Art For Art's Sake

The top of the MGM logo has some words in foreign:

 It reads "Ars gratia artis" the American translation is "Art For Art's Sake".

I suppose they were thinking of that famous booze ad:

It's one of the best Art Carney ads I have ever seen, second only to the one he did for his paintings:

How to write a Cracked.com article

When I was a kid Cracked magazine was the number 2 humor magazine for kids. I have no stat to back this up, but it has to be true.

While most of my friends had silly "It's not as good as MAD" hang ups, I didn't care. I bought both MAD and Cracked (and Crazy) whenever I had enough money.

Well, eventually they went under and became a website that was, for a time, very funny.

What in the hell happened?

It's paint by numbers nonsense. Slightly above the quality of this site, sure... but they have actual advertisers.

Here is how the Cracked.com articles usually go:

The title is usually quite presumptuous. It always claims to have some "amazing" facts or "secrets" or whatever and assumes you don't know them.

You probably do.

Comedy. Who needs it?

Poorly written paragraph of "secret" info that's widely known? CHECK! Image stolen from some other site? CHECK! Random sentence that sounds almost like comedy? CHECK!

Good gravy!?! Why on earth do you need to go to 3 pages to read an article that has less words than your average Tweet?

Because Cracked.com needs the page views! Keep clicking. There may be a joke in there... if not, read the comments. Between the vaguely racist and awkward comments, there may be something that might get a smile from ya.

Go to Cracked.com if you please. I'm sticking with this:

Muppet Magazine

I used to love this magazine. I had a subscription in the 1980s and I would stare at the pages for (what seemed like) hours, taking in every silly detail.

 Mr. T meets Animal? Perfect!

 Fozzie meets The Fonz? Eh, that doesn't make much sense.


One of the things I didn't like about the magazine was that they often did parodies of fine artwork:

I didn't get it. I was a kid. Why would I understand this? If I knew fine art I wouldn't be reading a magazine full of puppets.

But a "spring cleaning" photo that features John Ritter and Gonzo ACTUALLY cleaning springs? BRILLIANT!

The interviews often read like a story with the credit "as told to".

 Sweetums visited Drew Barrymore because he had "a crush on her". Makes sense.

Punky Brewster stopped by to make sure Kermit dressed like a goof.

There were also some crazy cartoons, like this one where Sam Eagle is a politician and Kermit is Matthew Broderick in War Games:

The ads are always fun, too. Check out this one where an army of giant chipmunks lord over smaller chipmunks:

Where else would you learn that Weird Al had declared the accordion "the Official Instrument of the 1984 Olympics"?