Helms’ compendium of high-profile miscalculations—from the Beanie Baby bubble to a sunken Soviet submarine—is dotted with wry observations and outright groaners. An offshoot of the comedian-author’s popular podcast, this book reflects his hunt for “retroactive comedy,” which left him “optimistic” in unstable times: “We’ve been here before, and we’ll get through this, too.” The same can’t be said of Acoustic Kitty. Under a secret 1960s project by that name, the CIA implanted a microphone in a cat’s ear, vainly hoping to eavesdrop on adversaries. According to one agency staffer, the multimillion-dollar project was scrapped when a car hit the first A.K. Cold War technological folly provides Helms with tons more material. A toymaker put uranium in a children’s science kit. The U.S. military inadvertently dropped a bomb on South Carolina, fortunately killing no one. “Rich weirdo” Howard Hughes helped the CIA build a huge mechanical claw in a failed effort to scoop a disabled Russian sub off the ocean floor. Expensive mishaps are firmly within Helms’ wheelhouse. His look at the “crash” of the Beanie Baby market—relative scarcity ballooned prices for the 1990s toy—features a soap-opera actor who spent $100,000 on “an ill-planned attempt to pay for” college tuition. Another recent mess-up—a failure to convert English measurement units to metric—caused NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter to blow up. “That is so dumb,” observed one space expert. Helms’ observations are gentler. He quips that a scientist lost the Mars satellite because he’d “forgotten to upgrade his PC to Windows 98.” For its part, the Army, he kids, was probably jealous of the Air Force’s missiles: “Come onnnnnn. They get all the cool toys.” Fortunately, his factual narratives are better than his jokes.
