Abstract:
[Laura Lee], 32, got to wondering about insects and why they only bite some people, such as her. Then she wondered about public toilet seats and why people, um, dribble on them. Why gum sticks to shoes. Why innocent paper cuts hurt so much. Why beer goes flat. Why, when you're walking toward someone on a narrow sidewalk and you duck to the right, they duck to the same side and the two of you end up doing that stupid little dance.

In The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation, you'll learn the exact dimensions of legroom between airplane seats (not enough), the origin of dandruff (don't ask) and what cockroaches eat (you don't want to know). Lee explains why it hurts so much when you bite down on a piece of aluminum foil stuck to your sandwich and why your destination always turns out to be in the fold of the map, where you can't read it.

A native of Michigan, Lee now lives in the Berkshire Mountains of upstate New York, where, she says, "There are fewer aggravations, out in the country." That doesn't mean her life is annoyance free. To compile her master list, she kept a log and asked her friends their pet peeves. They ranged from the technical (keyboard crud and the decibel level of booming car stereos) to the human (bad breath and hangnails).
 

Full Text:

Copyright Times Publishing Co. Nov 4, 2001

So, Laura Lee is sitting out in her yard, trying to relax. It's a lazy summer evening. But this durn mosquito keeps dive-bombing her.

Eeeeeeeee.

Is that annoying, or what?

Most of us would just slap the critter into oblivion, but Lee is not most of us.

This is a woman who once made her living as a mime. She also has been a shopping-mall Easter bunny and a morning drive-time radio host. (Talk about annoying!)

She wrote a book about a church Arlo Guthrie bought, and another book about famous predictions that never came true. Right now, she's handling PR for the Moscow Ballet.

This is a woman who makes something out of every opportunity. So it's not surprising that she turned her mosquito moment into a quirky new book, The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation (Black Dog & Leventhal, $12.95).

Lee, 32, got to wondering about insects and why they only bite some people, such as her. Then she wondered about public toilet seats and why people, um, dribble on them. Why gum sticks to shoes. Why innocent paper cuts hurt so much. Why beer goes flat. Why, when you're walking toward someone on a narrow sidewalk and you duck to the right, they duck to the same side and the two of you end up doing that stupid little dance.

These are the maddening moments of life, the things that happen 100 times a day to rile us, and they're cataloged hilariously in Lee's book.

But Lee doesn't just carp about petty aggravations, a la Jerry Seinfeld or Andy Rooney. She actually explains them in scientific detail.

In The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation, you'll learn the exact dimensions of legroom between airplane seats (not enough), the origin of dandruff (don't ask) and what cockroaches eat (you don't want to know). Lee explains why it hurts so much when you bite down on a piece of aluminum foil stuck to your sandwich and why your destination always turns out to be in the fold of the map, where you can't read it.

For the trivia buff (Lee, obviously, is one) she lists fascinating facts and figures:

n When a man is seated next to a woman in seats that share an armrest, odds are five to one that the man will hog the armrest.

n Fifty-nine percent of women don't sit on the seat when using a public toilet; they "hover."

n Thirty to sixty percent of the time a TV is on in the average home, no one is watching it.

To collect her facts, Lee combed the Internet, plowed through dry academic studies and called countless scientists who sometimes couldn't fathom the point of her book. Her specialty is simplifying academic jargon and turning it into amusing information.

"I like my science on the gee-whiz level," she said last week. "I call up the guy who spent 35 years studying intestinal gas and I ask him, 'What'd you find out?' "

(Yes, she really did find a flatulence expert, and yes, he really has studied human emissions since 1965. He's at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Hospital.)

A native of Michigan, Lee now lives in the Berkshire Mountains of upstate New York, where, she says, "There are fewer aggravations, out in the country." That doesn't mean her life is annoyance free. To compile her master list, she kept a log and asked her friends their pet peeves. They ranged from the technical (keyboard crud and the decibel level of booming car stereos) to the human (bad breath and hangnails).

Some aggravations were winnowed from the original list because there simply wasn't much to say about them. "We all know why bird droppings hit the hood of your car," she said. "That's gravity."

For most people, the granddaddy of all annoying things, she said, is the telemarketer. Americans get about 10-billion sales calls a year. Even more than the number of mosquitoes in the average back yard on a summer night.

But what aggravates Lee most are those tell-tale dribbles on the seat in women's restrooms.

"If you're not going to sit down anyway, could you just lift the seat?" she said. "Men do it, why can't women?"
[Illustration]
Caption: The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation; a drawing of a beer glass and bubbles from The Pocket Encyclopedia of Aggravation; Drawing of the unwrapping of a peppermint candy and a graph measuring sound emissions from opening cellophane wrapper.; Photo: PHOTO; DRAWING, (2)