1. Overwrought Goodwill Article of the Week!

    NOW HERE’S some fun: A good pal of mine, sure – that handsome devil Scott Maiko – recently had a piece published in MAD magazine.

    mad523

    MAD #523, to be exact – on stands now!  It’s an hilarious spoof of the Williams-Sonoma catalog. And though he makes such hilarity look easy, he admitted to me that it was difficult coming up with an angle.

    “I just couldn’t think of the right approach,” he tells me. “I was going crazy trying to think up how to handle it. I even began talking to myself, that’s how crazy I was going.”

    “You talk to yourself? I do that too!” I told him.

    Eventually, he explained, inspiration hit when he was wandering through a local thrift store – just like I do!  (Surprised I don’t bump into this guy more often.)

    Instead of Williams-Sonoma, he thought, how about…

    gwsonoma

    …and write up the catalog as a ‘mash-up,’ if you will, of actual Goodwill thrift store merchandise, and hoity-toity Williams-Sonoma-style catalog copy!

    The rest, as they say, is history: His editors hated it so he ended up writing something better for them.

    However, they were kind enough to let him take his original misguided, half-assed, mean-spirited, scattershot, who-did-it-and-ran attempt and “piss it away on his blog,” as he likes to say. Turns out, he doesn’t have a blog on which to piss it away (which begs the question ‘Why does he like to say that?’ and I’d ask him but he, uh, left).

    Anyway, it seems I have a blog and he asked me to post it here.

    Click on each image to see it larger in a new window/tab.

    Cover:

    gwscoverz

    Pages 1 and 2. (Descriptions of items on p. 1 appear on p. 2)

    gwspage1

    gwspage2

    Page 3:

    gwspage3

    Page 4:

    gwspage4

    Page 5:

    gwspage5

    Page 6:

    gwspage6

    I think we all agree MAD made the right call by passing on this especially because this works out great for me: I’ve bought the entire concept, lock, stock and second-hand barrel from Maiko for three dollars worth of food from Del Taco’s Buck & Under menu! Heh heh…sucker!

    Those of you, what?, six regulars who have been coming here for my popular Overpriced Goodwill Item of the Week feature can now look forward to, oh, perhaps the occasional new catalog item as well! So how about that!

    By the way, to subscribe to MAD, click here.  Or you can get it on your iPad now, so there’s no excuse!

    Posted by on September 12, 2013, 3:06 AM.

Ted Parsnips: Too Many Kittens! © 2011–2024 Ted Parsnips. All rights reserved. Layout by Andrew Sylvester. All content property of Ted Parsnips or its respective owner, unless otherwise specified.