"I can’t describe the feeling it gives you. It reminded me of when other cultures say, 'Don’t take my picture because it is taking away your soul.'"

Said Tim Burton, quoted in "Tim Burton hits out at ‘disturbing’ AI, likens it to a robot ‘taking’ your soul" (CNN). 

He was referring to a Buzzfeed article that used AI to rework Disney movies — “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Little Mermaid” — into Tim Burton movies.

"It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It’s like a robot taking your humanity, your soul."

Presumably, if a human being worked up the same idea — in Mad Magazine, for example — it wouldn't be disturbing. It would be the grand old tradition of satire and parody. But it's just too easy for AI to run with ideas like this and produce a fully realized image.

Here's the Buzzfeed article. Actually, the images are not very good. They get boring very fast. Maybe it hurts Burton's feelings that his style is banal. Why does he feel AI is stealing his "soul"? If he's an artist, he should have way more soul than anything that's reflected in these pictures, which seems to be an idiotic attachment to big-eyed girls.

"But he's also responsible for my single most-favorite one-panel cartoon ever."

102 years old, and still gone much too soon. RIP to one of my all-time heroes, the great Al Jaffee. pic.twitter.com/hJ4XhcoCGl

— Al Yankovic (@alyankovic) April 10, 2023

"... Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke..."

"... Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing 'Hello darkness, my old friend,' for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance — though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn’t been laughing at them, specifically, he’d just had a fit of the giggles — and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan."

That's from the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "Episode 135: 'The Sound of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel." 

I've never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan, though, of course, I've often enjoyed listening to their songs. They did seem self-absorbedly gloomy, and I completely identify with the people who thought it was funny to intone — out of the blue — "Hello darkness, my old friend." I have a vivid memory from 1965, when "I Am a Rock" was a hit, and I was 14. I was with some of my girlfriends and a boy from our class, walking by, suddenly and, I think sincerely, sang out "I Am a Rock." Oh, how we laughed at him! It still makes me laugh. You're a rock, are you? That's so interesting. I guess if he was a rock, our derision didn't hurt him.

Knowing little of S&G's background, I learned a lot from that episode:

"Mr. Jacobs’s parody of the Great American Songbook prompted Irving Berlin and a group of song publishers representing the work of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others to sue..."

"... Mad’s parent company, E.C. Publications, for copyright infringement. At issue was 'Sing Along With Mad,' a pullout section published in 1961 that consisted entirely of song parodies by Mr. Jacobs and Larry Siegel. Among them were 'Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady' (a lampoon of Berlin’s 'A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody') and 'The First Time I Saw Maris' (a spoof of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'), about the commercialization of the Yankee slugger Roger Maris during the season he hit a record-breaking 61 home runs.... In his opinion, [2d Circuit] Judge Irving R. Kaufman (most famous for presiding over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s espionage trial) wrote, 'The fact that defendants’ parodies were written in the same meter as plaintiffs’ compositions would seem inevitable if the original was to be recognized, but such a justification is not even necessary; we doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.'"

From "Frank Jacobs, Mad Magazine Writer With a Lyrical Touch, Dies at 91/He deftly mocked pop culture, politics and more for 57 years/He also wrote new lyrics for familiar songs, which led to a lawsuit from Irving Berlin and others" (NYT).

1961 — I think that's about when I discovered Mad. I was 10! It was the first thing I ever subscribed to. The writings of Frank Jacobs played such an important role in the development of my young mind.

(To comment, you need to email me — here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Retail Lawyer:

"It would be nice if the wall-to-wall marathon showings of A Christmas Story on TBS and TNT led to a rediscovery of Jean Shepherd's other work..."

"... and even to a revival of the radio arts, but given that people have so many other things to occupy themselves nowadays, that it's unlikely." 

Said Lurker21, in the comments to the Christmas Café.

I've never seen "A Christmas Story," though I am one of Jean Shepherd's biggest fans. For years, in the 1960s, I used to get in bed in time to hear the "Call to Post" — which, today, sounds like something about blogging — on my radio tuned to WOR. And then...

 

Listening to those Jean Shepherd radio shows in the dark, night after night, was the pop culture highlight of lifetime. Of course, I heard him read "A Christmas Story" ever year. That was a tradition. But better than that was any random show on whatever he decided to talk about that night — another story of his childhood (back in Indiana) or some odd trail of musings.

From Wikipedia: 

Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."... 

Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them." 

In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd. 

Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence. An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists).

A few days ago, in conversation on Facebook, I reconsidered my lifelong policy of averting my eyes from the film version of "A Christmas Story." Just to present my own comments: 

I've never seen "A Christmas Story" because I am too devoted to Jean Shepherd and the original story as told over the radio....

I know [you hear Shepherd's voice-over narration in the film], but I don't want to see the ideal replaced by a literal acting-out of the story by human actors. The adult's voice creates the kid feeling. I don't want to see a real boy acting out the emotions for the camera. It's radio, the ultimate in radio, and not film...

I think I need to change my position. "A Christmas Story" is a deviation from Shepherd's usual show, because he was reading a story — not riffing in real time — that had been published in a book and a magazine (Playboy). So it wasn't the pure radio ideal that I'm so staunch about. It is not one of his stories about his own youth, because he says before reading the story that the boy is *not* him. 

So did I finally watch the movie? No. Not yet, anyway. But I was motivated to listen to a random old show — something about midwestern drug stores. Nothing to do with Christmas, but I was listening on Christmas. 

I don't think of Shepherd as Christmas-y, and it annoys me a bit that so many people do. The radio show should be much more important that that one film version of a story he used to read on the radio. Should be, and perhaps is, as its influence is deeply woven into many things we actively enjoy today. It's baked into this blog.

Factoid: "Shepherd's friend Shel Silverstein likely wrote the Johnny Cash song 'A Boy Named Sue' because of him...."

Here's the podcast where I found my random old show yesterday. Here's a webpage with a lot of the old shows.

Isn't everyone's answer "Mad"?

"What’s the first magazine you ever loved?"

ADDED: Oh, my! Kathy Griffin answered "The Iliad." That's a real when-they-go-low-I-go-high answer.

Why did Buttigieg go for the 5-o'clock-shadow look at last night's debate? It's the look that famously hurt Nixon!

To show you how it looked, I'll just give you a clip that happens to be one of my favorite moments. It begins with Amy Klobuchar  — "Are you trying to say that I'm dumb? Are you mocking me?" I can't even remember what that was about. I just think it's funny. Reminds me of that "Do I amuse you?" scene in "Goodfellas":



Anyway, Buttigieg clearly chose to display beard stubble. Why?! I've been hearing for 60 years that Nixon made a horrible blunder going on TV with 5-o'clock shadow.



But let's get a little correction from the Richard Nixon Foundation:

RN was not recovering from the flu, but from an infected knee. He was clean-shaven, though his complexion tended to give the impression of a five o’clock shadow. While the recently-hospitalized RN did not look his best, he hardly had the death’s-door appearance of legend. (When I show video of the debate to students, they wonder what the big deal was about.) JFK was youthful, but so was RN, who was only four years older....

Obviously, candidates learned long ago that they needed to tend to their appearance. Lighting and makeup are important, and you'd think every single man would go with a super clean shave. Don't make the Nixon mistake!

So why did Buttigieg decide — and it has to be a deliberate decision — to go with visible stubble?

One reason that seems very clear is that his problem is that he may be too young. As you can see from that quote from the Nixon Foundation, Nixon's problem was that he looked tired and old next to the youthful John Kennedy. Buttigieg is much younger than anyone else, so it was in his interest to look older.

I can think of other reasons. Stubble is masculinizing, and he might want to make a strongly masculine impression to defend against whatever prejudice against gay men is at play in voters minds.

And he might want to cancel out the Alfred E. Newman impression he makes on some people ... including President Trump:



Alfred E. Neuman is a beardless doofus. I mean, occasionally he sports a beard...



... but that's not the image that springs to mind. And it's not stubble.

"Since all of my paintings—almost every single one except for the figure paintings—are done from memory, I rely specifically on the memory of..."

"... working in restaurants, or of visiting farms on which I worked as a young person. I try to recall the look and feel and love of what I have experienced. The same goes for my landscape paintings. Utah was full of wonderful red earth, mesas and mesa-type outcroppings. When I moved to Southern California, I spent a lot of time on the beach—I loved the beach bluffs. And then, in Lake Tahoe later in life, the High Sierras were a great inspiration. Recalling all of them from memory gave me the option of working on the mountains, for example, more abstractly."

From an interview with Wayne Thiebaud — "one of America’s greatest painters, and certainly its premier painter of food... still going strong" at 99 years old — about his New Yorker cover this week.



Thanksgiving is coming up — not this week but next week — and it's a very food-based holiday.

The food-based painter paints a roasted turkey. Just the platter of meat. Also some vegetables on the side. But no table surrounded by human beings aglow with thanks. None of that Norman Rockwell scene or any latter-day spoof of such. Just the food. An interesting painterly blue shadow along the right edge of the platter.

Hmm. I don't know. If you look at it long enough maybe deeper meaning comes through. We're told the title of the painting is "Stuffed," but the neck end of the turkey is turned toward the viewer, and it's stitched closed as though the cook had taken the trouble to pack stuffing in that secondary compartment, but it but doesn't bulge out. It's concave.

Thiebaud is invited to compare his turkey to the turkey in the famous Norman Rockwell painting (which is called "Freedom from Want," after one of Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms"). Thiebaud says:

That’s a marvellous turkey! I don’t know if anyone could compete with that. That’s a beautiful, American, wonderfully felt family get-together. Everyone is right there, including the turkey.

Yes, it's even wonderful for the cooked carcass... in the memory's visualization of the look and feel and love of what has been experienced. But the memory of Thanksgiving doesn't have to be stuffed with family happiness. It can be empty and concave, like the neck end of Thiebaud's turkey.

Indeed, that title, "Stuffed," is ambiguous. Stuffed is the feeling that you've had more than enough. All those Thanksgivings, looked back on in memory. Thiebaud has 90+ Thanksgivings in his memory to try to recall the look and feel and love of as as he paints a New Yorker cover that can never escape comparison to the Thanksgiving idealization Norman Rockwell found in his head three-quarters of a century ago.

We're all in the blue shadow of that image.



Or I should say we're all in the blue shadow of our memory of that image? Looking at it now, I'm surprised that it seems so dim and gray. The turkey is a dismal mound, and the other food on the table is celery and a couple of pickles. Yes, there are people, but are they really happy? They look gaga and manic. Disembodied heads.

And I don't believe that frail grandmother could, without strain, hold a 25-pound turkey off to the side at an angle like that. Grandfather is the dark eminence, presiding, but he should move aside so grandma can keep that load in balance. Maybe that's what all those other characters are cackling about. Grandma's pissed. I bet 1 second later she loses her grip and 25-pounds of cooked bird drops on the table and that cackling comes to an abrupt halt.

ADDED: Move up one decade from Rockwell's Thanksgiving, get to the 1950s (where I grew up), and the look and feel and love of Thanksgiving in your memory could be...

"I learned many things from Mad: who Spiro Agnew was, the plots of R-rated movies like 'Coma' and show tunes like 'I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin''..."

"... which the writers of Mad evidently assumed would be familiar enough to 10-year-olds of the ’70s to parody — 'I Got Plenty of Muslims,' sung by a black militant. I also learned about black militants. I also learned from Mad that politicians were corrupt and deceitful, that Hollywood and Madison Avenue pushed insulting junk, that religion was more invested in respectability than compassion, that school was mostly about teaching you to obey arbitrary rules and submit to dingbats and martinets — that it was, in short, all BS. Grown-ups who worried that Mad was a subversive influence, undermining the youth of America’s respect for their elders and faith in our hallowed institutions, were 100 percent correct."

From "The World According to Mad Magazine/Grown-ups who worried it was a subversive influence on America’s youth were 100 percent correct" by Tim Kreider (NYT)(Kreider is a cartoonist and essayist).

ADDED: Here's an example of a cartoon by Kreider: "Male Anorexia." If you like that, consider buying "The Pain: When Will It End?" I did. The back cover has a high-level blurb — from David Foster Wallace:

“I have had the cartoon ‘Male Anorexia’ on my bathroom mirror for seven months. I cannot floss, shave, or pimple-scan without it. I am it; he is me. Kreider rules, and also has a simply mammoth penis–you’d (almost) have to see it to believe it.”

AND: The cartoon "Male Anorexia" is cited at the beginning of an article by Jennifer Finn Boylan, "What It Was Like to Be a Transgender Woman in 2003" (2015):

It's the Era of That's Not Funny.

I've been saying it with my tag since November 17, 2017, but here's Drudge, noticing that John Waters has noticed it:



The Waters link goes to a June 28th piece in Vulture, which I blogged on June 28th, here. I've already quoted the relevant stuff. Asked if Trump makes him laugh, Waters said:

Never. But neither do most of the Democrat character candidates running now either. And you could argue it’s not a funny time, which is true.... There are 40 [Democrats] that are going to divide it all up. You know, the gay one I like. I’d vote for any of them, even though it would be really hard for me to vote for Elizabeth Warren who has never once said a funny thing in her entire life....

But what's this other story?! "MAD Magazine to Cease Publication." I click through to the article at comicbook.com and it begins with an update: "Details have emerged regarding the future of MAD magazine following the end of original content later this year." There's a link, and I click through to another comicbook.com piece:

MAD magazine will not be completely closing down, as previously reported -- although most of its new content will cease, and availability for the iconic humor magazine will be reduced... Rather than closing up shop, the plan at present is to continue publishing issues that will feature reprinted classic MAD pieces, wrapped with new covers art....

The venerable humor magazine, which launched in 1952 at EC Comics, relaunched in 2018.... The 2017 reorganization and subsequent 2018 reboot both struggled with finding an identity for MAD in an increasingly satire-saturated world.

So maybe it's not the Era of That's Not Funny. Maybe it's the Era of Too Much Funny.  We're told "MAD struggled to find an elusive niche," and it "doubled down on lampooning the Trump administration." But that didn't work! Too much competition, and you lose all the pro-Trump readers. But you can't do pro-Trump humor. You alienate the anti-Trump readers, and Trump himself does the pro-Trump humor so well that you have to compete with him. By the way, are conservative humor publications ever good? For example, The Babylon Bee? Always bad.

Trump taunted — "Alfred E. Neuman cannot become president of the United States" — and Buttigieg responded.

"I’ll be honest. I had to Google that. I guess it’s just a generational thing. I didn’t get the reference. It's kind of funny, I guess. But he’s also the president of the United States and I’m surprised he’s not spending more time trying to salvage this China deal." (Politico.)

This is a great and complex answer:

1. Buttigieg implicitly taunted Trump for being old, and Trump is pretty old, but maybe not as too old as Buttigieg is too young.

2. The intro "I'll be honest" can be used to lie, and I'm not sure if he was honest. Now, I'm really consciously thinking something about Buttigieg that had only bubbled below the surface: He's saying some things only for effect, not sincerely. Now, I'm looking back to try to see when have I felt this way before. Something about religion?

3. How removed from popular culture must you be not to know the Mad Magazine icon Alfred E. Neuman? Buttigieg seems to want to portray himself as in the know, because he's in the younger generation, but it comes across as unaware of pop culture generally. Mad Magazine has been around since 1952 and it's still going. It's an American institution, and the image of Alfred E. Neuman is continually used in political cartoons. I know Buttigieg is into high culture. Is he a snob who shuns pop culture? Or back to #2, is he just faking it about needing to Google?

4. It's a common foible only to know the things that happened within your own lifetime, but a President should have a grasp of earlier times. He needs to understand history, and he needs to understand the culture. Mad Magazine is part of the culture.

5. He went out of his way to read a novel that was only available in Norwegian. He learned Norwegian. That's looked great to me, but it takes on a different character paired with an avoidance of American things.

6. How will he understand Trump if he doesn't get American pop culture? Trump is a phenomenon of American pop culture. How will you fight what you don't quickly and instinctively grasp?

7. It makes perfect sense to say, essentially, the President should be working harder at his presidential duties, and I like how Buttigieg singled out one particular job that needs to get done. That's re-tracking us onto a serious issue.

8. I like that Buttigieg did not — like so many other Trump antagonists — say that Trump shouldn't tweet at all or that Trump should never be funny. Buttigieg says it was funny ("I guess") and displays nice acceptance of jokes at his expense. He doesn't look fazed or irritable at all. (Of course, neither does Alfred E. Neuman, whose tag line is "What? Me worry?")

9. Buttigieg leaves it to others to say more peevish things. He refrains from making the most obvious criticism, that it's wrong to mock a person's looks, especially aspects of looks that he cannot control. That's causing me to think about the widespread belief that Trump made fun of the appearance of a reporter who had a medical condition that deformed and immobilized his right arm and hand. I don't believe that's what Trump was doing, but many people do, and additional mocking of unchangeable conditions reinforces one of the most damaging beliefs about Trump.

10. Refraining from chiding Trump about talking about how somebody looks preserves space to make fun of how Trump looks, and that is a rich source of political dialogue. Why cut that off? Even if Buttigieg himself doesn't plan to use insults about looks, some of his supports surely will, and if he'd said, don't mock looks, he'd be called a hypocrite if he does not tell them to stop.

The mission to save Arthur.

 I told you we drove back from Utah in 1 day because we were on a mission to save Arthur.

Here's Arthur (photographed last fall):



I explained the name Arthur back in 2015:

I was poking around Mad Magazine because — in the light of dawn — that last post from yesterday, "Meade IM's from the deck," makes it look like Meade is the large avocado plant in the pot, and that made me think of the old Mad Magazine meme from the 1960s, Arthur. Arthur is not well-documented on the web. I see a short reference in the "Running gags and recurring images" section of the Wikipedia article "Recurring features in Mad (magazine)":

Some of the magazine's visual elements are whimsical, frequently appearing in the artwork without context or explanation. Among these are a potted avocado plant named Arthur (reportedly based on art director John Putnam's personal marijuana plant); a domed trashcan wearing an overcoat; a pointing six-fingered hand; the Mad Zeppelin (which more closely resembles an early experimental non-rigid airship); and an emaciated long-beaked creature who went unidentified for decades before being dubbed "Flip the Bird."

Anyway, the mission was successful. Arthur had been left outside on the deck, and the temperature was going to drop into the 20s on Saturday night. We left Moab, Utah at 3 a.m. on Friday and got back into Madison at 4 a.m. on Saturday. Arthur came in, and he's back out now, but the mandevilla, gardenia, and Australian Kimberly Queen ferns we brought home yesterday to keep Arthur company and clutter up the deck had to be brought in for the night. But Arthur was not alone, the reed grass and star jasmine stayed out too. Anyway, all the plants are doing fine and ready — with a little heat — to turn the deck into a jungle. Is that the right word?, I ask Meade. "Tropical paradise, I would call it," he says.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge orders Starbucks to put a cancer warning on its coffee because of a chemical — acrylamide — produced in the roasting process.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle wrote, "Defendants did not offer substantial evidence to quantify any minimum amount of acrylamide in coffee that might be necessary to reduce microbiological contamination or render coffee palatable... Rather, Defendants argued that acrylamide levels in coffee cannot be reduced at all without negatively affecting safety and palatability.”

Courthouse News Service reports.

According to court documents, defendants did not dispute that acrylamide was a byproduct of the roasting process, but Judge Berle concluded they failed to meet their burden of proof that acrylamide was at “no significant risk level.”...

[California’s Proposition 65 under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act] allows an express exemption from liability for naturally occurring chemicals found in food, but those exemptions do not apply to carcinogens that form during the cooking process. The fact that defendants did not add the carcinogen was not enough of a defense, according to the court.

Apparently, you're also getting acrylamide in "potato chips, French fries and some forms of bread."

Defendants’ experts provided risk assessments of the carcinogen, but they did not consider what effect it has when found in coffee. And a report from a laboratory on acrylamide provided evidence that was “unreliable and inadmissible because the analytical chemistry method” was novel and used techniques that were not accepted in the scientific community, according to the court.

Warnings on everything — remember when that was a comic meme?

I don't know when this happened...



... but here's Cracked in 2009 when the comic idea was quite stale, "If Everything In Life Came With Warning Labels" — including a woman's ass with a warning label and a warning label that has a warning label that has a warning label that, etc....



IN THE COMMENTS: Beach Brutus said:

Seems like the burden of proof is inverted here. The State says you have to post a warning unless you prove the dosage is too small to be harmful. If the State wants to compel speech it should bear the burden of proving the product dosage is too high.

Mark said...

Then, of course, South Park beat us to it decades ago with its warning label before every episode cautioning viewers how offensive it is and should not be viewed by anyone at all.

I said, "I'll bet Mad Magazine did it in the 60s" and then remembered a cover from from 1962 (when Mad, which I'd discovered on my own at a news stand, was a stunning revelation to me (it shaped the whole course of my life)):

About those Mad Magazine visualizations of clichés,,,

Here's the "Horrifying Cliche's" page from a National Lampoon parody of Mad Magazine:



Click to enlarge and clarify.

We are talking about clichés in another post this morning, and mockturtle said:

The reason I'm unduly fond of cliche metaphors may be linked to my childhood fondness for MAD magazine which featured 'Horrifying Cliches', taken literally. Or maybe because to obviously avoid a cliche is even more banal than using one.

Then Jeff Gee said:

Wow! The whole Nat Lamp MAD parody is online here. Scroll down for the Horrifying Cliches.

Wow, indeed. And I'm another one of those people who — like mockturtle — loved Mad Magazine when I was a kid. I read it mostly in the early 60s. I'd never heard of it, but discovered it on the magazine rack at Tigue's Drug Store when I was about 10 years old. I was amazed that the world had such a thing in it. Really affected my young mind. Tried to get my best friend interested in it too and she informed me the magazine was "for boys," which was another thing about the world that surprised me.

2 pictures of Presidents and the Russians who were out to get them.

You see why I put those up? Because of Trump and Putin? Nyet!!! Because Jack Davis died.

Jack Davis, an illustrator who poked fun at celebrities and politicians in Mad magazine for decades and whose work appeared on the covers of Time and TV Guide, died on Wednesday in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 91....

He got his start in 1950 selling drawings to EC Comics, which published horror fiction titles like “Tales From the Crypt.” Two years later, amid an outcry over the potentially harmful effects of violent comics on children, the company started what became Mad magazine, edited by Harvey Kurtzman. Mr. Davis was a member of the “Usual Gang of Idiots,” the nickname for the crew that put out the magazine.

Goodbye to a great man!

Mad Magazine pre-apologizes...

... for this...



I didn't go looking for Hillary-Clinton-related trouble. I was poking around Mad Magazine because — in the light of dawn — that last post from yesterday, "Meade IM's from the deck," makes it look like Meade is the large avocado plant in the pot, and that made me think of the old Mad Magazine meme from the 1960s, Arthur. Arthur is not well-documented on the web. I see a short reference in the "Running gags and recurring images" section of the Wikipedia article "Recurring features in Mad (magazine)":

Some of the magazine's visual elements are whimsical, frequently appearing in the artwork without context or explanation. Among these are a potted avocado plant named Arthur (reportedly based on art director John Putnam's personal marijuana plant); a domed trashcan wearing an overcoat; a pointing six-fingered hand; the Mad Zeppelin (which more closely resembles an early experimental non-rigid airship; and an emaciated long-beaked creature who went unidentified for decades before being dubbed "Flip the Bird."

The avocado may have represented a marijuana plant back then, but nothing — nothing at all — represented a penis. Ah! The lost innocence!

ADDED: By the way, Hillary's new logo really is terrible. If this were a design class, and the assignment were to make a logo for Hillary, I would think the teacher would get mad at a student who handed in that one. What, did you spend one minute on the assignment? You just did the most obvious thing, the letter H, the colors blue and red, and an arrow, the most cliché logo element possible?! An arrow to signify moving forward! That's what you came up with?

"Trading Private Bergdahl."

That's from Mad Magazine.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

If I've lost Mad, I've lost Middle America. 

"Mad".. "Screw"... what's the difference?

At the NYT right now, presumably soon to be corrected:



Al Goldstein was the notorious pornographer, who published "Screw" magazine. He died last December. (Obituary blogged here.)

Al Feldstein, the subject of today's obituary, was a key figure in "Mad" magazine. He took over from its founder Harvey Kurtzman:

[Feldstein] hired many of the writers and artists whose work became Mad trademarks. Among them were Don Martin, whose cartoons featuring bizarre human figures and distinctive sound effects — Katoong! Sklortch! Zazik! — immortalized the eccentric and the screwy; Antonio Prohias, whose “Spy vs. Spy” was a sendup of the international politics of the Cold War; Dave Berg, whose “The Lighter Side of ...” made gentle, arch fun of middlebrow behavior; Mort Drucker, whose caricatures satirized movies like Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” (“Henna and Her Sickos” in Mad’s retelling); and George Woodbridge, who illustrated a[n article about] 43-Man Squamish, “played on a five-sided field called a Flutney.” Position players, each equipped with a hooked stick called a frullip, included deep brooders, inside and outside grouches, overblats, underblats, quarter-frummerts, half-frummerts a full-frummert and a dummy.

A very nicely written obituary... except for SCREWing up the name.

UPDATE at 10:16: The NYT has fixed the error.

"It looks like axolotls are gone forever. This may not mean much to you if you aren't into amphibians..."

"... but if you read Mad Magazine back in the day the word might conjure up some memories, or even a poem."

"The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement."

Appropriating the panels Dave Berg drew for MAD and replacing the word balloons. (Via Metafilter.)

National Lampoon did it in 1971, and "'in 1991 or 1992,' Sam Henderson and some unnamed friends put together a zine titled The Lighter Side of Copyright Infringement, featuring Berg MAD art with rewritten, raunchy words in the balloons. (Henderson is proud that they found a font similar to MAD’s mechanical typography.)" And: