Thursday, December 06, 2007

Well, it could always be worse

I lost a library book that I was reading and recently found it under a pile of dirty laundry. This book and I are "reunited and it feels so good." And we chill on the train.

Today at the West 4th stop, I came across this within its pages:

"His [Bill Eberhard's] argument is eloquently laid out in a book I have heard described by some as the most stimulating they have ever read. However, with a title like Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia, it isn't the sort of book you would read on the train."
-Tim Birkhead
Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition


Had a good loud laugh over that on the platform.

I suppose Birkhead has a point here. Perhaps it should come with an optional plain and anonymous brown paper dust cover.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In "The Year of Living Biblically", a book where a secular Jewish Esquire editor chronicles his attempt to abide by *all* of the Bible's dictates for a year, he talks about visiting a Bible store (that's right, a store for just Bibles) in NYC that offered one edition with a cover disguised to look like a teen magazine, so you could read it on the train without catching dirty looks from all those atheist chauvanist New Yorkers. The author points out the strangeness of the implication that it's more acceptable for a grown man to read a teen magazine on a NY subway car than for a grown man to read the Good Book.

ergo said...

eh: There's a great scene in the movie "Breaking Away" like that where a racing bike obsessed teenage boy is holding up what appears to be a playboy to the relief of his father. what his father doesn't know is that the porn is a cover for a bike racing magazine he is reading and he is drooling over a very expensive bike frame.