By Caity Weaver

Chloe Gordon, a 32-year-old filmmaker, describes herself as “a person who somewhat ironically engages” with the work of the novelist Dan Brown. She has read all but one of the eight books Mr. Brown has published under his name. 

So when she stumbled upon an internet rumor that identified Mr. Brown as the author of a tongue-in-cheek dating guide from 1995 called “187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman,” she immediately bought it on Amazon.

The 96-page novelty book, which was originally published under the name Danielle Brown, promised very short descriptions of men the author considered unsuitable romantic partners — a book of red flags, if you will. “Men who think Lamaze is a famous French car race,” for example. “Men who decoupage.” “Men with pet rocks.”

But when she opened her mail, Ms. Gordon realized that the wrong book had arrived (“Heretics of Dune,” a 1984 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert). She forgot about it for about a year and then went on Amazon and bought the book again. This time she received Elizabeth Taylor’s 1988 dieting memoir, “Elizabeth Takes Off.”

Having struck out twice on Amazon, Ms. Gordon tried eBay. She paid a seller for the book, and a few days later received a refund and an email explaining that the book did not exist in the seller’s inventory. She ordered a copy from a different seller. This order, too, was canceled and refunded.

Ms. Gordon, who lives in California, did not give up. She ordered the book on AbeBooks, a subsidiary of Amazon. Once again, she did not receive “187 Men to Avoid” but, this time, “The Ghost Light” by Fritz Leiber.

She began to anticipate receiving wrong books. On July 19, she filmed herself opening her most recent Amazon package, which turned out to be a copy of Bill Cosby’s 1992 musings on youth, “Childhood,” and posted it on Twitter. “Oh no,” she groans. “This is worse — it’s getting worse!” 

“This breaks my brain every day,” Ms. Gordon said by telephone on the afternoon her unsolicited copy of Mr. Cosby’s book arrived. Every book she received appeared to have the same bar code printed on its cover — and most of the books’ back covers featured an additional stick-on label from their resellers insistently identifying them as “187 Men to Avoid.” Every label was patently untrue.

And why did the error appear to extend to every independent secondhand seller, too? “I still, to this day — I have no proof that this book is real or exists,” Ms. Gordon said. 

Information about the slim, square-shaped book is difficult to come by. But both the original 1995 edition and a Berkley Trade reprint published in 2006 are listed in various places online. The covers are almost identical — a pigeon-toed blond cartoon woman in a cherry red coat and floppy hat clutches herself protectively as she stands before a large assembly of suited men. The 2006 reprint amends the cover text to read, “Early Humor from the Author of ‘The Da Vinci Code,’” and recasts the author as “Dan Brown Formerly Writing As Danielle Brown.”

Data from NPD BookScan, which has tracked book sales data since the early 2000s, shows that the 2006 edition sold about 1,200 copies.

Ms. Gordon began to entertain conspiracy theories, including about the possible existence of a “person at some warehouse somewhere that’s putting the wrong bar code on everything.”

But what would be a warehouse employee’s motivations for falsifying stock numbers of an obscure, out-of-print dating humor book from 1995?

“There’s not really a version of this that totally makes sense,” Ms. Gordon said. “If I’m using my Dan Brown brain, it’s obviously Dan Brown putting the bar codes on fake books so that no one ever sees this really embarrassing book that he wrote in the ’90s.”

In 1995, the year “187 Men to Avoid” was published, Mr. Brown was working as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and he had begun writing his first novel: the thriller “Digital Fortress.”

His circumstances overlapped neatly with the author bio of “187 Men to Avoid”: “Danielle Brown currently lives in New England — teaching school, writing books, and avoiding men.”

In Lisa Rogak’s second unauthorized biography of Mr. Brown, “Dan Brown: The Unauthorized Biography” (a 2013 follow-up to “The Man Behind the Da Vinci Code: An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown,” published in 2005), Ms. Rogak, an exhaustive if often unsanctioned chronicler of celebrities’ lives, wrote that Mr. Brown had written “187 Men to Avoid” with his future ex-wife Blythe Brown.

According to Ms. Rogak, the couple (who were not yet married at the time “187 Men to Avoid” was published) had found inspiration for the book in “the ludicrous characters and dating and mating methods of the men and women they had witnessed” while living in Los Angeles.

Ms. Rogak’s research also turned up a rare public acknowledgment from Mr. Brown of “187 Men to Avoid,” given in an interview about his novel “Angels and Demons,” which was published in 2000.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/style/dan-brown-advice-book.html

Well, I am a spoil sport... I know where to find the book:

187 Men to Avoid

by Danielle Brown

For women of all ages and stages, from those naively starting out on their quest for true love to those who have been married before and should know better, these one-line observations on the opposite sex serve as amusing warning signs that ultimately save time, effort, and heartbreak in the never-ending search for Mr. Right.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/446965.187_Men_to_Avoid

Now the site has the decency to let us know a little secret: 

Danielle Brown

0 followers

pen name of Dan Brown (of "Da Vinci Code" fame) and his wife Blythe Newlon

Now you know...

------------

Meanwhile in our relative corner of the universe:

After a temporary reprieve due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Earth Overshoot Day — the day humanity is projected to have used up all the planet's biological resources regenerated in one year — has shifted forward again, this year landing on July 29.

"With almost half a year remaining, we will already have used up our quota of the Earth's biological resources for 2021," said Susan Aitken, leader of Glasgow City Council, where world leaders will gather later this year for the COP26 climate summit in November. "If we need reminding that we're in the grip of a climate and ecological emergency, Earth Overshoot Day is it."

As much of the world was living under coronavirus lockdowns in 2020, last year's Overshoot Day fell on August 22, nearly a month later than the high of July 25 set in 2018. But this year, even though carbon emissions from air travel and road transport are still lagging 2019 highs, a rallying global economy is pushing emissions and consumption back up.

"Rather than recognize this as a reset moment, governments have been eager to get back to business-as-usual. Global emissions are already creeping back up to pre-pandemic levels," said Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), a US-based environmental group.

In an email to DW, she pointed out that even with last year's shutdowns, greenhouse gases only declined 6.4% in 2020 — a substantial drop representing around twice Japan's yearly emissions, but not enough to turn things around.

"We missed opportunities when bailout funds were given to major climate polluters, like the aviation and meat industries, without any requirements for a green recovery," said Feldstein. "And we continue to miss opportunities every day that officials refuse to recognize the climate and extinction crises as emergencies — just like the pandemic."

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/earth-overshoot-day-moves-forward-by-nearly-a-month/a-58612967

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real

Important note to god-botherers, please, believe in god if you will, but do not involve the atheists, us, in explaining your delusion. Yes we know that god is hidden because “He” (god is a male with a white beard) DOES NOT EXIST. Some evangelicals try hard to steer their truck of beliefs on the rough track of faith by using atheists as props, and end up with mud on their brains...

"There are many atheists who maintain that if God exists it wouldn’t be that difficult to know. This is simply a species of the argument from divine hiddenness (i.e., if God exists, then His existence should be obvious to everyone). Why on earth would anyone need formal training in theology, philosophy, or apologetics to learn about God?" writes ADAM TUCKER at CP…

Yes, why on earth?

We don’t care about “your formal training” in godology — which would be the most deluded form of brainwashing ever apart from drinking blood at the local voodoo club — especially when you sneak your twisted “knowledge" on angsted people, in a superior sociopathic manner disguised as care… 

"He” does not make any more sense anywhere in this entire universe than in our little corner, as another billion planets like earth are alive with biota — doing well, with or without the death of Christ as a motivation to believe in a nonsensical superior absolute spirit controlling everything apart from our little devilish lives.

Ask yourself the questions: Why an original sin? Why a final judgement? Why do we need to be saved? I know you know the answer to all this because you have studied the big arcane words that you still don’t understand but use like speck-filler in space, including eternity... Senseless! Stupid!...

Simple: GOD DOES NOT EXIST... We owe nothing to anyone else but our immediate fellow humans and to our natural travellers in the random evolution of life, IF WE CHOOSE TO, on this little space we call earth. We could be bastards and some of us are — unfortunately too often with a godly belief component in order to conquer others, with morality and guns. 

Our real and relative human decisions are based on SURVIVAL with a stylistic component evolved from random uncertainty that we try to make as pleasant as possible, and which allow us to chose one way or the other, ethically or not. Being ethical has no moral component, but it is a factor which can help us survive best, by minimising pains, singularly and/or as a group in which individuals share for the common good. But Adam continues to tell us we need to plunge deeper into the mud so we can appreciate those "professionals" who devote their life to create the religious mud:

"Yes, God’s existence is obvious enough that my ten year old can understand the basics, but we’re not all ten years old. In order to understand the details, we need to put aside childish thinking (1 Cor. 13:11) and devote time to thinking deeply about reality and the conclusions that follow. We should also appreciate those who have devoted their lives to studying these things in order to help equip the rest of us and not be surprised if we don’t instantly understand every detail they communicate.

I want to challenge my brothers and sisters in Christ to not think like an atheist.”

Fuck! Not to think like an atheist? Are you worried they might discover the trick? Or that they might create their own brand of religion to collect tax-free cash, taking away some of your customers? Obvious to a ten year old kid? OBVIOUS???? You mean the kid discovered the “basics” of the delusion by himself without any help from deluded adults? Yes, give up this childish way to think! Once you investigate the devious components of beliefs, the most obvious conclusion should be that GOD DOES NOT EXISTS. The processes of life are complex, difficult to understand but do not require a god pinned to a cross to sort them out. That we die into oblivion is part of life. I know this is the big difficult one to accept but there is no mystery here. 

Religion is a business. RELIGIONS are businesses that sell submissive deceit for cash to build bigger churches and temples, and fill the pockets of controlling preacher. It’s very clever in the way religion spin people's angst and pain with idiotic blind faith. Imagine for a second that all people stopped believing in the fantasy. Priests and people like Adam Tucker would be unemployed, becoming poor beggars (possibly the only poor people left on the planet) — unemployable because they may have little other skills, apart from promoting and proselytising a con trick. At least advertising executives know they are massaging images and writing slogans to sell products with obsolescence…

Imagine Muslims realising that Allah is non-existent, in the same way as Christian and Jews admitting their god is a fake idea, as they all should. There could be a chance for secular peace and greater understanding as our devious governments and theirs would not be able to con anyone into committing acts of terror (war is terror) in the name of the superior monkey… Our morality would be our own feathers to look after with better ethical decisions rather than sin and punishment. 

Anyway, Adam, believe what you wish, but please, do not involve atheists as a counterpoint to construct your fancy lies, for your "brothers and sisters in Christ". It’s revolting.

GL.

Rabid atheist

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