by Dan Fogg
edited by Deborah Carney
41 fun pages
Premise: Ganked from Amazon:
Ignorance, lack of common sense, and downright inhuman stupidity run rampant in this country and around the world. I watch people, and I hear stories, and they beg, beg, beg to be mocked and ridiculed.
Weirder Than Marshmallows showcases tales of stupidity and ignorance in the hopes of making people laugh. Stories are divided into five categories.
Do Not Stop on Tracks showcases warnings that should never have to be warned.
En Masse contains stories of mass ignorance.
Technology Sucks explores the hazards of the technological age.
That’s Just Freaky features Twilight Zone like tales of paranormality.
Weird Stuff is stuff that is… well, weird
All the stories in this book are true. That’s what makes the concept attention grabbing. Anybody can make up strange stories, writers do it all the time. That’s why people love Stephen King, his stories are downright weird.
But these are real, they actually happened, to relatively normal human beings. There’s no fiction here.
Thirty milligrams sodium, twenty-three grams carbohydrates, less than one gram protein. The marshmallow. Don’t look for it at your local health club. Don’t include it as part of a diet. And don’t eat more than a few at once, you’ll just end up with a stomachache.
The ingredients of a marshmallow are fairly simple. Corn syrup, sugar, dextrose, corn starch, water, gelatin, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, artificial and natural flavor, and blue 1. Most of those are self-explanatory. Corn syrup for flavor, sugar because that’s what the marshmallow is, corn starch for shelf-life, water to puff the thing out, gelatin to hold it together. Nobody knows what the compounds are for, and nobody really cares. Because, come on, why would you care what you’re putting in your mouth?
The ingredient I have a question about is the blue 1. Food coloring. Blue food coloring. Now maybe I’m wrong about this, but marshmallows are white, aren’t they? And white is achieved by a lack of color. So what color did those little puffs of sugar have to start out to require the addition of blue to neutralize it?
Anyway, I could rant about marshmallows forever. You may not agree, and you don’t have to; I think the things are weird. But this book isn’t about marshmallows, despite the ramblings above. This book is about stories. Stories that are, like marshmallows, strange, mind boggling, but somehow appealing to the public at large. Hard to explain, impossible to ignore.
My Review:
This is one of those funky lil' gems that crack you up the longer you read. It was waiting nonchalantly on my Nook as a book I won in a Giveaway a few weeks back. I couldn't sleep one night, and opened it to get my mind off more serious things, and before I knew it I was snorting and chuckling and waking my husband up. "What's so funny?" he asked, and honestly, it wasn't easy to say!
You know how watching Funniest Home Videos sorta grows on you? After a series of person after person getting whacked by a pinata stick, you can't help bustin' up laughing even if you didn't want to? Even if you were in the middle of an argument? [Well, except for that goat - have you seen the episode where the goat gets scared and freezes up before tipping over? That one gets me every time (as soon as I knew the goat was ok, of course, I do live in Oregon and animal safety is of highest concern.)]
Weirder Than Marshmallows is like that. The first couple stories draw out a chuckle or two, but before you know it, your snorting and looking around to see if anyone's watching. For only $5 for an e-copy, there's real value in the health of laughing, not to mention, supporting a crazy sense of humor.
Note: There's some language & some rather straightforward opinion.
My Rating: 3.5 - Fun & Worth the Time
