The Annotated @Horse_ebooks

A public resource from Jack Stuef

As long as there are people searching for it on the Internet, there will be a terrible, overpriced ebook on the subject. In this case, cat piss.

I can honestly say that I was at my wit’s end and was 1 day away from bringing my cat to the SPCA.

My husband was fed up with our cat peeing on his clothes (only his) and we had tried everything we could think of to get him to stop.

Our vet told us that “some cats just do that” and we believed him.

Presenting: Thinking Outside The Box: How to Stop Your Cat Peeing Outside The Litter Box. A novel for our time.

That’s right, ladies, he’s an Official Article Columnist. And yes, the progress bar on that sound clip fills up pale yellow as it buffers. Eww. Cat piss.

My cat was a ‘sneaky-leaker’ and cost me $4289.19 in condo repairs…

Before you ask, yes, you can “test drive” this $20 cat-piss book for 60 days and “get a refund” if you aren’t satisfied with its effect on your cat’s urination. (Note: You will not get a refund.)

Yes, this banner is literally claiming that this book has been “seen on” search engines. Also, these cats appear to have URINATED MERCURY and/or Alex Mack. Missing the litter box may be the least of their problems.

“Whyte, Mike.” “Stop Cat Peeing — In 4 Days Or Less.” Web. 24 September 2012.

7 months ago - 10

Horse does not need to extend his demographic reach; he is beloved by all the children of the world. But this text comes from a 1996 issue of Ebony magazine. Specifically, Laura B. Randolph’s “Sisterspeak” column. This is one of the laziest magazine columns I’ve ever read. Randolph discusses “The Question” she likes to ask celebrities: “What’s the best advice you have ever been given?” According to Randolph, this is such a brilliant, penetrating question professional publicists never see it coming. Right.

I’m not sure what this advice means. Does God dole out fortune based on votes he receives from praying people? Or does this advice just mean, basically, “feel guilty if you something”?

Obviously, Oprah will have a better answer:

“You’re not in it.” Terrific, coherent insight. 

As if the idea behind this column wasn’t trite enough, Randolph fills out the space by literally listing off a series of her favorite aphorisms, such as, “There is no right way to do a wrong thing.” 

16. When you’ve got a secure, cushy columnist gig at a magazine, you should just phone it in.

What I’m saying is Ebony should give Horse_ebooks his own column. He’s the brown Sarah Jessica Parker.

Randolph, Laura B. “Words To Live By.” Ebony Sept 1996: 28. Print.

8 months ago - 2

“Deviance” is a word with strong negative connotations. Yet the existence of this robot horse is a deviation from the supposed purpose of Twitter as a social tool for real humans, and we love him for it. In this tweet, he points us to a line from an academic book on deviance, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance by Howard Saul Becker:

Becker writes that this example comes from an academic named, curiously enough, Melville Dalton. As he does with pyramids, Horse has some sort of affixation with the name Dalton. In a previous post, I looked at a line tweeted by horse from a film character named Dalton. This morning, he tweeted words culled from a Congressional record from the 1990s referring to Max Dalton, an American who was killed in Costa Rica.

Melville Dalton’s research found “systematic rule-breaking by employees of industrial organizations, department stores, and similar work establishment,” according to Becker. The ham thievery was the best of Dalton’s examples to tweet; the rest are rather banal.

For a book on deviance, the whole thing is rather dull. But it does mention the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, and interesting case of Congress levying a tax on the sale of cannabis, rather than, you know, just throwing a few generations of black men in prison. It’s worth reading the Wikipedia article. And laughing at the squares in government jobs who don’t know how to spell “marijuana”:

Although the spelling “marijuana” is more common in current usage, the correct spelling in the Marihuana Tax Act is “marihuana”. “Marihuana” was the spelling most commonly used in Federal Government documents at the time.

Becker, Howard Saul. So, Ted Danson. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Print.

9 months ago - 3

This time, Horse has gotten an English workbook stuck in his hooves: How To Punctuate, Grades 6-8. I didn’t know there was a specific way you were supposed to punctuate in grades 6-8. Oh wait, yes I did, (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*: you ✧✧✧✧punctuate✧✧✧✧ like ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ ಥthisಥ (︶ω︶)

This tweet comes from a worksheet question on underlining, italicizing, and using quotation marks:

That one’s rather boring. But Horse stumbled upon something intriguing here: This middle-school textbook, like Horse, is full of great non-sequiturs:

Pay no heed to Sara’s budding anorexia, those creepy human-looking bones Molly’s stuck into cement out back, or whatever is murdering the speaker in number 6. This is a punctuation workbook. The only help you need to provide is sticking some quotation marks in there.

Let’s get busy with the paint!

Apparently being in middle school is a lot more terrifying that I remember. Children are constantly getting maimed in this workbook while the adults look on obliviously, muttering to themselves about South American geography:

Then there’s the mundane punctuating preteens have to do when they’re aiding and abetting criminals or monitoring a disputed election in a third-world country:

The only way children can cope with the murderous chaos of the modern world, this book seems to argue, is to punctuate it. And appreciate the simple things:

Breyer, Michelle. How To Punctuate, Grades 6-8. Westminster, CA: Teacher Created Resources, 1999. Print.

9 months ago - 14

In the old days, we didn’t have plagiarist robot horses around to sell us products. There were salesmen. Yesterday, Horse pointed us to the February 19, 1949 issue of Billboard magazine (“The Billboard”) and an ad from a matchbook supplier directed at would-be salesmen:

This sales system is supposed to add an element of gambling to the everyday matchbook purchase. The fruits mentioned (and gnarled by the text-scanning bots) in Horse’s tweet correlate to the jackpots buyers can win if the ticket in their matchbook matches them. So if you got three oranges on your ticket, you would win $0.50, and hey, you were going to buy matches anyway, because cigarettes are delicious. It’s an efficient, time-worn prize system that requires no Howie Mandels whatsoever.

“It resembles an ordinary book of paper matches, so can therefore be sold anywhere, any time without attracting attention,” the ad states. Because if people got word scamps were walking away from you with 50 cents in their pocket, that’s a big security risk.

This bit of text is an interesting choice for Horse. In a way, a Twitter robot slinging ebooks is a modern analogue to the sort of sales schemes once advertised in the back of magazines. Though perhaps this ad would have been a better parallel:

Nay.

 

Neigh.

Universal Manufacturing Co. Advertisment. The Billboard. 19 Feburary 1949. Print.

9 months ago - 6

Horse goes to Japan! Or rather steals a string of text from a hundred-year-old book that’s supposed to teach you conversational Japanese:

Here’s another relevant passage:

We are all mere 馬鹿 at the hooves of the horse-doctor.

Adams, W. A. Japanese Conversation In Six Months: A New Method. Yokohama, Japan: Kelly & Walsh, 1905. Print.

9 months ago - 3

This is a case of Horse scanning text in an old book and coming across something he doesn’t understand. Thankfully, we have bots of our own that speak the same language: search engines. On this tweet, Google points us to this “eating chart” from a 1939 children’s book called Growing Big and Strong:

According to the opening pages, this is part of a series of health instructional books written for children. The cover art is terrific:

Like many old public-doman ebooks today, this was scanned from a copy in an actual library, in this case San Francisco’s Prelinger Library. Horse can trawl his way through this book to pick up text, but there are other signs of life here he can’t capture. For example, this drawing was made in the book and has now been archived for all of time:

The health tips here are all rather sound. We’d do well to follow them today:

But some of the analogies don’t hold up so well 70 years later:

Wastes in the large intestine are the parts of food that the body cannot digest. We may call them the “ashes” of food. The body will not do its work well if it does not get rid of these “ashes,” or wastes, every day.

Dicky forgot to take the ashes out of the furnace, but he never forgets to get rid of the ashes of his body. He wants to stay healthy.

Dicky never forgets to shit.

Andress, J. Mace, et al. Growing Big and Strong. Boston: Ginn, 1939. Print.

9 months ago - 5

Chiiiiiiicks. Based on data from Jande (1972).

Hall, Brian Keith. Bones and Cartilage: Developmental and Evolutionary Skeletal Biology. London: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005. Print.

9 months ago

You really should. This is Horse’s best ebook of the day. Look at these things:

Maybe it’s just the lighting, but these glass box things appear a little too macabre to be holiday themed. They look like they could be caskets for particularly flamboyant stillborn infants. Finally, something more depressing about Christmas than the suicide rates. 

Not sold yet? Let the lighted Christmas Block lady seal the deal:

This Amazing Informative EBook will be available here for download anytime of the day or night, even at 2:00 a.m.

That’s right, the Internet is even open at 2 am.

Obviously, the author of this ebook seems to be pretty well put together to this point, but there’s reason to think she may not be of sound mind:

Jesus Christ, crazy, pull yourself together.

Bush, Kat. How to Make Lighted Christmas Glass Blocks. Brite Blocks. Web. 30 July 2012.

9 months ago - 5

After tweeting selections from parrot-care and personal-wellness e-books in the past day,  Horse turns to a more scholarly work, Mexico and the Sexenio Curse: Presidential Successions and Economic Crises in Modern Mexico, a 1999 book from economist Jonathan Heath and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. According to the book’s lone Amazon.com review, “En este libro se analizan los factores que han provocado en los ultimos años crisis recurrentes cada fin de sexenio.” So there you have it.

Horse is pointing specifically to this table in the book:

As you can see, things are important.

The word “horse” never appears in this book. But our equine friend still thinks it’s important his followers be able to predict Mexican economic policy as we approach the year 2000. Important important important important.

Heath, Jonathan. Mexico and the Sexenio Curse: Presidential Successions and Economic Crises in Modern Mexico. Washington: CSIS Press, 1999. Print.

9 months ago - 1

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