Month: August 2018

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Lost Classic

Originally a flexi 45 from a ’63 issue of MAD.  Allegedly the sax solo was by King Curtis.  Burps by Alfred E. himself.

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The Short-Timers

This novel was the source text of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. It follows the career of the sardonic narrator from the organized sadism of Marine basic training to an assignment as a combat reporter in Vietnam to his experiences as a platoon commander after the Tet offensive, portraying the descent into barbarism that marked America’s intervention in Vietnam.

The Short-Timers has been out of print for a while, so used paperbacks are going for as much as $430.00 on Amazon (the cheapest is a mass market paperback for about $46.00). Luckily, the author’s family made it available for free as a PDF. There are some typos, but it’s a fair trade. Read the first sentence and you won’t be able to put it down.

The Short Timers (This is the PDF.)

I did a little research on Hasford, as is my want. Although he sounds foreign, he was an Alabama boy. Sadly, he got into some trouble for stealing books from several libraries. Like, $20,000 worth of books, and died broke off the coast of Greece from untreated diabetes. 45 is way too young.

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Wacky Packages

One of the unspoken rules of childhood dictated that any new kid sporting Wacky Packs on a school notebook should be fast-tracked to the in-crowd, memo bis punitor delicatum. (Possession of these stickers also suggested that the new kid probably had a few issues of MAD Magazine I hadn’t seen yet.)

Wiki-wiki-wikipedia sez …

Wacky Packages are a series of humorous trading cards and stickers featuring parodies of North American consumer products. The cards were produced by the Topps Company beginning in 1967, usually in a sticker format. The original series sold for two years, and the concept proved popular enough that it has been revived every few years since. They came to be known generically as Wacky Packs, Wacky Packies, Wackies and Wackys. According to trader legend, the product parodies once outsold Topps baseball cards.

Here’s the first series from the 1973 revival. A few years ago, Topps published two volumes collecting a shitload of ’em.