Fads & Trends, Curiosities & Wonders

I don't profess to be fashionable.  I am on the cutting edge of nothing.  So, when the Weekly Alibi ran a feature recently on "Planking/Flanking", I was fairly clueless.  Then, yesterday, a co-worker turned me on to Tebowing, & as a corollary, I discovered Owling.  How have I missed all the fun fads?

As I am wont to do when I want to learn about something, I turned to my friendly local library catalog.  A keyword search of "fads" turned up titles such as Panati's Parade of Fads, Follies, and Manias: The Origins of Our Most Cherished Obsessions, Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads,& Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore that Shaped Modern America.  A good background, but none of these books were going to keep me au courant.  We do have the I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Collekshun book-wasn't that all the rage not too long ago?  Are people still doing PostSecret? How about Sh*t My Dad Says?  I guess people are still loving The Onion, since you can now pick up a copy locally.  The literary mashup genre still seems to be going strong, though I stopped reading at Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter.

However, what my search for fads did lead me to was a couple of very interesting subject headings (when looking an item record, you can find subject headings under the "Find Similar Items" tab): Popular Culture, seven glorious pages of off-the-wall books from Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now to Hip, The History; & Curiosities & Wonders, which brings you New Mexico Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff, The Book of Useless Information, & Charles Fort: The Man who Invented the Supernatural. I'm sure I'll be reading in these subjects for quite some time.

Some other fun things you might enjoy:

Garfield minus Garfield

Simon's Cat on YouTube

Awkward Family Photos

The Bad Fads Museum

Cake Wrecks