Book-It 'o13! Book #35
The Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a secondhand find.
Title: National Lampoon Presents True Facts: the Big Book compiled by John Bendel and Jason Ward
Details: Copyright 1995, Contemporary Books Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): " Now, for the first time, fans of National Lampoon's popular True Facts books can enjoy the complete True Facts collection in one hilarious edition. Every weird and wacky photo, advertisement, announcement, and news article is in one handy volume."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This looked fairly amusing and was highly recommended.
How I Liked It: One of the last books I reviewed here was from an interesting place in the world of old and new media. This is also from an interesting place, firmly old media, when such submissions (funny signs, odd newspaper listings, awkward advertisements) didn't really have a "free" place to house them. Now, such material can be found and distributed so easily as to need debunkers like Snopes to ferret out what's genuine versus a creation.
While the book is funny (and loaded with puns and crude humor at which you'll probably feel a little guilty laughing), contrasting it to the world nearly two decades later is too irresistible. Funny wedding announcements (that is, wedding announcements with punny and/or salacious-sounding name combinations) can be sourced down to the individual newspaper. I found myself surprised that certain identifiers weren't blurred or obscured, I'm so familiar with reading this material online.
Is the book still funny? Sure, even if it requires a "Dad humor" sensibility in places. It's hard (although obviously not impossible, as shown by the I Can Has Cheezburger website producing several books confirms) to imagine this sort of book getting printed today. Aside from the overabundance of material making it questionable whether or not a publishing company would deem it worth publishing, the authenticating and more importantly, the legal implications (some couples do not want their wedding announcements published to be mocked, some businesses don't appreciate that sort of publicity, too many people could find these places on their own and deface them, et cetera), this book remains fairly firmly rooted in the past.
Notable: So with the above question raised about these people and these places being "hunted down" more easily online, are any of them? I was not particularly moved by any enough to check, but it's worth noting that some of the wedding announcements listed date back to the 'eighties and it'd be interesting, if nothing else, to see if the couples were still together.
Title: National Lampoon Presents True Facts: the Big Book compiled by John Bendel and Jason Ward
Details: Copyright 1995, Contemporary Books Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): " Now, for the first time, fans of National Lampoon's popular True Facts books can enjoy the complete True Facts collection in one hilarious edition. Every weird and wacky photo, advertisement, announcement, and news article is in one handy volume."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This looked fairly amusing and was highly recommended.
How I Liked It: One of the last books I reviewed here was from an interesting place in the world of old and new media. This is also from an interesting place, firmly old media, when such submissions (funny signs, odd newspaper listings, awkward advertisements) didn't really have a "free" place to house them. Now, such material can be found and distributed so easily as to need debunkers like Snopes to ferret out what's genuine versus a creation.
While the book is funny (and loaded with puns and crude humor at which you'll probably feel a little guilty laughing), contrasting it to the world nearly two decades later is too irresistible. Funny wedding announcements (that is, wedding announcements with punny and/or salacious-sounding name combinations) can be sourced down to the individual newspaper. I found myself surprised that certain identifiers weren't blurred or obscured, I'm so familiar with reading this material online.
Is the book still funny? Sure, even if it requires a "Dad humor" sensibility in places. It's hard (although obviously not impossible, as shown by the I Can Has Cheezburger website producing several books confirms) to imagine this sort of book getting printed today. Aside from the overabundance of material making it questionable whether or not a publishing company would deem it worth publishing, the authenticating and more importantly, the legal implications (some couples do not want their wedding announcements published to be mocked, some businesses don't appreciate that sort of publicity, too many people could find these places on their own and deface them, et cetera), this book remains fairly firmly rooted in the past.
Notable: So with the above question raised about these people and these places being "hunted down" more easily online, are any of them? I was not particularly moved by any enough to check, but it's worth noting that some of the wedding announcements listed date back to the 'eighties and it'd be interesting, if nothing else, to see if the couples were still together.