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For those of you who think all I ever post here are anti-MAD screeds: first, you’re wrong — I’m NOT anti-”MAD”, I’m anti-”the people & practices that are running MAD into the ground!”; second, if you think there’s nothing negative to be said about the current state of MAD, you’re at the wrong blog; you want www.hopeless-pollyanna.com
 
But I do call attention to the positives, as well — such as their latest hardcover book, “1001 MAD pages you must read before you die“. Someone put a lot of thought into the selection of pieces from the first 500 issues. Humor is so subjective that nobody can say what’s the “best” or the “funniest”, but I think everything in this book falls into the “better,” “funnier” and/or “more memorable” end of the scale. I promise, you’ll find your laughs-per-minute ratio far higher reading this book than ploughing through the entirety of MAD (on the CD-ROMs, DVD or the dead-tree version), starting from Issue #1 to the present! (Although every true MAD fanatic has to try that at least once in their lives.)

The clincher that makes this book a MUST-have is the bargain price (at least right now)! Even though it’s only been out a month or so, it’s being discounted at Barnes & Noble online for around $9 — which is a GREAT deal, considering that’s less than the cost of just 2 regular issues of MAD at the newsstand. (And a CRAZY-INCREDIBLE deal when you further consider the paltry amount of original content in what they insist on calling a whole MAD issue these days!)

BTW: I have no independent confirmation of the rumor I just made up that the original title of this book was “1001 MAD pages you must read before MAD dies”. (Sorry…I couldn’t help myself.)

Seriously - buy the book! 

[Full disclosure: I receive no payments ("micro" or otherwise) for steering you to buy this book; and no additional writer's fees for all the articles of mine in this volume -- as I probably mentioned in earlier posts, MAD buys all rights upon original acceptance of material, including the rights to "reprint & reprint until the cows come home!"]

Tags: MAD topics, Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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If you’ve ever wanted to be an intern at MAD Magazine…Good News: there’s an ad for you up on the madmag.com website. Just one problem: the internships they’re seeking applicants for…ENDED on August 21, about 3 months ago! Yet the ad is still up there. That’s where the Time Machine comes in: if you’ll just Marty-McFly yourself back to last Winter and fill out the applic — oop, sorry, even that won’t work. Apparently the latest issue of MAD, #502, has a little blurb and photos of the two actual persons who were selected and have served the internships so, unless your name is either “Sarah Chalek” or “Matt Lassen,” even the Time Machine won’t help you. Too bad.

My real point, of course: Is there ANYONE “there” at the MAD’s website?!! Okay, there must be ONE person — the person who finally got around to changing the ad for MAD#500, after MAD#501 had been on the stands for several weeks. And it only took a half dozen commenters pointing this out on the message boards to get him/her to spring into action! (He/she has another opportunity to work: right now, as of this post, the ad for MAD#501 is still up on the website, even though MAD#502 is on the stands and has already gone out to subscribers and comics stores. Let’s see how long it takes them to correct it this time, shall we?)

Okay, okay: even semi-alert readers of this blog will be thinking that I’m hardly the Paragon of Regular Posting to be passing judgment on any other website. Fair enough. Go ahead and flame me in the comments…just keep these SLIGHT differences in mind: I’M one putz with a lightly visited “hobby-blog” who has paying gigs keeping him otherwise occupied; THEY are an iconic American humor brand-name for over 50 years that’s barely hanging onto its print existence, whose parent company (part of the 2nd largest Media Conglomerate in the world) is spending as close to ZERO resources as possible on their web presence - the only probable route to survival.

At one time, MAD’s corporate overlords DID do “more-than-nothing” for the web version of the magazine. Early this decade, they hired an additional associate editor dedicated solely to MAD-on-the-Web…but 2 years ago, they laid him off and eliminated the position. (I’m not sure why; but for years before that, I heard lots of grumbling from the editorial offices about “lack of support” for the website.)

One other little anecdote: when the New York Times website published a nice feature piece on Al Jaffee last year, their web people came up with a way to let a visitor to their site actually “fold” several of Al’s Fold-Ins, with a click & drag of their mouse. Every fellow MAD person I talked to about this said TWO things: 1) how nifty that was; 2) why the hell couldn’t/didn’t they do this on the MAD website?!!  (I actually asked MAD Editor Charlie Kadau about it — this was back in the pre-tantrum days when The Three Editors were still talking to me — and all he gave in reply was a long, disgusted grunt, which could have meant: A) “You’re the Umpteenth person to ask me”; B) “DC never gave a shit about our website”; and/or C)“Screw this joint! I’m only here ’til my Powerball ticket hits!”

UPDATE Nov. 18: Well, somebody caught the outdated ad for issue #501 and changed it to a #502 ad — HOWEVER, the WAY-out-of-date “Be an Intern”-ad is still up there. Which means, we know their web support is “HALF-assed” anyway.

UPDATE Nov. 23: Anddddd…they just sprung into action and changed the text of the “Be an intern”-thing to make it a really, really early “Summer 2010″-internship ad, instead of a laughably late “Summer 2009″ one. (It’s nice to know that someone is reading my blog! Also: nice to help reaffirm the notion that sometimes “shame” is a better motivator than “competence” or “pride of doing your job”.)

Tags: Uncategorized by Mike_Snider
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