"NINE HALLMARKS OF HIGHLY INCOMPETENT LOSERS" MINES LIFE LESSONS FROM THE WORLD'S FUNNIEST MISTAKES

Hilarious new "reverse self-help" book offers nine simple lessons in how to fail, illustrated with hundreds of actual news stories of people doing incredibly stupid things.

Did you hear the one about the man who tried to kill his lice by shampooing with gasoline, then dried his hair by bending over a blazing wood stove? Or the fellow who sued to attend driving instructor school, even though he stuttered so badly he couldnt say Stop" before a student drove into a tree?

If you think these are jokes, guess again. Theyre among thousands of ridiculous true stories that have been filed away over the past decade by Pat Reeder and Laura Ainsworth, self-proclaimed loserologists," public speakers and co-authors of the new reverse self-help" book, Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers (Comedy Wire Publishing, $10.95).

The husband-and-wife humorists spend all day searching out these stories and all night writing jokes about them for their worldwide radio prep service, The Comedy Wire (www.comedy-wire.com). But they do more than just keep DJs and talk show hosts sounding witty and well informed.

We both created corporate communications and training programs for major companies before turning to intentional comedy writing," Ainsworth said. So as we sorted through all these hilarious stories of failure and humiliation, we began subconsciously noticing recurring themes. Eventually, we realized that if you boil them down to their essence, most of these embarrassing stories resulted from one or more of nine basic human mistakes."

Reeder added, These are mistakes that everyone makes over and over, from dumb criminals to CEOs and world leaders. The only difference is the scale of the ensuing catastrophe. For instance, if you combine Saddam Husseins ‘failure to plan ahead and his ‘claiming abilities he didnt really have with France ‘calling undue attention to itself, the U.N. ‘failing to communicate clearly, and a few other hallmarks of losers, you eventually end up with the Iraq War."

Reeder and Ainsworth call Nine Hallmarks… a reverse self-help book" because instead of promising to illuminate the road to Success, they drop warning flares at the off-ramps to Failure. The book humorously explains the nine rules of loserdom and illustrates them with approximately 200 outrageous-but-true news stories to prove that while these mistakes might be common and simple, there is no limit to the variations people can invent.

For instance, the most basic Loser Hallmark is Never Plan Ahead." Examples range from a burglar who burst through the ceiling vent of a store late one night without having bothered to find out that it was open 24 hours a day, to a multimillion dollar corporation that marketed a preservative-free soda, only to discover that when summer arrived, it began fermenting in the can and exploding.

As each loser hallmark arises, so do dozens more breathtaking examples. An armed robber ran out of a bank to find his accomplice had Lost Sight Of The Goal" by choosing that moment to take the getaway car to a car wash. A bride Called Undue Attention to Herself" by posing for the newspaper in a wedding gown she had shoplifted. And top British scientists proved that even geniuses Dont Sweat The Details" when they spent four years studying a sample of sheep brains before noticing it was really cow brains they had mislabeled.

The book concludes with a quiz that recounts 30 true-life problems and offers the reader a choice of two solutions: one that is perfectly logical, and a ludicrous one that actually happened.

Reeder said, Despite all the moronic mistakes we poke fun at, our book does have a positive message: that ‘L doesnt just stand for ‘Loser. It also stands for ‘Lighten up when you make a dumb mistake, ‘Laugh about it, and ‘Learn from it. After all, we believe mistakes are a great way to learn – as long as you learn from somebody elses!"

Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers is available at www.comedy-wire.com and in bookstores through Biblio Distribution, a division of NBN.

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For over a decade, Pat Reeder and Laura Ainsworth's Comedy Wire has been the secret source of wit for top radio shows around the world. They have also created thousands of radio commercials and award-winning training programs for major corporations such as Southwestern Bell, GTE and Sylvania. Laura writes the long-running column Welcome to the Bird House" for Companion Parrot Quarterly magazine. Pat has been a major market radio DJ/production director and is co-author of the ultimate book on incompetent celebrity singers, Hollywood Hi-Fi (St. Martin's Press). As the first head writer of The Lyons Group, he co-wrote the original pilots for Barney the Dinosaur and has written for performers as diverse as Tony Randall and Jimmie J.J." Walker. Pat and Laura have been interviewed by national magazines and major newspapers, websites such as BBC News online and the Wireless Flash news service, dozens of radio stations from Arizona to Ireland, and such TV shows as Inside Edition and Fox TV's Good Day in Dallas. They combined their corporate problem-solving skills with their comedy material for their new book and for a live presentation on the Nine Hallmarks of Losers" which they perform for civic groups and corporations. Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers is available through www.comedy-wire.com and is distributed to the trade by Biblio Distribution, a division of NBN (800-462-6420).