At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life
Wade Rouse$23.99(USD)
We all dream it.
Wade Rouse actually did it. Finally fed up with the frenzy of city life and a job he hates, Wade Rouse decided to make either the bravest decision of his life or the worst mistake since his botched Ogilvie home perm: to uproot his life and try, as Thoreau did some 160 years earlier, to "live a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions."
In this rollicking and hilarious memoir, Wade and his partner, Gary, leave culture, cable, and consumerism behind and strike out for rural Michigan–a place with fewer people than in their former spinning class. There, Wade discovers the simple life isn’t so simple. Battling blizzards, bloodthirsty critters, and nosy neighbors equipped with night-vision goggles, Wade and his spirit, sanity, relationship, and Kenneth Cole pointy-toed boots are sorely tested with humorous and humiliating frequency. And though he never does learn where his well water actually comes from or how to survive without Kashi cereal, he does discover some things in the woods outside his knotty-pine cottage in Saugatuck, Michigan, that he always dreamed of but never imagined he’d find–happiness and a home.
At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream is a sidesplitting and heartwarming look at taking a risk, fulfilling a dream, and finding a home–with very thick and very dark curtains.
Zobmondo!! You Gotta Be Kidding - The Crazy Game of "Would You Rather" for Kids
$24.99(USD)
You Gotta Be Kidding... The Crazy Games of Would You Rather? for Kids. Of course we are kidding. After all, these Would You Rather choices are not real, but they are fun to think and talk about. You Gotta Be Kidding! gets kids and grown-ups thinking, laughing, reasoning, and having a blast making goofy decisions and completing the wild Would You Rather Challenges. Best of all, kids have fun speaking up for a change, instead of always saying 'I do not know'. Watch imagination rule and confidence build as kids get comfortable standing up for their choice while laughing the whole time. Would You Rather eat a bucket of apple stems or eat 20 banana peels? Gross, huh? But you cannot say ¿neither¿ when playing this game. Even though nobody would be dumb enough to eat that stuff, each player still has to choose. So make your best choice and then speak up and tell everyone why. To win, you must correctly guess what the others will say and successfully complete your even more outrageous challenges as you try to move forward to the Finish Line.
The Man Who Would Be King [VHS]
John Huston$14.98(USD)
A grandly entertaining, old-fashioned adventure based on the Rudyard Kipling short story,
The Man Who Would Be King is the kind of rousing epic about which people said, even in 1975, "Wow! They don't make 'em like that anymore!" When director John Huston (
The Maltese Falcon,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
The African Queen) first started trying to make the film, with Gable and Bogart, the project was derailed by the latter's death. It was a few decades before Huston was able to finally realize his dream movie--and with an unimprovable cast. Sean Connery and Michael Caine are, respectively, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan, a pair of lovably roguish British soldiers who set out to make their fortunes by conning the priests of remote Kafiristan into making them kings. It's a rollicking tale, an epic satire of imperialism, and the good-natured repartee shared by Caine and Connery is pure gold. In today's screen adventures, humor is usually imposed on the material by a writer or director trying to make some kind of cleverly self-aware comment ("Hey, we know it's a movie!"), but that sort of jokiness can create so much ironic distance that it pushes the audience right out of the picture. Huston lets the humor emerge naturally from the characters, for whom we wind up caring more deeply than we ever expected. The digital video disc includes a wonderful documentary on the making of the film.
--Jim Emerson
