There are fewer than two weeks left in the semester and readers might think they've handled this year of college pretty well. Maybe they can even say they survived.
But, did they survive properly?
The authors of \The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook: College"" offer advice for everyone from freshmen to seventh-year seniors on how to handle those emergencies that occasionally befall even the best of us.
Authors Joshua Piven, David Borgenicht and Jennifer Worick offer endless tips, often backed by experts (there's a nice list of bios in the appendix to skim), that they promise will get readers through any situation they may encounter.
For example, if one were to have a one-night stand and lose their pants somewhere? Not a problem. He or she should remove their shirt, staple the head hole closed, slide legs through the armholes and presto!
Let's be honest, if a person were spotted on campus wearing their shirt as pants, they'd be all over the Internet before they made it home.
For the dirt-poor who can't afford furniture, the book offers suggestions on how to make it at home. All that's needed is a milk crate, car-wash sponges, a magazine and a placemat or fabric.??Turn the milk crate upside-down, place the magazine on top of it, place sponges on top of that, cover with the placemat and stitch to milk crate. And now, the reader has a lovely chair.
Quick question: How do these poor students afford things like car-wash sponges if used furniture is too expensive'And why not just ""borrow"" a chair off someone's porch?
Perhaps the best advice offered in this book deals with opening a bottle of beer when there is no opener to be found. After reading this, readers will know how to open a bottle in 10 different ways. There's the bottle-on-bottle opening, the traditional table edge and using one's belt buckle. What if the only thing one has is their roller blades? Well, duh, use the space between the shoe and the blade to pry that sucker off.
And now, the reader is still on their roller blades and needs to get to wherever they were headed but forgotten because, like Pringles, they couldn't stop at just one beer, and the world is kinda spinning. What is it that the reader is supposed to be doing here again? Oh, right, attending class!
Now, sometimes class isn't the most riveting thing one could be doing and being forced to focus for 50 minutes (or more) is asking too much. But there are ways to alleviate the boredom-such as making paper airplanes, taking notes in a foreign language or pretending to be a secret agent and spy on classmates.
Another helpful part of the book is the list of famous names and pronunciations in the appendix. It tells readers nothing specific about Duchamp (Doo-SHAN) (an avant-garde artist who entered a urinal in an art contest) or Dostoyevsky (Dost-ta-YEF-ski) (author of ""Crime and Punishment""). It simply divides them into the categories of philosophers, artists, novelists, playwrights and poets.
""The Worst Case Scenario Handbook: College"" is published by Chronicle Books.
