The brief Wikipedia entry for the book reveals, disturbingly, that: “The 1996 republish has been edited to remove some of the scarier creatures, including the vug under the rug.” Which, the atrocious use of “republish” as a noun notwithstanding, is just saddening and maddening. The vug was scary! It was also my favorite part of the book. I mean, the whole thing falls apart without the vug.

If I had to pick a second-place Seuss, then it would become tougher, especially with the snarling and slapping and electrodes. But, tempting as it would be to choose a classic like The Cat in the Hat or Green Eggs and Ham, or a lesser-known title like Hop on Pop or Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now?, I’d have to go with The Sneetches and Other Stories.

It was close—I’m awfully fond of Marvin K. Mooney—but Sneetches includes “Too Many Daves,” the story of Mrs. McCave, sort of a female George Foreman who had 23 sons and named them all Dave. Heavy stuff. Note also that the walking pants in “What Was I Scared Of?” are, like the vug, awesomely freaky.

Feel free to share your favorite Seuss works in the comments, or just to gripe about the devugging.

1. A bicycle can’t stand alone; it is two tired.

2. A will is a dead giveaway.

3. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

4. A backward poet writes inverse.

5. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts; in feudalism, it’s your Count that votes.

6. A chicken crossing the road: poultry in motion.

7. If you don’t pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.

8. With her marriage she got a new name and a dress.

9. Show me a piano falling down a mine shaft and I’ll show you A-flat miner.

10. When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

11. The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

12. A grenade fell onto a kitchen floor in France resulted in Linoleum Blownapart.

13. You are stuck with your debt if you can’t budge it.

14. Local Area Network in Australia : The LAN down under.

15. He broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.

16. A calendar’s days are numbered.

17. A lot of money is tainted: ‘Taint yours, and ‘taint mine.

18. A boiled egg is hard to beat.

19. He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

20. A plateau is a high form of flattery.

21. The short fortuneteller who escaped from prison: a small medium at large.

22. Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

23. When you’ve seen one shopping center you’ve seen a mall.

24. If you jump off a Paris bridge, you are in Seine.

25. When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she’d dye.

26. Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.

27. Santa’s helpers are subordinate clauses.

28. Acupuncture: a jab well done.

29. Marathon runners with bad shoes suffer the agony of de feet.

30. The roundest knight at king Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

31. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

32. She was only a whisky maker, but he loved her still.

33. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption.

34. The butcher backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.

35. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.

36. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

37. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

38. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

39. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

40. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other, ‘You stay here, I’ll go on a head.’

41. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

42. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass.’

43. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said, ‘No change yet.’

44. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

45. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

46. Don’t join dangerous cults: Practice safe sects.

Her publisher, Palgrave, is part of Macmillan, which just won a fight to force Amazon to sell e-books at more than $10, but part of the fallout from that fight is that books which cost much more than that on the kindle often get one-star reviews on the basis of their pricing alone.

There’s a simple fix here, which is for Amazon to delete reviews that focus solely on a book’s price. Not that it’s in their interest to do so, because they want to keep their ebook prices low for now, to sell more Kindles, and they can point to such reviews as support for their stance. But if they did want to—I don’t know, what do you think? Price ought to be a factor in a review of any product, of course—the primary practical question a review is trying to answer is “Is this worth it?” But if the review is just a complaint about the price—which is really a complaint about the system as a whole, and not so much the specific book—is it right to let it stand?

This is hypothetical for Smith—her book isn’t out for another week, so there are no such reviews of it yet. And maybe there won’t be any—I just spent a few minutes trying to find one, and after scanning the very small handful of Kindle editions priced over $9.99 in the top 150 nonfiction and fiction titles, I couldn’t find such a one-star review. But mine wasn’t an in-depth search, and those reviews, they are out there: Author T.J. Stiles posted a response when his book received some (although they weren’t a result of the Macmillan flap; his post is from last May).

For Stiles, the issue was that the reviewers in question didn’t even seem to have read the book. I’d tend to absolutely side with him there: If you can’t (or don’t) speak to anything about a product besides its price, then the place for your complaint is not in the reviews. Again, price is a matter of context: To me, the Left Behind books are not worth a dollar, much less $6.49, based on what the reviews tell me about them; on the other hand, I’d happily pay $36 for this biography of Marshall McLuhan (even if it weren’t cheaper than the hardcover or paperback price), if the single review it’s received is at all accurate. (And this guy has a particularly excellent complaint. To which I would add: Part 3 is really where the series should have ended.)

Saying, “This isn’t worth more than $9.99 to me because of x, y, and z” makes sense. Saying, “This isn’t worth more than $9.99 to me simply because a book should never be more than $9.99″ is silly, and the sentiment is misplaced. If the $9.99 hardliners want to treat book-publishing economics like widget-making economics, despite the differences, then they have to ask: Would it be fair to review a car by saying, “Well, I don’t know anything about this car, but $25,000 is way too much for any car, so I’m giving it one star”? Or a dishwasher? Or a scratching post? (Yes, I have been reading scratching post reviews lately.)

Also note that since Stiles posted his response, the price of his Kindle edition has dropped—to $9.99. That’s the other thing: Prices aren’t static. And once they change, are one-star reviews that deal solely with dollar-cost serving any purpose besides possibly hurting the author’s sales? And if they’re not, shouldn’t Amazon delete them?

And what a surprise it was to see Kelly O’Connor McNees’s name appear in my Google Reader yesterday, on author John Scalzi’s blog! We call her Kelly 2 around here—although usually we don’t call her at all, because most of the time she is IMing or Gmailing with Kelly 1, so it just makes more sense to type something at her, and saves on minutes too. Anyway, she’s gonna be doing a Big Idea post for Scalzi about her upcoming debut novel, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott. You should BUY IT. (We already have a copy, because we are BAD-ASS.)

And wonder of wonders, I have! If you’d like to learn a little bit about what’s on WYOU, Madison’s embattled public access station, and what I think about it, check out my lengthy-ish feature in this week’s Isthmus. (To be honest, I wish the story stressed the “embattled” part a little more than it does, but it ran in the physical paper, and those have only so much space.)

I also wrote about Wicked, which is coming to town in the fall.

(via John Scalzi)

The 34-year-old Villano — whose outlets include the San Francisco Chronicle, Fodor’s travel guides, Casino Player and Oceanus magazines — said some writers struggle because they have fuzzy, arty notions about their work. They need to act more like small business people, Villano said, diversifying their skills and the outlets they write for.

That would be my take too, based solely on my own limited experience. The demand for content grows every day, and there are still places out there that will pay you for it, and pay you well. Some are magazines and newspapers, but you gotta look other places, too.