We will confess to some amusement at James Altucher's confession in his Financial Times column that his latest book, The Forever Portfolio, was cobbled together in three weeks, five months after the original deadline, and then only because he hit upon a maverick strategy:

"Why not write about whatever I wanted to write about? The only conditions were that every page had to be useful. It could contain useful information about stocks, jobs, entrepreneurship, dieting, games, Chubb Rock, chocolate, anything, and be filled with the craziest, but true, stories and anecdotes I could think of."

Still, some of his self-reported stalling tactics seemed a bit dodgy: "Jillian and Courtney, I am sorry that several times I answered the phone and pretended to be an answering machine," he apologized to the staffers at his publishing company. "I don’t have an answering machine. That was me." Also, he claimed that he would sometimes pretend to be his own secretary. So we asked Portfolio publicist Courtney Nobile if he'd really tried either of those tricks with her. "I'm now unsure," she admitted, "but I really doubt it."

Ahhh, hyperbole, you tease us so cruelly.