Thrift Store Adventures: Book Edition Vol. 3!

As you may have noticed, I really enjoy finding strange books at thrift stores. There is practically an infinite amount of books at thrift stores, and a pretty good number of odd/creepy/funny books among them, leading to an infinite number of lawlz to be had. Here are some good ones from my latest journey.

First up, we have an enlightening and entertaining book called "Hug a Tree, And Other Things To Do Outdoors With Young Children."

Get a room

Other than mistakenly capitalizing prepositions in their title, this book seems pretty awesome. I cannot freaking wait to open the book and see all the other fun suggestions to do with some young children outdoors when the activity on the cover is HUGGING A TREE! This is sure to be a page-turner. And just look at the cover kid; he's topless, and i'm pretty sure shorts that short are illegal. But he's having a great time huggin' that tree!

I notice that it took three authors to write this book. I imagine they had a pretty epic brainstorming session:

"OK, so let's think about this. Imagine you're walking through the park and you see some great young children you want to impress. Clearly, the first thing you'd do is hug a tree, but what else can we add that's fun and exciting..?" 

"Oh! How about rolling around in the grass!" 

"Great idea! And maybe talking to the flowers!" 

"I like the way your brains work. Throw in picking up rocks and I think we've got a bestseller!"

Next, we have an inspiring book called "It Can't Hurt Forever." 

There are many things to ponder about this one. The book didn't have anything on the cover, but that is the first page. It looks like a kid on dialysis with his shirt pulled up with a sad-faced doctor sitting next to him. I have no idea what this book is about, but from the looks of the picture and from the title, that kid is fucked. Maybe literally, if Sad-Faced Doctor is actually Lusty-Faced Doctor. I don't know, I can't make much of a conjecture on that.

The first line of the book is this: "Day 1: Mom promised me I won't die." Uh oh. His mom is clearly feeding him a line of crap. First off, it looks like he's going to die. Second, the title is saying that it can't hurt forever, which is probably a spoiler for the ending, where he dies (a.k.a. it stops hurting). Thirdly, everyone dies, so his mom is full of shit regardless. 

I love finding really old computer/technology books that had no idea how lame they were at the time. Unfortunately this one was mostly boring, and talked about newsgroups and stuff. It's called "The Internet: Complete Reference." I did, however, flip through it and find one great chapter:

Wow! It's like it read my mind, this is my ultimate goal! Who knew I could complete it online...

This next one is called, "Coping with the Drug Culture: Is Your Family Turned On?"

Apparently they used the term "turned on" instead of "doing drugs" or "getting blitzed" in the '60s (I'm guessing it's the '60s, judging by the colors and font). Still, it's worth noting that the title of this book is fucking hilarious. I guess if your entire family is acting like a bunch of nymphomaniacs, you can usually assume they are on drugs. Probably ecstasy. My dog humped my leg once, he must have been on drugs.

Here is a really stupid "joke" book called "GR8 Jokes :-)" 

Let me tell you, none of these jokes are GR8 in any way. The book cover looks like a Nokia 3310 and every joke is in text-speak, which basically means you can't read them. (Un) Fortunately, they translate what each text message means. They fail to translate what the jokes mean though. Take a look:

As you can see, none of those jokes are decipherable without the translations, and even translated the mick-shaws joke makes no sense to me, but I know it's something racist. Can anyone explain that one?

Lastly, we have a disturbing book entitled "Parents Cry Too!" 

When you look at this cover, you may notice a few things:

• The parents must have been 60 when this kid was born
• The baseball, bat, and glove are freaking HUGE!
• The kid has no hands

Wait, what? Yeah, if you look, you'll see that the kid has no freakin' hands, just some nubs wrapped up in tape. I'm assuming that the parents are crying because their son didn't like his birthday gift, which makes them sad. But then again, what kind of asshole parents would give their handless kid some giant baseball equipment? And it had to be the parents that left that stuff there, because that kid sure as heck didn't put it there; he has no hands. 

Anyway, I really don't know what this crazy book is about, but the cover sure is funny. The boy looks to be about in the puberty range, so I wonder about the mechanics of his "urges." And now that I think about it, he would not benefit from chapter 8 of the internet reference book.