Secret #1: Experiment On Your Children

Please, Mom, I want some more.Title: “Living Well, Spending Less: 12 Secrets of the Good Life”

Author: Ruth Soukup

Rank: 80

Blurb: “Through personal stories, biblical truth, and practical action plans, she will inspire you to make real and lasting changes to your personal goals, home, and finances.”

Excerpt: “Not until I observed firsthand the real and immediate changes in my kids after getting rid of their toys did I truly begin to understand.”

Review: “The title of this book should be: ‘Long-winded stories about the mistakes I made in my quest for a designer lifestyle.’ I can’t relate to the author’s life at all. She has some social anxiety issues that had her moving her family to new cities frequently, and then the kicker was when she said her husband became a stay-at-home dad so she could BLOG. DO WHAT? And I am to take FINANCIAL advice from this woman?”

Customers Also Bought: “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying”

Footnote: Let’s see what happens when those kids reach their Twenties.

Living Well, Spending Less [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

21 Comments

Lesson 1: Don’t buy this book.
Lesson 2-12: See lesson 1.

And when one of her kids shoots up a school, she’ll be like – no, really?

Which book of the bible discusses clipping coupons and buying all your stuff when it’s on sale? Is that covered in the Stinque bible?

I’m constantly amazed by all the people who claim to be living a perfect life but feel the need to write – and endlessly promote – book after book after book selling this perfect life. If you make a gazillion dollars from a string of best sellers doesn’t that change your existing perfect life? Changing perfect means making it less than perfect, right? Does not compute.

Snowpocalypse in the North East!

Glad I wasn’t on night shift or day shift who had to drive in this shit.
#sorefromshovelingforoneandahalfhours

@Dave H: Which book of the bible discusses clipping coupons

Ecclipsiastes.

@nojo: badunka bump! He’s here all week kids!

WRT to the “Grand Old Pandemic” tweet of the day (nice!), I present to you a lovely take down of Aqua Buddha.

@SanFranLefty: That really caught me by surprise. I thought Antivaxxers were Yuppie Libruls, then next thing you know everybody’s panding to wingnuts. (Special credit to Ebola Christie for rushing to make it matter of “choice”.)

Still, it remains Equal Opportunity Idiocy. Apparently Millennials are on the Vax Choice train, because, y’know, it would be impolite to tell somebody to do something.

@nojo: yeah, Ebola Christie was especially blood-pressure raising. I need to find PromNight and get his rant on his governor. This whole anti-vaxxer thing has always made me incredibly stabby thanks to a close family member who had polio in the ’50s, and now that a dear friend with a suppressed immune system is in the ICU with a raging infection, I’m super stabilicious with these fucking morons.

@nojo: Ha! Awesome.

@nojo & @SanFranLefty: Yeah, the RepubliKKKans truly are taking us back 200 years. Brace yourselves for slavery.

Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you! And I did what I had to do to report it! But somebody wouldn’t let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, yelling that my daughter was a lousy Peter Pan. Calling me a talking head and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me? Who are they? Unless they’ve been me and been there and know what the hell they’re yelling about!

-Brian Rambo Williams

@ManchuCandidate: His daughter can’t act but he’s not a fool. What is this?

@Benedick: Let’s go to the tape

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams admitted Wednesday he was not aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by RPG fire during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a false claim that has been repeated by the network for years.

Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.

I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but how do you misremember that?

@Benedick:
Parody of the climax “speech” in the “film” Rambo uttered by fictional Nam hero played by actual Nam avoider and Soccer Coach in Sweden Sylvester Stallone.

@nojo: We all misremember. Not to excuse this taradiddle. Those of us who have lived with one other human unit since the last ice age will find that we have to bite our tongue while unit misremembers the time I threw up on Elaine Stritch. Watching him in ‘archival’ footage going all Rambo makes me think that the problem is that Brian wanted to be as butch as the other guys. The guys who laughed at him as an elitist weenie while they were busy strafing civilians.

As Odin told Baldur as he received the fatal blow from Loki: Dude, you are so toast.

@ManchuCandidate: Of course. Have we seen his porn movie? Shouldn’t that be the choice for next Thursday’s ‘Hot Stinque Movie Night?’ I mean does the world revolve around Judi Dench?

@Benedick: We all misremember.

Too much slack.

I’m notorious for “Did I say that?” moments years later. But I’m not (a) a working journalist, (b) on assignment, in (c) a terrifying moment, that (d) I misrepresent for years afterward, including (e) an appearance on Letterman.

It really is a question of professional integrity, and when I was a working journalist — even for a tiny community newspaper — I took that very seriously. We all did — the managing editor at my college rag posted a sign on the wall shouting “ACCURACY! ACCURACY!! ACCURACY!!!” My favorite J-School prof would dock a grade for a fact error.

You may be right about the cause — awkward self-aggrandizement. Or maybe his self-dramatization was a twisted means to honor the grunts he was flying with. But since he fancies himself a Serious Journalist, this is a Serious Problem. Not as silly as blaming a stuck backspace key on CIA snoops, but serious enough to warrant that timeout he’s taking.

No link, but Williams may have over-dramatized Hurricane Katrina…

1. He said he saw bodies floating outside his hotel window. He was staying in the French Quarter, where there was minimal or no flooding.

2. He said he got dysentery from drinking the floodwater. There were no reported cases of dysentery.

If this proves true, I would have reason to doubt any of NBC’s Chief Newsreader’s personal anecdotes from the field. He keeps printing the legend.

@nojo: Well, good thing he didn’t piss off the Teabaggers like Dan Rather did, he can keep his job.

@SanFranLefty: You come at the king, you best not miss.

But, to be fair, it wasn’t NBC or CBS who employed Judith Miller.

@nojo: He thought RPG fire was related to a Role Playing Game, so . . .

I knew two guys who were “war correspondents,” back in Gulf War I, meaning they sat around in Saudi Arabia while the units they were sent to cover also sat around in Saudi Arabia.

Here’s a real fucking war correspondent: http://nojobforawoman.com/reporters/dickey-chapelle/

@redmanlaw: Eric Engberg, who was part of the CBS team on the ground in Buenos Aires, describes Falklands coverage:

We — meaning the American networks — were all in the same, modern hotel and we never saw any troops, casualties or weapons. It was not a war zone or even close. It was an “expense account zone.”

Rookie correspondent (and Fabulist of the Week) Bill O’Reilly was also on the team, prompting this classic:

You don’t shoot a long stand-up when you have plenty of good pictures of the event you are covering. What O’Reilly was doing was in the realm of local news.

It’s a great read for the flavor of network journalism of the time.

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