The Naked Man Festival: (And other excuses to fly around the world)

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Allen & Unwin, 1. okt 2004 - 276 pages
Bestselling author of Rule Number Five: No Sex on the Bus and Planes Trains + Elephants, searches out the most bizarre festivals in a frantic race around the world.

It was only a degree above zero and the rain was coming down in sheets, yet here I was about to run around in nothing more than a nappy. I was pretty sure it was going to be the silliest thing I'd ever done '

Join Brian Thacker as he embarks on a round-the-world odyssey in search of as many silly, outlandish and even staggeringly banal festivals as time, distance and severe bouts of exposure will allow. Along the way he is pelted with beans, overawed by giant snow cows and stampeded in a temple full of men wearing nappies in hot pursuit of a stick. And that's just in Japan.

Brian also manages to narrowly escape being sacrificed by a Vodou priest in Haiti and to retain his eyebrows after celebrating Hogmanay in Scotland. He discovers 101 new and interesting things to do with a tomato; meets a woman at the UFO Festival in Roswell who is regularly used by aliens for perverted medical experiments and hangs out at the Sydney Gay + Lesbian Mardi Gras with a bloke called Miss Stephanie.
 

Contents

Tet Lunar New Year 22
21
Bean Throwing Festival
61
Snow Festival
81
Copyright

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Page 255 - Sin auld lang syne. We twa hae paidl'd in the burn, Frae morning sun till dine; But seas between us braid hae roar'd, Sin auld lang syne. And there's a hand, my trusty fiere! And gie's a hand o
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Page 235 - The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
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Page 120 - Mardi Gras proper began in 1981 when the original link with Stonewall was broken in favour of celebrating...
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Page 148 - Just off the top of my head, there are: freedom of speech; the right to petition the government; the right to bear arms; and the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.

About the author (2004)

Brian Thacker was born in England but didn't like the weather so he emigrated to Australia when he was six. He has worked as a tour leader, ski guide, advertising art director, silver service waiter, painter, barman, paper shredder, newspaper delivery boy and butcher's assistant. He has written over a thousand postcards in his travels and is the author of Rule No. 5: No Sex on the Bus (2001) and Planes, Trains and Elephants (2002). So far he has visited 58 countries (59 if you count Tasmania). He lives in Melbourne with his wife Natalie and daughter Jasmine.

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