Blogger Ben Shakey writes:

On top of my regular job at a call center for an online Casino, I work 5 hours a week a bookstore. This provides me with a sizable discount toward my addiction to books.

While putting out the magazines this week I saw a new title. MAD KIDS is a version of MAD Magazine targeted at kids. http://www.dccomics.com/madkids/ On the cover this month is Wallace and Vomit. Claymation parodies puked all over the page.

This of course led me to ask “Isn’t Mad Magazine already targeted at kids?” As I recall it was me that read Mad. I don’t recall seeing my father sitting, smoking a pipe with his feet raised on an ottoman, reading “The Eccch-sorsist” parody.

Well, I haven’t read Mad lately. It’s turned into the New Yorker or something. All the Spy Vs. Spy comics are sparse black and white cartoons of the spies standing at cocktail parties trading quips about therapy. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an exhaustive, if readable, discussion on ‘The Lighter Side Of Hippies’. This month’s fold in is written by Joyce Coral Oates. It the first time that I have had to use a bookmark so I didn’t lose my place in the middle of a fold in.

As a side note, when I was younger I submitted some jokes to Mad. They sent the greatest rejection letter anyone could receive. It was a form letter telling me that they try to encourage young talent with nurturing criticism but in this in this case I was just terrible. The form letter had several negative comment with boxes next to them fro the editor to check. I believe that they may have checked “Just not funny for mine”. They may have also called me a clod.

You are downloading The Ricky Gervais Show and Sowerby and Luff’s Big Squeeze, aren’t you? You’re listening right now? There will be at least twelve Gervais/Merchant/Pilkington podcasts (there are already four), and, I hope, Georgina Sowerby and Brian Luff will never stop tying each other up, waxing, going on fictional cross-country trips in search of ten pairs of pants, drinking in the Gay Legs, and scoring badly on the children’s edition of American Trivial Pursuit. As they explain on the Big Squeeze website, “Contains strong language and a mince pie.”

Photo: David Baily

Between Big Squeeze and the Office loons, you’ve got the perfect soundtrack for 2006: ridiculous dialogues with occasional singing, ghostly-farmer sound effects, dead brilliant deadpan, and plenty of monkey news.

That’s what your iTunes can look like if you act now. If you, like me, are deciding what to do with the rest of your life, start by listening to British babble by some of the funniest minds on the continent. Big Squeeze also contains quite a bit of nudity.

Update: Here’s an interview with the scamps at Big Squeeze (you’ll have to click on the link once there), plus some funny pictures of Brian (after listening to dozens of their podcasts, I say you get to use their first names) looking like an indie-rocker and Georgina doing an arabesque. Is that an arabesque? My ballet days were short and painful. Swing, now, that’s another thing. Georgina hints at a past stint on a “naughty chat line”; Brian says he’s turned on by cheese on toast. As they say in their disclaimer, product may contain nuts.

Categories: Gervais, Pilkington, Merchant, podcasts, Comedy 365

Of course, I’m itching to get my hands on Blank, the forthcoming Gladwell parody. (Hi, HarperCollins!) Can one be so sure Noah Tall is a man, I wonder?

Very distressing story in the NY Post. Selim Algar writes:

December 28, 2005 — A home-care aide took advantage of the trust afforded him by an acclaimed Hamptons writer and his wife — using personal information and bank cards to steal their life savings, authorities charge.

Now former New Yorker and Esquire magazine writer Wilfrid Sheed may be forced to sell his tony home in the exclusive Hamptons town of North Haven.

Compounding his ordeal, Sheed, who celebrated his 75th birthday yesterday from a hospital bed, may never walk again after a recent recurrence of polio. The mounting stress, he said, even threatens his ability to write and complete his latest work.

But through it all, the National Book Award nominee has maintained possession of his most precious assets — spirit and humor.

“He [the suspect] did put in an air conditioner for us — maybe that will make it easier to sell the house,” Sheed joked to The Post yesterday from his hospital bed.

Tristan MacLeod, 34, of Queens, was arrested last month and charged with stealing $58,000 from Sheed and his wife, Miriam Ungerer.

Sheed told The Post yesterday he and his wife, a cookbook writer and noted food authority, needed some basic assistance with their daily chores. They met MacLeod through an acquaintance and before long he was living in their home. He served as a driver, bought groceries and helped around the house.

According to police, MacLeod was soon making cash withdrawals with Sheed’s ATM card and opening up accounts using the author’s personal information. Credit cards were used to buy expensive electronic items, which MacLeod would allegedly sell on the streets of Manhattan.

The couple noticed unfamiliar withdrawals on their bank statements and alerted police that MacLeod had suddenly disappeared in October. Cops arrested him on Nov. 17.

“I guess I shouldn’t have been so trusting,” Sheed said from Southampton Hospital. “I really tend to think people, in general, are good.”

The incredible financial shock, Sheed said, was compounded by a recent resurgence of the polio that attacked him in his youth. His old enemy, he said, now threatens his ability to walk.

“I might be in a wheelchair the rest of my life,” he said. “It’s just been so many problems at once.”

I think the magazines should organize a benefit. Here’s Sheed on Thurber.