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The Book of Heroic Failures

created by Amadeo

(thing) by Amadeo (4.6 y) (print)   ?   1 C! I like it! Fri Jan 19 2001 at 23:03:41

Also known as "The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain", this book was written by Stephen Pile, the founder of the Not Terribly Good Club itself, to celebrate the diverse and wonderful joys of incompetence. The reasoning, of course, is that "success is overrated."
Mankind spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about the things he does well, when these few blades of grass are surrounded by vast prairies of inadequacy which are much more interesting.
The book is a compendium of the most gifted failures which have been committed, in fields ranging from 'The Most Inaccurate Value of Pi'(the General Assembly of Indiana passed a Bill ruling that pi was four) through 'The Least Successful Pornographic Bookseller'(who was fined because his books were not sufficiently pornographic) to 'The Least Successful Alcoholics Anonymous Metting' (ended with a cloakroom brawl after £385 had been spent at the bar).

The book includes a special tribute to the infamous 'Man from Porlock', of Kubla Khan fame, and an appendix on 'The Art of Being Wrong'.

Altogether, almost as good a source of obscure factoids as it is entertaining.


printable version
chaos

The Devil's Dictionary Microsoft does your mom Kubla Khan TDD: Z
English As She Is Spoke William McGonagall Inadequacy pornographic
Alcoholics Anonymous wrong Indiana once tried to change the value of pi infamous
failure book The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Pedro Carolino
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