50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know

Title: 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know Author: Russ Kick
Number of pages: 128
Published: November 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9713942-8-8
Number of Interesting Facts: 50

If The Disinformation Company Ltd. were less of a publishing company and more of a record label, 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know would be a cheap, compilation EP release aimed to suck you into checking out the rest of their catalog. It would have a few outtakes from the predecessor Everything You Know Is Wrong on it, and then a few demos to the upcoming The Disinformation Books of Lists, and after your first listen you’d kinda be all like "Wait...huh?" I don’t know if that made any sense, but either way, 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know is pretty sweet.

50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know contains 50 straight forward, not-so-easy to digest bits of information that might have gotten past your local media outlet. Russ Kick’s writing is very simple, and to the point, with a little bit of an ironic tone, as if to say, "Man, you didn’t know about this shit? Where’ve you been?" But that’s all right, because the information contained within is interesting enough to allow you to handle the arrogant tone.

What is presented in the pages of the book, and they’re tiny pages, like the size of a CD booklet, but with thicker pages, and a binding, varies from the downright hilarious to the straight up disturbing. A lot of it is hard to swallow, like finding out all of the terrible things aside from cancer that smoking can do, or the fact that work kills more people than war, but a happy medium exists when you weigh in the light-hearted, pope-writing-erotic-novels, SUV-for-insecure-men sections.

The atomic and nuclear bomb show up numerous times through-out 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, with two atomics falling on North Carolina, World War III almost starting in 1995, and, what has already been revealed on E2, plots to detonate an atomic bomb on the moon. From the sadness of knowing that the elderly have the highest suicide rate, to the pure joy of finding out Hitler’s blood relatives live in the U.S. -–don’t worry, they’ve decided not to breed-- this book has so many interesting facts it will truly make your head spin.

And I can already hear you in the background, screaming, "Wait a minute! This sounds like made up jibber-jabber, fool!" Well, don’t worry about it, because not only does Kick reference all of the material used to compile these crazy facts, but he also takes a shot at people who don’t, with one section being devoted to scientists who don’t actually read the articles they cite, leading to the falsification of the information being adopted from one false source.

So, if you’re into finding out weird and interesting things that you will otherwise not find out in school, or through major media publications, or if you’re a well-read intellectual who knows everything and wants to make sure he caught everything, check out 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know for a fix. Or just go to the library and read a little bit. I dunno.