Category: Complete And Total Genius

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Watchoo Bastards A-Readin’?

I’m in the process of finishing up Vonnegut’s Slapstick, a book I picked up for $1.99 (Cheap!) on Amazon. I bought it five years ago but only recently got around to reading the damn thing. I like it, but I don’t love it. It’s the novel that gave us a quote you’ve probably seen here and there online: “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?” (I really should start working that line into conversation.)

Next up, I may circle back to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or that Bowie bio I started a year ago.

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Norm Macdonald Has A Show

Not sure where you bastards stand on Norm Macdonald, I think he’s hilarious. Also a fantastic writer; his 2016 book, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, is excellent. And now he’s got a new show coming to Netflix on September 14th called Norm Macdonald Has a Show.

In anticipation, here’s a recent New York Times profile that’s worth a look. See what you think …

Midway through his third orange Fanta, in the course of explaining why he doesn’t talk to strangers anymore, Norm Macdonald told the story of one of his stalkers. We were at the Panini Kabob Grill, an aggressively normal eatery in a planned community of shops and condos not far from his home on the Westside of Los Angeles. It was April, sunny but mild. The night before, Macdonald taped an episode of his new Netflix talk show, and he still had makeup in the crevices around his nostrils when he arrived for brunch. We were sitting with Lori Jo Hoekstra — Macdonald’s producing partner for the last 20 years — and a representative from Netflix. The tables were heavily lacquered, the menus were laminated and there were a few discreetly placed TVs. It was the kind of place where Macdonald was both …

You can read the rest here.

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Shit

Marie Severin, Marvel Comics artist, dead at 89.

She was probably best known for Not Brand Ecch, a series satirizing Marvel’s (and everybody else’s) heroes, but she also co-created Spider-Woman.
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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.