"I’m out of dog food and my cat’s box needs new litter. I know what I’ll do: I’ll order Dog Chow and Fresh Step online from a sock puppet and then I’ll watch the dog starve and the cat shit all over the house while I wait for it to be delivered!"

Thus begins Philip J. Kaplan’s take on the late, unlamented Pets.com, the first entry in his book F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts (Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $18). Kaplan — a/k/a "Pud" — is the founder of the Web site FuckedCompany.com, which he started two years ago to track, in the most cynical and scatological manner imaginable, the ongoing collapse of the dot-com economy.

F’d Companies is a bathroom book — great for a random-access guffaw or two while, well, you know. But actually reading it, cover to cover, is not recommended: the stupidity that Kaplan documents is as mind-numbingly repetitive as his own not-particularly-creative overuse of the F-word. Kaplan does, nevertheless, expose some astounding tales of idiocy.

Among my favorites is an actual Ponzi scheme called CyberRebate.com. Here’s how it "worked." You’d buy some sort of electronic goody at well over the purchase price (Kaplan’s hypothetical example: one DVD for $150). Then, 14 weeks later, you’d receive a check for the entire purchase price, paid out of money sent in by new CyberRebate customers. Naturally, such "pure fuckitude," as Kaplan puts it, quickly put the company out of business and left customers holding the bag. "So why aren’t the founders in jail?" he asks. Good question.

Or take Bank One’s online branch, Wingspan: "Let’s see ... they paid higher interest than other banks, they charged no fees for practically any of their services, they refunded ATM fees from any bank’s ATM machines, they gave $100 free to their first 10,000 customers. And they went BROKE. Shocker. Seems customers were happy with the service (why wouldn’t they be?) — Wingspan just had a crappy business model that failed to include any real profit making."

Kaplan also dissects Digiscents, whose goal was to add smell to Web sites, and Flooz.com, which tried to get people to send in real money in return for fake Internet cash. And, in a particularly inspired rant, he labels ex–media mogul Steven Brill and company "fuckmustards" for the way they ran Contentville.com. (Funny, but a recent piece on F’d Companies in Newsweek, for whom Brill is now a columnist, didn’t mention that entry.)

Kaplan is riding high these days — FuckedCompany.com draws a reputed 3.5 million unique visitors every month, and he was recently the subject of a fawning profile in Inc. magazine. Unfortunately, he seems incapable of telling the difference between obnoxiously endearing and just plain obnoxious.

For instance, in his upcoming "FC 2002 Tour" to promote F’d Companies, he promises "booze" ("I don’t care what they say, I’m drinking in their fuckin bookstore") and "dick prints" ("That’s right, I’ll have an ink pad and will give dick prints on request"). Yuck.

The tour is scheduled to hit WordsWorth, in Harvard Square, on Thursday, April 25, at 7 p.m. You might want to wash your hands afterward.