Flip Flop Flying

My new book “Atlas, Schmatlas” is out. There’s a picture of it in the column on the right. It’s in shops in the US, UK, and should be available in stores and from online retailers in a lot of other countries too. Should you happen to live in North Korea, you’re probably gonna find it tough to get hold of. Should you live in Darfur, maybe you’ve got more important things on your mind, so I won’t hold it against you if you don’t rush out and buy it.

You may have read stuff about the book on the atlasschmatlas.com site, you may have even been one of the people who read it when it was just a small page on Flip Flop Flyin’ called The FFF Pictorial Atlas of the World: but now it’s in the shops, I figured it would only be right to try and promote it a little bit.

Oh dear, how do I do that? Erm, well, I suppose I should tell you that it’s really really good. My mum likes it. Several of my friends like it, too. Someone sent me an email saying they giggled quite a lot while reading it. That made me happy.

For those of you who don’t know anything about the book, it’s basically an atlas with jokes. It’s got plenty of comedy lies in it, but there’s also some comedy based in truth in there. And in Prince and the Revolution-style, I did it all by myself. I wrote the words, did the pixelly illustrations, and the pen-on-paper map drawings too. I didn’t do the layout, though. That was done by a lovely lady called Laura.

You can read some excerpts, and look at some of the pictures on the aforementioned atlasschmatlas.com page.

My mate Derick sent me a photo of the book in the humour section of his local Brooklyn book shop. As you can see, it’s nestled sweetly between The Portable Jewish Mother and Life Lessons From Your Cat; both of which are small books and make Atlas, Schmatlas look like a basketball player at a horse jockey party.

Anyway, I’m not very good at this bigging-myself-up lark, so I’ll just say this: please buy it, it’d make me happy, cos I worked really hard on it for eight months last year, and I do think it’s quite good, despite my terribly English refusal to be overly boastful. Thank you.

These FFF does things seem to have changed in style over the last couple of trips I’ve made. This is mainly because I tend to blog about the trips as they happen. This new one, FFF does New York, came from wondering how much walking around I do on these trips; how much land is covered on foot.

After seeing this site a few days before I went to New York, I decided to keep a mental note of where I walked every day. And it surprised me to see that I didn’t really cover much ground. It certainly felt like more.

A short message links to a page with details about the new Radiohead album. And if you don’t want the special £40 box full of goodies, and you just want the download, you get to decide yourself how much you want to pay.

This is an ace idea. I’m sure a lot of people will pay one pence (and who can blame them), but I got to the page where I had to decide, and I couldn’t bring myself to be a cheapskate. So I paid a tenner.

Damn! I paid a tenner when I could’ve got it for one pence! What a dick I am!