I am making flowcharts for a work blog AND IT IS DESTROYING WHAT IS LEFT OF MY SANITY.

Oh my God, he is SO right. Here I was the other day reading:

"Hardly anybody watches beauty pageants any more, but everybody watches beauty pageant scandal coverage"

They DO? I thought? When have I ever done that?

But just now, dear reader, I found myself clicking on this:

Police investigate third beauty pageant brawl
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/27/3201042.htm

Shit. How did he know I'd -?

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I've been eating breakfast and giggling at this.

I'm not a flowchart sort of girl, so I find myself gravitating to the text more than the charts as I dip into it.

Doomsday Scenarios:

Nobody wants to spend their afterlife telling other spirits 'How did I die? Well, the earth's temperature climbed half a degree every year for twenty years, which doesn't seem like much, but that increase significantly increased the amount of algae in the oceans, which upset the foodchain and blabbity-blab blab boring scientific stuff.' The biggest reason to fight global warming is so we can obliterate ourselves in a flashier way, like by creating a minature black hole or zombie plague.

Dethroned or Disgraced Beauty Queens:

This is a bar chart in the book:

Figure 1: Why aren't We Watching Beauty Pageants?

A Not enough nudity 13%
B Jealous 25%
C Don't Like Beauty 2%
D Too busy working three jobs and raising five children alone since our husband left...because we weren't pretty enough 8%
E Shark Week 20%
F Don't like the 'Interview' part 30%
G Busy writing our doctoral thesis on women's studies 10%

Maybe one of those stars is for effort. A book like this can't make you snort your weeties every time you read it, but.

Okay, then, Zeppelin Warfare:

Zeppelins are massive, majestic flying machines, but they are also notoriously fragile: Strong winds cause considerable difficulties for zeppelins, landing is dangerous even in perfect weather and requires a large ground crew, and of course early zeppelins were filled with highly flammable hydrogen gas. Some zeppelins were known to burst into flames if a passenger ordered their Bloody Mary with extra tabasco, or said a word that sounded similar to 'fire.' During a routine flight to Switzerland, a young zeppelin intentionally smashed itself against a mountain peak because it was going through a difficult breakup.

I wish I could show the flowchart for Zeppelin Warfare, it's hilarious. There is a lot of schnapps drinking.

In his typically dry, understated way, David Giltinan described this book as "pants-crappingly awesome" - but I knew what he meant, and immediately ordered a copy. It does not disappoint.

Friends, we're always* saying we LOLed. LOL is an acronym that is supposed to mean "laugh out loud". In fact, Table 1 give you a detailed breakdown of what LOL really means, using the scale employed by professional Internet humorologists:
_________________________________________

LEAST FUNNY
1 (42%) Knowing smirk 
2 (30%) Genuine smile 
3 (16%) Inadvertent snort 
4 (8%) Single stifled guffaw
5 (3%) Peal of head-turning laughter 
6 (1%) Helpless, prolonged, tears-in-eyes giggling
MOST FUNNY

Table 1. What LOL really means when it's used on Goodreads.
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I lost count of how many times I got to stages 4 and 5, and reached 6 at least twice - embarrassingly, both of them were on the chart Things To Say During Sex. But maybe that's just me, and other people will be more amused by Freudian interpretations of the American Dream, a brief lesson in Dolphin (eee-UUUeee-UUU-click! means "Although I am from the above-world, I still love your daughter") and a knock-out tournament in which all past and present US Presidents battle it out to the death. There's also a ludicrously exact table categorising superheroes and their superpowers, a flowchart explaining how the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife works and several other things that David G mentioned in his review.

Unless you're a Viking warrior with a spear through your body or suffer from some other medical condition where laughing is counter-indicated, I strongly recommend buying this book. It's funny.

* Except for notgettingenough, who hates the word. Not, I am specifically excluding you from this claim, so there is no need to post a denial.