{"id":129,"date":"2004-05-17T08:16:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-17T08:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=129"},"modified":"2004-05-17T08:16:00","modified_gmt":"2004-05-17T08:16:00","slug":"unusually-stupid-americans-a-compendium-of-all-american-stupidity-by-kathrun-petras-and-ross-petras-2003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2004\/05\/unusually-stupid-americans-a-compendium-of-all-american-stupidity-by-kathrun-petras-and-ross-petras-2003\/","title":{"rendered":"Unusually Stupid Americans: A Compendium of All-American Stupidity, by Kathrun Petras and Ross Petras (2003)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some things in this book made me laugh really hard&#8211;notably the product warning labels, some of which I&#8217;d seen before but I still like. Collapsible stroller: &#8220;Remove child before folding.&#8221; Good collections of stupid products, stupid things people have said, stupid tax-writeoffs, etc. and lots of good corporate stupidity and stupid greed. Unfortunately, nothing is documented and quite a few anecdotes reek of urban legend or distortion. As a kid I used to read my grandmother&#8217;s Reader&#8217;s Digests cover to cover, and I particularly liked Senator William Proxmire&#8217;s Golden Fleece awards, which were lauded by RD. Only as an adult did I learn that Proxmire typically misrepresented the scientific studies he reviled. I get the impression these authors take the same liberties, selectively playing up some aspects for their humor or &#8220;outrageousness.&#8221; Does that matter in a humor book? If it&#8217;s presented as fact, yes it does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some things in this book made me laugh really hard&#8211;notably the product warning labels, some of which I&#8217;d seen before but I still like. Collapsible stroller: &#8220;Remove child before folding.&#8221; Good collections of stupid products, stupid things people have said, stupid tax-writeoffs, etc. and lots of good corporate stupidity and stupid greed. Unfortunately, nothing is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}