from the inetraction. I think he makes a good case that in almost any game, you can introduce just a bit of characetr depth and relationships, without stopping for a ten minute cutscene, and it adds value to the game.

This author's background was originally in TV, but he also has considerable experience in video games. I felt like he has a good background to be writing the book, and was speaking from experience.

The only negative comment about the book is that I found several of the chapters to be very similar. Like you'd be reading a chapter, and you'd think, "Hey, didn't I just read this exact same thing a few chapters ago?" Actually, you didn't, this chapter is covering a very slightly different topic. In other words, I think he could have consolidated a few chapters, which would have saved me some time. I suppose this makes it easier to jump around, since you don't rely on information from previous chapters. But I found it a little repetitive.

All in all, a really good book for anybody interested in video game design or storytelling in general.

An excellent book for all writers.......2004-12-14

I've known Lee Sheldon for several years. He is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable people I've met in the game industry, so I was very much looking forward to this book. Suffice it to say that I wasn't disappointed.

Writing for games has a lot in common with writing for other media (e.g., character and theme) and a lot that is unique to itself. Lee does an excellent job of covering both aspects - so much so that I would recommend this book to writers with absolutely no interest in interactive media. (I've read my share of writing books over the years, and this one stands at the top of the heap.)

Of particular interest to me were chapters 3-6 on character and chapter 14 on modular storytelling, the most elegant way I've seen of organizing a linear experience into a non-linear structure. The book also does an excellent job of discussing storytelling in massively multiplayer games and provides extensive background material, much of which is intended to set up and justify Lee's modular storytelling model - rather more background than necessary, actually, since you should be sold on the need for something like modular storytelling long before he gets around to explaining it.

The book's does have a few faults. For example, a couple of the later chapters feel out of place, and the text is dusted with a handful of puzzling and sometimes repeated typos (Eowen? Kalishnakov?) But these are of little consequence and should not detract from your enjoyment.

Highly recommended.

almost didn't read it..........2004-11-05

because I started with the appendices, including an "oppinionated bibliography" - that almost had rushing off to the shelves (and the library and amazon) to grab a bunch of other books to read.

When I got down to reading the main work - it was just as captivating. He writes well, there are jokes mixed in and a good strucutre. Some minor typos/mis-references (a missing appendix c) and a bit overdone on the "define this word" stuff, but it doesn't detrect from the overall message.

The best part? Make your rule then break it. If you willingly break a rule, chances are the result will be much better than if you happen to ignore it beacuse you are unaware of it.

Draws heavily on ideas from many fields, so the content has value outside of "pure" game design (ie for animation, machinima, role playing, adapting books to hobby-theater)

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