The dazzling success of The Toaster Project, including TV appearances and an international book tour, leaves Thomas Thwaites in a slump. His friends increasingly behave like adults, while Thwaites still lives at home, "stuck in a big, dark hole." Luckily, a research grant offers the perfect out: a chance to take a holiday from the complications of being human—by transforming himself into a goat. What ensues is a hilarious and surreal journey through engineering, design, and psychology, as Thwaites interviews neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, prosthetists, goat sanctuary workers, and goatherds. From this, he builds a goat exoskeleton—artificial legs, helmet, chest protector, raincoat from his mum, and a prosthetic goat stomach to digest grass (with help from a pressure cooker and campfire)—before setting off across the Alps on four legs with a herd of his fellow creatures. Will he make it? Do Thwaites and his readers discover what it truly means to be human? GoatMan tells all in Thwaites's inimitable style, which NPR extols as "a laugh-out- loud-funny but thoughtful guide through his own adventures."
Written with all the scathing dark humor that is a hallmark of BoJack Horseman, Raphael Bob-Waksberg delivers a fabulously off-beat collection of short stories about love—the best and worst thing in the universe. Featuring: • A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding. • A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact. • A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can’t be genetically modified. And fifteen more tales of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.
Many people dream of leaving the workaday world for a life of simplicity and freedom, and Margaret Hathaway and her then-boyfriend Karl did just that. In The Year of the Goat, the reader can jump in the “goat mobile” with them as they ditch their big-city lifestyle to trek across forty-three states in search of greener pastures and the perfect goat cheese. Along the way, the reader is introduced to a vivid cast of characters—including farmers, breeders, cheese makers, and world-class chefs—and discovers everything there is to know about goats and getting back to the land. But readers beware: When it comes to goat cheese, it can be love at first bite.
By taking you through the development of a real web application from beginning to end, the second edition of this hands-on guide demonstrates the practical advantages of test-driven development (TDD) with Python. You’ll learn how to write and run tests before building each part of your app, and then develop the minimum amount of code required to pass those tests. The result? Clean code that works. In the process, you’ll learn the basics of Django, Selenium, Git, jQuery, and Mock, along with current web development techniques. If you’re ready to take your Python skills to the next level, this book—updated for Python 3.6—clearly demonstrates how TDD encourages simple designs and inspires confidence. Dive into the TDD workflow, including the unit test/code cycle and refactoring Use unit tests for classes and functions, and functional tests for user interactions within the browser Learn when and how to use mock objects, and the pros and cons of isolated vs. integrated tests Test and automate your deployments with a staging server Apply tests to the third-party plugins you integrate into your site Run tests automatically by using a Continuous Integration environment Use TDD to build a REST API with a front-end Ajax interface
Twelve tales of the human condition as seen from the dark side, through the lens of myth, nightmare, romance, the weird and the surreal. The collection’s title story sets the table, turning over love’s joy to explore where such an emotion might come from, and what it might cost. Other stories include: -“The Question Man,” in which Derek is compelled to find the answers to the questions of a mysterious caller -“Spider Goes to Market” finds the trickster god Spider caught in the horrors of the African slave trade -“The Dead Mothers’ Club” seeks to answer the question of what happens to the children who cannot recover from the loss of their mothers - “Twelve Nights” is the length of time it takes for a man to transform into something else, once the reality of what he knew to be his life is broken Other stories included in this collection are "The Oddist", "The Lighted Window", "The Good Dead", "Five Pregnant Vampires", "The Abandoned Mother", "Our Lady of the Jars", and "Not an Exit". From the first print edition of this collection, John Pelan writes in his introduction: Gerard Houarner is an artist, one that’s not afraid to venture into new territories and try different hues and shades in his prose painting. The artist has hung an entirely new show in his gallery, and it’s well worth coming in to view, the admission fee is inexpensive and the memories will linger a lifetime. And, from Asimov’s SF Magazine, Paul Di Filippo writes in his On Books Review: …the stories that flesh out this book (flesh bruised and broken) are hardly romantic trifles, cynical or otherwise. They are instead Grand Guignolish shockers reminiscent of John Shirley’s work. Houarner’s introductions show a concerned and ethical individual at work, and his sharp literary skills insure that he always adheres closely to his personal moral compass, without sacrificing horrific impact. “Out Lady of the Jars” is my favorite here, straying as it does into the Borgesian territory of imaginary beings.
This computer-generated anthology serves as a companion to Taft's Blues Lyric Poetry: a Concordance and gives the user the complete poetic context for every word, phrase or line in which he is interested. He also provides a selection of blues lyrics which have never appeared in print before or are scattered. Taft has transcribed over 2,000 blues lyrics from recordings made between 1920 and 1942 and includes over 350 singers such as Josh White, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey. The anthology includes both country and urban, male and female, "downhome" and vaudeville singers. The songs are arranged according to singer and under each singer, according to dates of recording and sequences in the recording sessions. Information given includes singer, title, place, date and record numbers. The final section is a line-concordance index to the titles of the songs. ISBN 0-8240-9235-X (alk. paper) : $75.00 (For use only in the library).
Over twenty years in the writing, the three books in The Legend of The Secret Saga series evolved to be an fascinating magical story unlike any other, as they poetically weave together a strange epic tale. THE AUTHOR, Estee Shoesmyth, is a tangible figment of her own unbridled paradoxical imagination and the fantasy fiction pseudonym of eclectic American artist, Suzanne T. Dietz. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is the complete epic trilogy in one colorful volume. There is no other story like it in The Real World! The fantastical epic tale opens in Book One, which is When Begin Began. Celestial Scribe, Angel Daria pens the following words: "To Whom It May Concern: When this immense historical accounting commenced, I surely did not anticipate that the nature of this story would ever veer off the straight and narrow path. Instead, it proceeded to travel along the strangest winding ways. And so, I followed it most dutifully — with my pen in hand. Once upon a time, an anonymous philosopher on The Ultimate Earth aptly intellectualized, 'There are always three sides to every story: your side, the other side, and the truth.' The story presented to you here may seem like nothing more than a collection of my own fantastical delusions. Surely, it could not be that which I, myself, have ever witnessed! In that case, it would certainly not make it to be truth. However, it is ... by my best accounting ... the strange but true enough telling of a deliberately long-lost story from somewhere far out on the other side of Who-Knows-Where." That's just the beginning! In Book Two, The Murky Middle, the story dims to very, very dark with the introduction of a terribly wicked magician's sorcery. Through magic, he enters into a spirit world and adamantly decided to stay there. From that secret domain he meets another and the two, in cahoots, do some deliberately evil damage that stretches out from that invisible place right into the unsuspecting folks who live day to day in The Real World. Those folks do not stand a chance to escape being affected by the magician's insidious determination to capture them all. Eventually, Adam and Eve are reincarnated into The Real World on a specific mission, years beyond the peak of that magician's vicious reign. By then, the worse had evidently devolved into the worst that ultimately leads through to Book Three, The End Of The End. This story is utterly fascinating. Its twisting and turning through that which may be somewhat recognizable is more tangled up into the fantastical that is addictive to read onward to find out what happens next. All throughout there is mystery, magic, love, hate, obsessiveness, rejection, maliciousness, brilliance, stupidity, sickness, healing, forgiveness, revenge, romance, weirdness, wonderment, heavy heartedness, humor, life, death, and reincarnation. All along, there is that concept of eternity being a time lasting for Forever. Which, according to all reports in The Real World, Forever is a long, long time. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is the complete epic trilogy in one colorful volume. There is no other story like it in The Real World. Not from When Begin Began, throughout The Murky Middle, and all the way to The End Of The End. It is a story that is a Fairytale and a Fantasy. Magical and Mythical. Poetic and Artistic. The Legend Of The Secret Saga is fantastical and not as expected it might be!
