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Excerpt: The Odd Todd Handbook

The online spokesman for a laidoff media generation takes his shtick to the bookstore.

If you somehow missed the Odd Todd website when it debuted in 2001, then, well, you must have been one of the few who still had a job. For those who sat at home and collected unemployment while we watched our magazines and websites and 401(k)s and dreams of good tables at Michael's all fly out the window, Odd Todd was our poet. There was a whole generation of us, creative people who'd come to New York to play our own, non-investment-banking part in the boom, and, suddenly, it was over. But while we merely sulked and drank and moped and maybe toked and watched a whole lot of TV, Todd Rosenberg starting making online cartoons about our shared plight. The first one was genius. (If you haven't seen it yet, watch it now. Really, right now.) It caught our lives exactly, and so we were hooked. Oddtodd became a laid-off-media-people-during-the-bust celeb, and now here is his book. If it's not quite as hilarious as the original website, it's still pretty damned funny. And, anyway, find someone else who built a successful career of being unemployed, and then we can talk.

Excerpted from The Odd Todd Handbook: Hard Times, Soft Couch, by Todd Rosenberg. Copyright © 2003 by Todd Rosenberg and published by Warner Books. Excerpt used with permission of the AOL Time Warner Book Group. You can buy The Odd Todd Handbook at Amazon.com.