1. Bitrix24.Com
Corporate intranets can set companies back tens of thousands of dollars. Fortunately, businesses consisting of less than 12 employees have the option to receive intranet from Bitrix24.com at absolutely no cost. It provides fully functional CRM, planner, project and task manager, as well as many other convenient elements at no charge. All these features are also available for lager businesses of over 12 employees at an affordable $99 per month.

2. Logaster.Com
All businesses require a logo. Sadly, a single logo put together by a professional designer can cost hundreds of dollars. Crowdsourcing will still cost a business a hundred dollars or more for a professional logo. In contrast, Logaster is a free of charge logo creator with extra features available such as business cards and fax cover sheets for a monthly subscription of only $5.

3. PickyDomains.com
Searching for fresh, new ideas for domain names but all the attractive ones are already being used? Some people choose to expend thousands of dollars to use branding agencies like cyberquarters. PickDomains.com offers risk free naming so itїs not necessary for you to dish out large sums of money anymore. Just filling out what you need (domain name, or slogan) sends your request to our more than 55,000 registered contributers who will approach you with hundreds of proposals. It is only $50 to accept one of their offers. If you decide against them there is no charge to you.

4. JetRadar.com
Most people are aware that Expidia, Orbits, and CheapFlights.com offer large savings to their customers on airfare. What most people are unaware of is that JetRadar.com offers airline tickets at even lower prices. Being a meerasearchengine, JetRadar processes your requests through every major travel agency, flight site and 728 different airlines. Airlines are known for making special deals available only through their corporate website in attempts to attract their customers away from other ticket providers. JetProvider scans for special sales by airlines and makes them accessible to anyone.

5. RetailMeNot.com
For those who enjoy shopping online and want to save on their purchases, coupons are the can help you achieve tremendous savings. As a social network specializing in coupon sharing, RetailMeNot allows its users to receive large discounts even when shopping on famous online stores. Users can also find out what current online trends are by searching for top rated coupons. In other words, for those that like keeping up to date with fashion, RetailMeNot informs you as to what trends other people interested in. The RetailMeNot newsletter also sends registered users the most recent updates on coupons.

6. SideJobTrack.com
SideJobTrack is a free invoicing tool designed for part-time contractors which is perfect for those who want to oversee several jobs at once. Particularly with online work, it can be a task to keep track of payments for a multitude of jobs. SideJobTrack makes the job simpler. As a job tracker that is web-based it has elements focused at eliminating problems with project management, invoicing, and reporting.

7. iSpionage.com
Those with online competition may ask themselves; how much money their competitors spend on Google Adwords, which keywords create the most visitors for their website or, how many people visit their website every month. iSpionage.com provides answers to all of these questions and more. iSpionage offers a free account with all services previously stated and 3 searches a day or a paid version.

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OK, so in Parts 1 and 2, I told the story of my first steps with PickyDomains.com – namely getting publicity from bloggers and news sites for free. The next step was to buy some publicity – namely blog reviews. Back then (let me remind you, it was 2007) quite a few get-paid-for-review services appeared. ReviewMe.com as particularly hot and PayPerPost.com was getting a lot of traction as well.

I opted for ReviewMe.Com. I quickly learned that most reviews would cost me anywhere between 80 and 150 dollars (that is, if I wanted reviews to appear on blogs with PageRank and readership – there has never been shortage of cheap junky made-for-SEO blogs, especially on PPP). This was a lot of money, and ReviewMe.Com was partly to blame – they paid only 50% of the money to bloggers and took the rest. For the record, the highest I paid for a review was $500. I am never doing it again.

The idea to cut the middleman out was obvious. I started using ‘pay per post’ sites only to find blogs that offered advertising and approached owners directly. This approach cut my costs of getting published in half. I tried haggling some more and then an interesting thing happened. One blogger told me that $30 that I was offering was too low, because it would take him an hour to actually write the review and his time was more valuable than that. So I offered him to provide a written review and he’d publish it for lower price, provided the approved it. It worked.

After that my approach to buying reviews for PickyDomains changed. I felt that I could justify $30 for getting by blog reviewed. If blogger asked for more, I’d inform him or her that that was outside my budget, but I could provide review myself, if the price was lowered. Later we started advertising the fact that PickyDomains would pay $30 for review right on the site – so now I don’t have to spend much time looking for bloggers, as they approach me.

Finally, I found a way to get PickyDomains advertised on blogs for free. Yes, ZERO. And it’s very simple. Guest posts. A lot of blogs accept guest posts. Quite a few actually advertise this fact and have guest blogging or write for us section on their blog. All you have to do is provide a unique (meaning not published anywhere else) well written content. Believe me, you won’t have much competition, because most guest post submissions are pure junk.

Here are a few examples of my guest posts:

http://regulargeek.com/2011/06/20/7-sites-to-help-crowdsource-your-web-work/

http://growmap.com/domain-name-ideas/

http://byterevel.com/2011/10/22/9-wacky-but-successful-website-ideas/

Why am I submitting guest posts in this format? Because it’s easy to publish your guest posts this way. If I was to offer PickyDomains overview as a guest post – it would surely get rejected. But by making a ‘list’ guest post is no longer about just PickyDomains. The second, more important reason, is the topic. Some blogs are about writing or blogging. Others are about tech startups. There are blogs about bootstrapping. Or branding. Or crowdsourcing. The list format lets you tailor guest post to each blog you are pitching your story to. Finally, when you make a list, link to your site looks natural, because you are linking to every site you mention. Usually links are allowed in the signature of the guest post and not in the body. With my approach, I NEVER had any issues getting my link where it mattered (nobody reads the signature).

At first I did both writing and pitching guest posts myself. It quickly became a time consuming affair, since I was writing a new post almost every day and it quickly became ‘old’. I was getting tired. So I started outsourcing (I REALLY recommend this site) first writing and then placing guest posts. Obviously, it was costing my money, so the true cost was no longer zero, but it did achieve an important goal – now several blogs write about PickyDomains every week with very little effort on my behalf.

That’s it for today, but more is coming. And if you have any questions or have a service that you’d like me to promote through guest posts with PickyDomains, use PickyDomains support form to contact me.

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http://www.threadflip.com/

If you’re a person who loves to shop, there’s a chance you’ll come across an item or two that’s sitting practically new inside your closet. And if the novelty and/or thrill of the idea of owning such an item already left you, you can always put your unwanted fashion up for sale.

San Francisco startup Threadflip is out to give users a novel way of discovering, buying and selling fashion. Users of the site upload images of items - clothing, bags, shoes, jewelry - they wish to sell and set their own price tags. Photos can be imported from Instagram and Facebook.

One feature the site offers is convenient shipping. The moment your item lands itself a buyer, Threadflip sends you a prepaid box, shipping label, even wrapping material. And if you’re hands are too full to allow you time to do the selling yourself, Threadflip also offers a “white glove service” where all you do is send your items t o the company, and Threadflip’s stylists do the photo uploading and pricing research for you.

A 15% cut goes to Threadflip for regular sales, whereas it charges 40% of the purchase price for its white glove service.

Threadflip aims to build a tight and solid community of social shopping enthusiasts.

[Via - Unusual Business Ideas]

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The next time you find yourself pounding your keyboard in frustration because the domain name you want is already taken, direct your ire toward Mike Mann.

Mann is one of the longest members of the clubby world of domain speculators, and he’s buying up names in force these days. And not all on the aftermarket, as some others do. But new names. Dot-com names that aren’t registered — even though 100 million-plus already are — that he then turns around and sells for a few hundred bucks, sometimes far more.

And this week, in a span that lasted less than 24 hours across Tuesday and Wednesday, Mann snapped up 14,962 domains — 1,822 starting Tuesday evening and the rest on Wednesday.

“I’m just really greedy,” said Mann, a man no one would describe as modest. “I want to own the world.”

First, the quick backstory. Mann, who’s 45 and lives in Delaware, joined the dot-com land grab relatively early, in the late 1990s. He had founded an ISP called Internet Interstate, but one day in 1998, much to his surprise, he got a $25,000 offer for a domain he owned, Menus.com. The following day he got a $50,000 offer.

“I was like, ‘I paid $70 for this,’” said Mann, who tends to sport dark glasses and, despite the outfit in the photo, doesn’t smoke cigarettes. “The next day, I went into the domain business.”

Mann went on to become one of the most aggressive domain speculators in a world that was — and still largely is — the digital Wild West. In the early years, registering good names wasn’t that hard, and some people made many, many millions doing just that.

But as time went on, it became far more difficult. The shrewdest (or craftiest) of the so-called domainers went to great lengths to bag their URL prey. They wrote scripts to pound on the registrars, working in the dark of night to “catch” names the nanosecond they expired, or “dropped.” (The king of the “drop catchers” was a mysterious man named Yun Ye, who built a portfolio he sold to the now-public Marchex in 2005 for $164 million.)

Some cut deals with small registrars so they could get direct connections to the names that were expiring — in effect, buying their way to the front of the line, as I documented in this piece, “The man who owns the Internet.” Helping to drive it all: Google and Yahoo, which supply the pay-per-click ads that fill so many undeveloped, or “parked,” sites that people land on by typing URLs directly into a browsers’ address bar.

Mann held his own — big time. He built up a business called BuyDomains that in 2005 he sold to Boston-based Highland Capital for about $80 million. That business is now called NameMedia, and it’s going strong, though in 2008 it pulled its planned IPO because of the economic meltdown. One thing that Mann sold to NameMedia: A patent he was awarded in 2003 for a system he developed to generate domain name recommendations and then register the domains.

In short, Mann came up with his own weapons. After he sold to NameMedia, of which he still owns a 15 percent stake, Mann had a noncompete that kept him away from the domain game for about four years. Instead, he worked on his many other ventures, such as SEO.com and a nonprofit called Grassroots.org.

But as soon as he could, he jumped back in. That was about two years ago, and ever since, he’s been buying an average of 300 names a day and selling them through his company, DomainMarket.com. That business, he said, brings in about $400,000 a month.

Over the last couple of months, however, cash flow got tight as he was focused on other businesses, so Mann held off buying names. He didn’t stop adding to his list of names to buy, however. It’s that list that turned into this week’s shopping spree.

“I haven’t heard of anyone doing an en masse splurge like that in several years,” said Ron Jackson, who runs Domain Name Journal, the trade site for the domain world.

So how did he do it? Part software power, part human power. He starts with a tool built in-house that, among other things, sifts through Google-friendly keywords, looks at traffic potential, filters out obvious trademark violators, and then ranks and scores possible names. Then comes the human part.

“We have a filter, but I’m the world’s most efficient human filter for this sort of thing,” said Mann, true to form. “I don’t think anyone can read huge lists of domain names as quickly as I can and understand what they’re reading. I’m a pattern reader. It’s a huge pain in the ass, but it’s what I do for a living.”

Then the machines take over. “The robot just goes to the registrars — buy, buy, buy,” he said.

While some big domainers run their own registrars, cutting out the likes of Go Daddy as middlemen so they can buy directly from VeriSign, which runs the registry, Mann does not. He registers his names through Go Daddy and several others. The cost of his two-day binge: Roughly $100,000.

These names are not Internet gold, mind you. They are not Sex.com, which sold for the highest price on record and, incidentally, which Mann was a part owner of for a while. They’re names like CeoHealthClub.com, ChineseFoodCatering.com, BaptistChurchCamp.com and DrugDevelopers.com — names that he’s confident he can sell for a decent profit.

“There’s these idiots that are questioning this, claiming I don’t know what I’m doing and throwing away my money,” said Mann. “The issue is whether this batch worth is 100K. Any professional can tell you yes.”

That’s astonishing confidence in a market this hard to predict. The value of names collapsed with the economy a few years ago, and demand dried up for all but the best names. And plenty of companies are glad to start their businesses with .CO or .ME names, or simply use quirky spellings so as not to pay the crazy prices demanded by greedy domainers, which is why Flickr and Digg are spelled the way they are.

Even so, I wouldn’t bet against Mann. Nor would I suggest trying this at home.

[Via - PickyDomains.com]

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More than a decade ago, Daniel Suelo closed his bank account and moved into a desert cave. Here’s how he eats, sleeps, and evades the law.

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http://www.safetytat.com/

If you have you ever lost your child, even for a moment, you know that it is every parent’s worst nightmare.

Here’s a product to make you feel better about that eventuality: SafetyTats are temporary child identification tattoos that when applied to a child’s arm provide an immediate and highly visible form of identification and contact should your child become lost. Unlike just writing your telephone number of your child’s arm, the temporary tattoo is waterproof.

Where’d the idea come from?

The idea for SafetyTat temporary child ID tattoos was born of necessity one weekend at an amusement park. On Labor Day Weekend, Baltimore Mom, Michele Welsh and her husband, there with their three small children, felt out-numbered. To stave her panic, she quickly wrote her mobile phone number on each of their arms with a ballpoint pen. As she did this, she thoughtfully explained to each of them the importance of staying close to Mommy and Daddy. She also told them that if they were separated that the number on their arm was a way to reconnect with them.

Throughout the day of fun, Michele had to rewrite the number several times as it smeared or washed off. Several parents in the park stopped her to ask if that was her number on the kids’ arms. Each time, they loved the idea.

The day was a success and the idea for SafetyTat temporary child id tattoos was born.

[Via - Dane Carson]

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http://www.paulsammut.com/ramos/

There may be a lucky few who never have trouble getting up in the morning, but for everyone else, engineer and designer Paul Sammut has a new solution. Now fully funded on Kickstarter, Sammut’s new Ramos alarm clock can’t be turned off by any ordinary means; rather, users must get up and walk to an accompanying defuse panel to punch in the clock’s preset deactivation code.

There’s no “snooze” button in easy reach on the Ramos clock, which has been in development for years, Sammut says. “Ramos is a clock I made after I got tired of constantly oversleeping,” he explains. “I needed something that would force me out of bed.” No surprise, then, that the Ramos can only be turned off when the user gets up and enters in a code on a separate wireless defuse panel, which Sammut suggests be placed in the kitchen or bathroom. “You’ll have to use your brain a bit more, which will help wake you up,” he notes. “Best of all, after you turn off the alarm you’ll find yourself in your bathroom or kitchen, away from the evil alluring bed and ready to start your day.” An optional snooze mode will be included, but users won’t be able to exceed the number of “snoozes” they preset in advance.

The Ramos can now be preordered on Kickstarter starting at USD 160, with options including either an LED or nixie tube display and a variety of hardwoods and finishes. Specialty retailers around the globe: one to get in on early?

[Via - Springwise]

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1. PickyDomains.Com – this crowd sourcing site specializes in naming things. Like names, domains, product lines, slogans, etc. The service is 100% risk free, meaning clients pay only if they decide to use one of the suggestions offered. Contributors get 40 to 60 percent of the amount paid by client.

2. 99Designs.Com – 99Designs is probably the best known logo crowdsourcing service out there (though it offers all kinds of web design services as well). It’s been growing by leaps and bounds and paid out over $25 million to designers since 2008.

3. oDesk.Com – dubbed ELance killer, oDesk may not kill its main competitor but having a chance to work with both, I can tell you that I like oDesk a whole lot better. It’s probably one of the best sources for crowdsourcing jobs for writers, programmers, designers, artists, marketers, virtual assistance and other freelancers.

4. IdeaBounty.Com – yes, you can even crowdsource ideas. (I wonder if anyone has used existing crowdsourcing service to generate ideas for a new crowdourcing service). As the name implies, IdeaBounty pays for ideas (most clients are corporations). And even though they say ‘ideas are a dime a dozen’, IdeaBounty pays thousands and the top reward so far stands at a cool $20,000.

5. AgentAnything.Com – Any Errand Any Time Any Where – that’s the slogan AgentAnything goes by and that’s pretty much a close description of the service. Unlike the four you just read about, this one leans toward offline tasks and is a lot like Craigslist.

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“Our whole society is designed so that you have to have money,” Daniel Suelo says. “You have to be a part of the capitalist system. It’s illegal to live outside of it.”

Suelo has defied these laws. His primary residence is the canyons near Arches National Park, where he has lived in a dozen caves tucked into sandstone nooks. In the fall of 2002, two years after quitting money, he homesteaded a majestic alcove high on a cliff, two hundred feet across and fifty feet tall. Sitting inside and gazing into the gorge below felt like heralding himself to the world from inside the bell of a trumpet.

Suelo’s grotto was a two-hour walk from pavement, and he settled in for the long haul. He chipped at the rocky ground to create a wide, flat bed, and lined it with tarps and pads and sleeping bags that had been left out with someone else’s trash. He built wood-burning cook-stoves from old tin cans. He learned to forage for cactus pods, yucca seeds, wildflowers, and the watercress that grew in the creek. He drank from springs, bathed in the creek. From a chunk of talus he carved a statue, a ponderous head like some monolith from Easter Island.

In warm months the cave attracted occasional hikers, and when Suelo was away, he left a note. Feel free to camp here. What’s mine is yours. Eat any of my food. Read my books. Take them with you if you’d like. Visitors left notes in return, saying they were pleased with his caretaking.

Then one day, after several years of peace, a ranger from the Bureau of Land Management arrived to evict him. Suelo had long since violated the fourteen-day limit.

“If I were hiking along here and I saw this camp,” said the ranger, “I’d feel like I wasn’t allowed here, that it was someone else’s space. But this is public land.” The ranger wrote a ticket for $120.

“Well, I don’t use money,” Suelo said. “So I can’t pay this.” Not only did he not use money, he had discarded his passport and driver’s license. He had even discarded his legal surname, Shellabarger, in favor of Suelo, Spanish for “soil.”

The ranger felt conflicted. He’d spent years chasing vandals and grave robbers through these canyons; he knew that Suelo was not harming the land. In some ways, Suelo was a model steward. The ranger offered to drive him to the next county to see a judge and resolve the citation.

The next day, these odd bedfellows, a penniless hobo and a federal law enforcer, climbed into a shimmering government-issue truck and sped across the desert. As they drove, Suelo outlined his philosophy of moneyless living while the ranger explained why he had become a land manager– to stop people from destroying nature. “And then someone like you comes along,” he said, “and I struggle with my conscience.”

They arrived at the courthouse. The judge was a kindly white-haired man. “So you live without money,” he drawled. “This is an honorable thing. But we live in the modern world. We have all these laws for a reason.”

Suelo hears this all the time: that we’re living in different times now, that however noble his values, their practice is obsolete. He even heard it once when he knocked on the door of a Buddhist monastery and asked to spend the night, and a monk informed him that rates began at fifty dollars. The Buddha himself would have been turned away, Suelo observed.

“We’re living in a different age than the Buddha,” he was told. But Suelo simply doesn’t accept this distinction.

To the Utah judge casting about for an appropriate sentence, Suelo suggested service at a shelter for abused women and children. They agreed on twenty hours. Suelo volunteered regularly at the shelter anyway, so the punishment was a bit like sending Brer Rabbit back to the briar patch. And within a few weeks of eviction from his grand manor, he found a new cave, this time a tiny crevice where he would not be discovered.

It’s tempting to conclude that Suelo’s years in the wilderness have transformed him into a crusader for the earth. And clearly his lifestyle has a lower impact than virtually anybody else’s in America. Without a car or a home to heat and cool, he produces hardly any carbon dioxide. Foraging for wild raspberries and spearfishing salmon has close to zero environmental cost–no production, no transportation. And although food gathered from a dumpster must be grown and processed and shipped, rescuing it from the trash actually prevents the further expenditure of energy to haul and bury that excess in a landfill.

Suelo brings into existence no bottles, cans, wrappers, bags, packaging, nor those plastic six- pack rings that you’re supposed to snip up with scissors to save the seabirds. As for the benefits of pitching Coke bottles into the recycling bin– Suelo is the guy pulling those bottles out of the bin, using them until they crack, then pitching them back. The carbon footprint of the average American is about twenty tons per year. Suelo’s output is probably closer to that of an Ethiopian– about two hundred pounds, or about one half of 1 percent of an American’s.

“He wants to have the smallest ecological footprint and the largest possible impact at improving the world,” says his best friend, Damian Nash. “His life goal since I met him is to take as little and give as much as possible.”

That said, Suelo constantly rethinks and interprets the rules of living without money. In the spring of 2001, Suelo had his one major lapse. While staying at a commune in Georgia, wondering how he was going to get back to Utah for a friend’s wedding, a most tempting and confounding piece of mail arrived: a tax return in the amount of five hundred dollars. “This experiment of having no money is on hold now,” Suelo wrote in a mass email to friends and family. He cashed the check, paid the deposit on a drive- away car, and blasted across America at the wheel of a brand- new, midnight- blue, convertible Mercedes-Benz 600 sports coupe.

“What a kick it is to go from penniless hitchhiker to driving a Mercedes!” he wrote. “I got a deep breath of the southern U.S. all the way to New Mexico, riding most the way with the top down. On top of that, I get so much pleasure seeing the look on hitch-hikers’ faces when a Mercedes stops for them.” Later that summer he ditched the remainder of the money “because it felt like a ball and chain,” and has not returned to it since.

Suelo’s quest for Free Parking might be easy if he availed himself of government programs or private homeless shelters. But Suelo refuses these charities as by-products of the money system he rejects. He does, however, accept hospitality that is freely given. He has knocked on the door of a Catholic Workers house, a Unitarian church, and a Zen center, and has been offered a place to sleep. He has spent time in a number of communes, including one in Georgia where members weave hammocks to provide income, and another in Oregon where residents grow their own vegetables. In Portland, Oregon, he stays at urban squats populated by anarchists, or in communal homes that welcome transients.

Suelo is also welcomed by family, friends, and complete strangers. He has lost count of the times someone picked him up hitchhiking, then brought him home and served him a meal. A Navajo man gave his own bed to Suelo and slept on the couch, then in the morning treated him to breakfast. Through two decades in Moab, Suelo has developed a reputation as a reliable house sitter. In a town of seasonal workers who often leave home for months at a time, his services are in high demand.

Even with all the roofs offered, Suelo spends the majority of his nights outdoors. He camps in wilderness, the red rock country around Sedona, Arizona, or the Gila of New Mexico, where he spent a few weeks learning survival skills from a hermit. One summer, Suelo commandeered a piece of plastic dock that had floated down the Willamette River, in the heart of Portland, and paddled it to the brambles of the undeveloped island. “I had visions of building a cob house,” he says, but that didn’t pan out.

He spent another summer in the woods by Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco. He dropped his pack just thirty feet from a trail and lived undetected in the heart of one of the wealthiest zip codes in America. He spent a month camped in a bird refuge on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. Turns out there are plenty of places to sleep free in America: you just have to know where to look.

Adapted from Mark Sundeen’s The Man Who Quit Money

[HT - MadConomist]

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http://www.bigcommerce.com/

All venture capitalists have got startup business plans piling on their desks every single day. But how many of them are the breakthrough ideas worth investing in? Australian BigCommerce has proven right to the Massachusetts based venture capital firm General Catalyst. “We quickly signed up our first 1000 customers within three months,” says Eddie Machaalani, the co-funder and co-CEO of BigCommerce, “and now we’re about to hit 20,000 customers after just 17 months.

Mitchell Harper, the other co-founder and co-CEO, explains “you can set up your own online store in a few clicks. We’re growing so quickly because we’ve made it really easy to sell online.”

If you’ve got a product and you need an easy way to sell it and advertise it, BigCommerce might be exactly what you’re looking for. All the marketing tools have been built in and the list of features is countless which targets all potential kinds of client s.

There are e-commerce newbie’s looking for tools to start with: web-based control panel, automated email marketing and almost one hundred store designs. There are e-commerce owners hoping to update and refresh their software with push to Facebook and eBay, SEO and Google Website Optimizer. And there are website designers looking for a ready platform to work with; they’ll look into painless software updates, unlimited design flexibility and premium hosting. To cut the long story short, BigCommerce has got everything for everybody.

The company overview does sound like a cliché online success story. Two IT geeks, a brilliant idea, a lot of hard work, right place, right time, huge demand and a spot on investor. (General Catalyst have also believed in BigFish, airbnb, iWalk and many others). This is how Eddie Machaalani speaks of the beginnings of their cooperation. “When we made the decision to raise capital and did our U.S tour to pitc h different VC firms, General Catalyst had already done a ton of due diligence on the market opportunity, our company and our competitors. They were very eager to invest in the company.”

BigCommerce have recently announced $2M integration fund to follow the market developments and create new better features. The software has now got built-in Pinterest and Quickbooks integration, referral system, a live chat, abandoned cart plugin and many other improvements. They tent to release new features every two weeks.

The software seems to be ahead of its competition (Shopify, Zencart, Magento) according to various online discussions, blogs and comparisons and is only getting better and smarter. E-shopping cart is gaining the whole new meaning. And what does it mean to you? Only one way to find out. (Here is a link for $100 coupon or 30 day free trial provided by BigCommerce for our readers).

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Madconomist.Com]

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1. We Are All Weird

Weirdness takes many forms. When everyone else is carrying nylon computer bags and sporty backpacks, weird people insist on an “old-fashioned” leather briefcase (guilty). Many people think it is weird to go to over 50 Grateful Dead concerts and own recordings of hundreds of their concerts (also guilty). Is it weird to spend six hours on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in a dingy rec room playing Dungeons and Dragons? To collect chewing gum wrappers and own over 2,000, with examples from over 50 countries? To read instead of watching television? To ride a bike instead of driving? The weird is us. And the weird is you.

2. Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods that People Eat

Jerry Hopkins has raised the bar in food scholarship - Extreme Cuisine is an extremely entertaining read and a primary source for anyone interested in how (with recipes) and what other (often rural) world cultures eat. A most worthy successor to Unmentionable Cuisine. Great color photography inserts. Hopkins provides scholarly detail about some subjects some pet-lovers might find less tasty (eating dogs, cats, horse, monkeys, etc), some which are most assuredly unknown by most (eating rooster combs, wattles & testicles) and has a good sense of humor by including dumpster diving and eating roadkill. As Anthony Bourain learned, Hopkins is the perfect guide, the “Old Hand” to the other (than American style packaged foods) food worlds.

3. Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die

in 1700 there were less than 100 causes of death. Today there are 3,000. With each advance of technology, people find new ways to become deceased, often causing trends that peak in the first year. People are now killed by everything, from cell phones, washing machines, lawn mowers and toothpicks, to the boundless catalog of man—made medicines. In Final Exits the causes of death—bizarre or common—are alphabetically arranged and include actual accounts of people, both famous and ordinary, who unfortunately died that way. (Ants, bad words, Bingo, bean bag chairs, flying cows, frozen toilets, hiccups, lipstick, moray eels, road kill, starfish, and toupees are only some of the more unusual causes.)

4. Crazy: Notes On and Off the Couch

While the professionals are trying to help people resolve their problems, the therapists themselves are often depressed, anxious, and prone to panic attacks. They take antipsychotics, self-medicate with booze, and struggle in their own relationships. The ones who are providing the perspective are often the ones with the most on their plate. In short, they are just as “crazy” as the patients. Crazy is the story of how one mental health professional deals with his own personal problems and those of the people he treats. Part exposé and part memoir, it reveals what therapists really think about their profession, their colleagues, their patients, and their own lives.

5. Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude

Amy Bloom’s latest book, Normal, gives those of us who are familiar with her fiction another opportunity to luxuriate in her distinctive, elegant prose. Those not familiar with Bloom’s work are in for a rare treat: a book which employs this writer’s considerable talents (as both a psychotherapist and an artist) for an attentive and comprehensive examination of people whose lives include (but are not limited by) transgender, crossdressing and intersex issues. Bloom doesn’t create “characters” in her exploration of these people; instead, she puts her artistry to work in giving voice to the living, breathing human beings who have the same range of responses as there are fascinating situations in this book.

6. Normal Gets You Nowhere

An amazing succession to her first book, “If You Have To Cry, Go Outside,” Cutrone dives into deeper issues with complete honesty and witty humor that leaves readers feeling inspired. Topics in the book are what many people have contemplated between one another in conversations for years but have never had the nerve to stand up and defend their beliefs or opinions for the sake of revolutionizing change in multiple aspects of current issues and self-awakening. She stands up on a literary soap box to encourage people to question, reflect and embrace free thinking for positive reformations in society.

7. Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices

You probably don’t expect to find yourself compulsively reading a book called an encyclopedia of anything, but then you probably don’t expect to be reading about men who coax angry bees to sting their penises in order to make the organ swell and become more sensitive. The 750+ listings here will propel you from amazement to amazement as they carry you from abduction as a sex act to zoophilia (sex with animals). You will be repelled and excited, entranced and titillated, shocked and sucked right into the world of sexual extremes and oddities. And, all the time, you’ll be making mental notes of which entries you just have to tell this or that friend about.

8. Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho

In the autumn of 1957, the nation learned of a nightmare unfolding in the little rural town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. A local recluse and simpleton by the name of Edward Gein murdered Bernice Worden, the owner of the local hardware store. A murder, even in 1950’s America, wouldn’t grab the attention of most folks, but this crime did. Local police searching Gein’s farmhouse uncovered a soul shattering house of horrors. Not only did they find murder victim Worden in the most degrading condition, the police also discovered pieces of human bodies inside the house. Gein had fashioned soup bowls out of human skulls, masks out of human faces, and furniture out of human flesh. Every hour spent in the farmhouse turned up even more horrors, enough to make even the most hardened cop sick to his stomach. As the official inquiry deepened, America learned that a human monster lived in the most unlikely of settings, a man who embodied virtually every ghastly psychopathology known to modern science. The name Eddie Gein became synonymous with evil and he quickly became part of the dark side of American pop culture.

9. Letters of the Lost - Suicide Notes

Letters of the Lost is a collection of suicide notes. For many victims of suicide, writing a letter, or an email was not on the agenda. This book communicates the terrible loneliness there is in deciding to kill oneself. It covers people from all backgrounds, ages and gender, and hopes to enlighten people on why so many of our friends and family decide they cannot take this life.

10. The New Weird

This avant-garde anthology that presents and defines the New Weird—a hip, stylistic fiction that evokes the gritty exuberance of pulp novels and dime-store comic books—creates a new literature that is entirely unprecedented and utterly compelling. Assembling an array of talent, this collection includes contributions from visionaries Michael Moorcock and China Miéville, modern icon Clive Barker, and audacious new talents Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, and Sarah Monette. An essential snapshot of a vibrant movement in popular fiction, this anthology also features critical writings from authors, theorists, and international editors as well as witty selections from online debates.

[Via - Madconomist.com]

Want more weird?

Dumb But Profitable. 10 Million Dollar Ideas That Shouldn’t Have Worked.
Stupid Shit People ACTUALLY Put On Their Resumes
35 Weird Facts You Never Heard Of
10 Things You Did Not Know You Could Buy On Amazon.Com
What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Know

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