This Week's Selection:

Catflexing: A Catlover's Guide to Weight Training, Aerobics, & Stretching by Stephanie Jackson (1997)

If there's a stupid way to get fit, someone has written a book on it. I know so many ways to lose weight through prayer, hypnosis, astrology, and colonics that whenever I see someone actually exercising I think, "That uneducated idiot should try reading a book."

Speaking of idiots, they are going to love Catflexing. Catflexing is exactly what it sounds like: different ways to lift cats to get in shape. And despite the fact that mistaking live animals for exercise equipment is ridiculous, don't hold out any hope that this is some kind of joke -- it's very real and very crazy. To find out exactly how crazy, we'll have to run it through the faultless MADMAN Scale of Book Lunacy Measurement.

Mocking of Reality (20 points)

When rating how hard a book laughs in the face of everything we know to be true, I will be using the cultural definition of reality, not the scientific one. Or to put it another way, I'll be operating under the assumption that there's probably a God, almost certainly a Bigfoot, and odds are you're a disguised robot. Using this reality barometer, a book about alien abductions may score lower than one about Amway success stories.

Author's Sucking (20 points)

This category is reserved for personal attacks against a book's author. He or she will receive points based on failure, laziness, and unlikability. It might be mean-spirited, but the crappy have had it too good for too long.

Danger to Self (20 points)

Knowledge isn't always safe. Watch, I'll show you: You can make a throwing knife by throwing any regular knife. Seven people just died. And in their memory, this category measures how hard a book is trying to kill its reader. In the case of a 15 or higher, I'll leave this section blank while I'm bleeding somewhere else.

Menace to Others (20 points)

There are all kinds of things done in the spirit of self-improvement that have no respect for others. Anything from the proper neck-punch technique to the best way for an elderly person to prolong an orgasm could have a tremendous impact on the happiness and safety of your community.

Accidental Awesomeness (20 points)

Terrible things often have an ironic value that is impossible to measure. And yet this category measures it on a scale of 0 to 20. In your face, universe.

Normalized Insanity Rating (100 points)

Getting this final number is not as simple as adding up the five others. After the tallying, I have the authority to modify the score up to 20 points. Why? Because due to the very nature of insanity, a rigid standardized test isn't always effective at spotting it. For example, a firearms license application doesn't have a box to check if you were sent by talking bats. Similarly, I don't have a box to check if a book happens to be printed on human skin, yet I think that would be an important thing to consider when numerically expressing its batshitted-ness. This adjustment will help in situations like that.

Mocking of Reality: 18/20

Standing Catbell Curls should feel humiliating for both you and your cat.

Stephanie Jackson exhibits all the standard behavior of a crazy cat lady. She talks about her pets like they're husbands and children -- but I'm doing an injustice to the magic she sees in their wise, beautiful souls. If you're allergic to pet dander, a single glance at one of her stories about the hopes and dreams of her cats could kill you. Stephanie f***ing loves cats. She communes with her animals so much that when she moves to a new community, she has 30 days to inform her neighbors that she's a druid. There is so much pet hair in her home that her dryer's lint trap looks like the dumpster at a cosmetics research lab.

All of that would be perfectly ordinary except for one thing: Stephanie is hot. If you were to only read her writing, you wouldn't even picture a person. You'd picture some kind of vaguely human-shaped mound draped in cats and watching Beastmaster. Or as she calls it, "That Movie with the Perfectly Ordinary Guy." Instead, she's a fit, sexy woman and for hundreds of photos, the only thing she's wearing is underwear and a grumpy cat. It's unnatural. The very concept of a hot crazy cat lady is a mockery of the natural order, and the universe punished this act of the impossible with an impossibility of its own: giving her a book deal.

Author's Sucking: 6/20

You may never need to do a girl pushup with a cat on your back, but for the rest of us, we'll never find a better guide than this one. If you're having trouble getting started, Stephanie suggests, "Have your cat lay across your shoulders or back and go for it." Pay close attention during your workout and when you start to feel claws, you'll know you've made a grave mistake by following the advice of a deranged person.

Danger to Self: 14/20

Most cats will hate everything about Catflexing. Nature has given them a number of dramatic ways to express panic and anger when they find themselves being used as kettlebells. Of course, you might have an inexplicable spiritual bond with these creatures, allowing you to drape yourself in live animals while you exercise. If that's the case, why are you working out? Losing weight is like taking food out of your cats' mouths because on the day you die they will feast on you.

I'll let you in on a secret: every time you meet a coroner, he might say, "Nice to meet you," but inside he's saying, "Some day I'll know what you look like when feral cats skitter away from your skeleton." A smile will creep across his face at the thought of it. Moments like that are why he became a coroner in the first place. "The night will take back your flesh!" he'll accidentally shriek, before running away.

Menace to Others: 12/20

Obviously, there's a high risk of being clawed, bitten, or shunned by your faithful companion when you start flinging it around, but what are the risks for the actual cats? Let's take a look at the "Questions and Answers" portion of the book, where one anonymous Catflexer wrote,

"I'm not very coordinated and I find some Catflexing positions to be very awkward. While doing the Standing Catbell Press, I dropped my cat Booie and she landed on her head. I took her to the emergency vet and they found she had a concussion. She's better now, but she's skittish and reluctant to do the workouts with me. What should I do?"

You should really go to a vet that asks more questions. A competent veterinarian would have wondered how the hell your cat got a concussion, and then after hearing your story, should have refused to give it back. Cracking open a cat's skull is literally the dumbest way to explain to a person that they shouldn't be using exercise equipment that they can concuss. And you still didn't learn your lesson?

You can have a dips**t pet or have a dips**t owner, but it's not safe to have both. I mean for God's sake, it says very clearly in the book that you should only do Standing Catbell Presses "slowly and methodically; otherwise, the less trained cat may become nauseous." What does the author have to do to convince you that everything about this is a stupid idea?

Accidental Awesomeness: 15/20

It doesn't matter who you are; you're going to find something awesome about a half-naked hot woman holding fluffy cats. And the unabashed nutbaggedness of each and every thing in the book never stops being fascinating. For example, here's another question sent in to the author:

Scrape quickly with both paws to increase your human's speed.

[grammar error left intact out of respect for Catflexers everywhere] "I have been Catflexing with my cat Manhattan for approximately two years. I had no idea there so many other Catflexers out there until recently, when I entered my first contest. Manhattan and I are now preparing for our second contest, but he's acting different this time. He's very irritable and aggressive. My neighbors have told me he's been attacking their cats sexually."

Going into Catflexing, I figured that it was going to end with a lot of biting and hissing and maybe a dent or two in my cat's head. However, I never would have predicted that it could turn my cat into a rapist. Don't get me wrong -- it makes sense. I just didn't see it coming.

Normalized Insanity Rating: 85/100

When tallying up the numbers from the other categories, the MADMAN Scale allows me to add up to 20 points to make the final number better reflect a book's overall irrationality. I added all 20. If I found you screaming into a bag of cat teeth, I'd tell you that it's the second strangest thing I've ever seen someone do with a cat, and I still feel like I'm not getting it across how damaging Catflexing is to the logic center of a brain, be it man or cat. This book is bats**t insane, and I can prove it again. Take a look at this one last question sent in to Stephanie:

Every time I write a caption for this picture, spell check changes it to "nice pussy." Sorry!

"My husband is preparing for a Catflexing competition and is thinking about shaving my cat Kiwi's entire body. I'm furious at the thought, and I'm sure Kiwi would be, too. What would the judges say about this?"

Whenever I find myself arguing about whether or not a cat should shave before a body-building competition, I like to throw everything I have into a chest punch. Because no human would argue about things like this, and the chest is where space aliens keep their primary genitals. Stephanie's response is less pragmatic:

"Good question! Many professional athletes do it, so why not cats?"

This was the psychological breakthrough I needed to finally understand Stephanie. I realized that all you had to do was add the phrase, "...so why not cats?" to the end of every sentence and suddenly you could see the world through her eyes. I'm really worried this is going to drive me insane within four sentences, but let's try it. We lift weights, so why not cats? We do crunches while wearing scarves, so why not cats? We put sour cream on chili, so why not cats? We bait condors with cats, so glbb! blggg! glbbb!!!