Book Review - Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know Instructions for Life From the Everyday to the Exotic
Category Book Review Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know Instructions for Life From the Everyday to the Exotic
Another interesting library pickup... Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know Instructions for Life From the Everyday to the Exotic by Derek Fagerstrom, Lauren Smith, and "The Show Me Team". Anytime someone tells me there's 500 things I should know how to do, I'm naturally curious as to how ill-equipped I might be to make it through life. While I would quibble a bit on the "should know" piece, this really is a good book and one that I may end up ordering from Amazon just to have around.
The chapters are divided into the following basic categories: Make, Eat, Drink, Style, Love, Nest, Grow, Thrive, Go, Survive, and Wow. Rather than go into lengthy text descriptions of each "how to", they've opted to use diagrams with as few words as possible. So under Drink, you learn how to properly open and pour a bottle of wine, how to remove cork bits from wine, how to evaluate a wine, and how to "dazzle with sabrage". Yeah, I didn't know about that last one either. It comes from Napoleonic times, when soldiers would use their swords to open a bottle of champaign by striking the lip of the bottle where the seams meet. This removed both the tip of the bottle *and* the cork, and was quite the show. Granted, I don't know how many of you have a decent sword on hand to entertain your guests, but if you do...
Not all of the how to's are quite that spectacular. You learn how to tie a bowtie and a windsor knot in a regular tie. There's how to hem jeans (a constant in our family of short people), how to sew on a new button, and how to iron a button-down shirt. Of course, that's all prefaced by how to wear a kimono and how to decode kimono styles. The first part of that list I'd find very useful. The last part? Not so much if I'm not heading over to Japan anytime in the near future. But I now know how to create water in the desert, use my pants to stay afloat, wrestle an alligator (useful for my next DisneyWorld trip?), and how to get up on a elephant, camel, and horse (again, probably not immediately useful for my near-term future)...
Yeah, you really do need to take some of these as very tongue-in-cheek, as the odds of needing to know how to get out of quicksand probably wouldn't make my top 500 list. But the illustrations are great, the range of topics is impressive, and it's quite amazing how much they end up conveying without paragraphs of explanation. You'll know how to do some stuff already, you'll never need to know other items, but I'm pretty sure you'll come away from Show Me How wanting to try out a few new skills. Personally, I want to try the "open a beer with another beer" trick... :)
Another interesting library pickup... Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know Instructions for Life From the Everyday to the Exotic by Derek Fagerstrom, Lauren Smith, and "The Show Me Team". Anytime someone tells me there's 500 things I should know how to do, I'm naturally curious as to how ill-equipped I might be to make it through life. While I would quibble a bit on the "should know" piece, this really is a good book and one that I may end up ordering from Amazon just to have around.
The chapters are divided into the following basic categories: Make, Eat, Drink, Style, Love, Nest, Grow, Thrive, Go, Survive, and Wow. Rather than go into lengthy text descriptions of each "how to", they've opted to use diagrams with as few words as possible. So under Drink, you learn how to properly open and pour a bottle of wine, how to remove cork bits from wine, how to evaluate a wine, and how to "dazzle with sabrage". Yeah, I didn't know about that last one either. It comes from Napoleonic times, when soldiers would use their swords to open a bottle of champaign by striking the lip of the bottle where the seams meet. This removed both the tip of the bottle *and* the cork, and was quite the show. Granted, I don't know how many of you have a decent sword on hand to entertain your guests, but if you do...
Not all of the how to's are quite that spectacular. You learn how to tie a bowtie and a windsor knot in a regular tie. There's how to hem jeans (a constant in our family of short people), how to sew on a new button, and how to iron a button-down shirt. Of course, that's all prefaced by how to wear a kimono and how to decode kimono styles. The first part of that list I'd find very useful. The last part? Not so much if I'm not heading over to Japan anytime in the near future. But I now know how to create water in the desert, use my pants to stay afloat, wrestle an alligator (useful for my next DisneyWorld trip?), and how to get up on a elephant, camel, and horse (again, probably not immediately useful for my near-term future)...
Yeah, you really do need to take some of these as very tongue-in-cheek, as the odds of needing to know how to get out of quicksand probably wouldn't make my top 500 list. But the illustrations are great, the range of topics is impressive, and it's quite amazing how much they end up conveying without paragraphs of explanation. You'll know how to do some stuff already, you'll never need to know other items, but I'm pretty sure you'll come away from Show Me How wanting to try out a few new skills. Personally, I want to try the "open a beer with another beer" trick... :)
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