Florida Trip: Part 1

Well, after work on friday I head down to National Airport to fly to florida for the closing on the house I'm buying with my brother and dad to fix up and flip. It's the best (read closest) airport for me to fly out from Plus it's metro accessible. The other airports (BWI and Dulles) have cheaper flights, but they are farther and I gotta' take a cab to get there (one day if I'm bored I'll finish the draft of the post I was working on titled "DC Cabbies: Scum of the Earth...or possibly lower").

Diet Coke of Evil claims there's two ways to tell a story. The short way and the long way. So DCOE style, here's what happened.

Short version: I flew down to Florida to do the closing on a house that I'm buying with my Dad and brother. It's a 2BR 1BA house that they want to expand into a 3BR 2BA(by closing up the carport) and sell for hopefully a lot of money. They needed my name to be on the title since my brother already owns 3 houses in his name and my dad's credit got screwed up in his recent divorce.

Long Version:

So I get to the airport and use this new e-check in. I got to pick my own seat, which was sweet. I inadvertently ended up sitting next to a fat russian guy who smelled like onions and whose rolls were spilling over into my seat. Which was not sweet. He had a portable DVD player with him and watched "The West Wing" reruns throughout the flight. If he hadn't been wearing headphones, I mighta been able to follow the plot. But I have seen the West Wing a couple of times and to be quite honest, it's better with no sound.

At the airport I went to the book store (Ollson's) to check out some of the book recommendations I had gotten from my imaginary friends on the interweb. I sometimes think about what I would do if I got bored with practicing law. And by "sometimes" I mean several hours a day. I decided that I could be a writer. There were so many books there and most of them looked/sounded crappy. I don't think I'll be the next Mark Twain, but I do think if I wrote a mediocre book it would be better than most of the stuff in that book store. Because I was bored and thought it would make a good blog entry, I wrote down some names of actual books I saw there. I think the key to getting published is to come up with a ridiculous title. They seem to fall into one of three categories.

Titles that ask idiotic questions:
Why Do Men Have Nipples? This was actually a NY Times bestseller. I don't know the answer, but if people will read a whole book about man nipples I think my writing will make me rich.
Are Men Necessary?For Maureen Dowd's sake I hope the answer is no. I feel bad for anyone that would end up married to this harpy. This was also a best seller, by the way.
Can a Guy Get Pregnant?I'm no doctor, but I don't think I'd have to be to write a book like this.

I think I could crank out a book like these a week.
Why We Don't Have Three Legs, By Tom Quixote
Does The Law of Gravity apply to Anarchists?, By Tom Quixote
Where Did I Put My Car Keys? By Tom Quixote (for those of you who can't wait 'till the book comes out, they are in your jacket pocket).

The Books Offering CommonSense "Wisdom".
Never Scratch a Tiger With a Short Stick This guy actually works giving speeches to corporations. Now I know that I should attend one of those motivational speaker gigs. I'll have blog material for weeks to come.
Sex With Kings Why is this Plural? Are there so many people having sex with multiple kings that they need to refer to a book for advice?
Your Cat's Just not That Into You . If even your cat doesn't like you, then I think you need more help than a book can give you.

My books of advice will have titles like:
Don't Eat the Yellow Snow, By Tom Quixote and maybe
101 Reasons Not to Set Fire to Your Genitals, By Tom Quixote and Evil Knievel.

By this stage in my career I'll have started co-authoring books.


The Books with Strange or Provocative Titles:
Sun Tzu Was a Sissy I bet the Sequel will be Genghis Khan was a Pussy.
The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit "Corporate" is an important adjective, so you don't get it confused with the regular Dictionary of Bullshit.
The Sociopath Next Door I bet the guy he's talking about is Sudanese.
Not a Good Day to Die I agree with the premise. But some people apparently think that it is A Good Day to Die
The Best thing that Can Happen To a Croissant I think people are boring enough, do we have to read about the exlpoits of food items in a continental breakfast?

They were also selling a book by the Washingtonienne for 40% off. It's still overpriced. Because I'm good at math, I came up with a formula for deciding how much a book by a Congressional Aide that sold anal sex to low-level Bush appointees was worth.
Here it is:

Where X = the price of Washingtonienne's book,
then
(If X > $0 then the book is overpriced).

Tune in a couple of days for Part 2...or possibly Part 3 if this gets to be too long.