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Schnabel also encourages men to buy women adventures to exotic locales. He provides a checklist for your sweetie to mark the places she would most like to visit -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are all provided as potential "adventures," which I suppose is technically accurate. But if my girlfriend wanted to go to Liberia for her birthday, I'd get her a plane ticket, a phone card, a life insurance policy, and a couple of disposable cameras. And of course I'd give her a good-bye kiss at the airport..

"Even if she hates the entire experience," Schnabel writes, "she will get a kick out of embarrassing you by telling the story over and over to your friends." Just think of how many hilarious stories you've heard that begin with, "So I walk into this mosque in Kabul, and the Imam says to me, 'Hey infidel, is your refrigerator running?'"

As a gift guru, Schnabel is a glutton for punishment. The last 50 pages of the book consist of more checklists of gifts ideas. Consider the following sampling: classes at clown school; an Ultrasonic bug and rodent repeller; a submersible bag; acids (?!); medieval catapult; fart machine; animal heads; a suit of armor; a life-size chess set; night vision goggles; an escape chain ladder; gas mask (see "fart machine" above); animal traps; and anti-snoring strips. Gun locks appear no fewer than three times.

Still wondering how this guy gets himself in trouble? Try this on for size. In the "Gifts During Tragedies" chapter, Schnabel says that the perfect boyfriend would handle his girlfriend breaking her leg on a ski trip by buying her a bottle of wine, a long a backscratcher, and a book entitled, Skiing Basics for Simpletons.

"She may feign anger," he writes, but she will "also get mileage out of it for years as she tells the story of your unsympathetic attitude over and over to her friends." The Gift Giving Handbook for the Inept Man might be better christened, How to Test the Love and Patience of Your Significant Other. Granted, sending the love of your life to clown school is a novel idea, but that doesn't make it a good one.

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Iraq, Oil