BobHarris.com - Friday pudublogging: How the Zebudu is Made

Books! Actual books!

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-- The Wall Street Journal

"Pulls you in like a good sports story"

-- The New York Times Book Review

"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"

-- New York Newsday

"A surprisingly touching memoir"

-- Entertainment Weekly

"Snappy and informative"

-- Associated Press

"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."

-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life

"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."

-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game

"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"

-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All

"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."

-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history

Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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— Boston Globe

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— New York Observer

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— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”

— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

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Friday pudublogging: How the Zebudu is Made

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Friday, 20 July 2007

This week, another entry courtesy the unbelievably cool private tour given Team Pudu by the Los Angeles Zoodu: the exceedingly rare (in fact, it's classified as "Completely Imaginary") English Zebudu:

The Zebudu is a cross between a horse, a pedestrian walkway, two pudus, and a UPC scanner. Sometimes there is another Zebudu involved, but not always.

You really don't want to know the mechanics of mating, but it should not be attempted at rush hour. Also, everyone always winds up on the other side of the road, with no idea how they got there.

Fortunately, the upside comes when you try to buy a Zebudu in a convenience store. Through a miracle of nature, the stripes are already encoded to come up as "Zebudu" in most checkout systems. (Unless the store has recently upgraded to Vista. Then all bets are off, and the store probably has bigger problems anyway. I hear that Microsoft's next OS upgrade will even ship with a small fire extinguisher, just in case.)

The only real question, then, is how to get your Zebudu up onto the checkout counter in the first place. The ancient Greeks developed several acceptable techniques involving the five basic machines, and Archimedes was fond of floating his Zebudu up onto the counter, which offered the side benefit of a gentle cleansing action. The only shortcoming, for the Greeks, was needing to wait another 2000 years for the laser to be invented, a puzzle they only recently got around.

Fortunately, modern zoologists have discovered a much simpler approach: just put another Zebudu on the other side of the cash register, a horse in the pedestrian crossing, and two pudus across the street. Ten minutes later, there will be a receipt in your hand, a Zebudu in your car, and two confused-looking pudus riding a horse into the sunset, holding hands and looking for something to eat.