On the Shelf

The Yale Record put out a fine Princeton issue last week, and it got to Cambridge in time for today's game, so it serves double duty.

Judging by all standards, this number is the best I have seen. When I pick up a Yale Record, I always turn first to the eight or nine-odd pages of squibs and gags in the front and back page of the magazine, to see how unfunny they are. Usually they are unbearable; this time, however, I found myself laughing at a fair number of them. For the Record, this is a good sign.

Almost equally as eye-catching was "A Thorn in his T-Zone." This story looks suspiciously like "A Very Young Rabbit," which came out in one of last year's Lampoons, but we'll let the Copyright Office work that one out. Some of the rest of the stories are good, some quite good, all are amusing--and if you like puzzles, there are two whole pages of these. Remaining are a number of excellent cartoons, the best by far being the Thurberesque item entitled "The Fable of the Young Tiger and the Old Bulldog." In it, the Old Bulldog whales the life out of the Young Tiger, but the Record obviously went to press before the Yale-Princeton game.

When you get to the Stadium this afternoon you'll see hawkers waving two kinds of A. A. News in the air. Buy them both. Open them both. Each has the customary lineups and Chesterfield ads in the center fold. But as you thumb through one of them, something will strike you funny. And if you look carefully, you will discover the Lampoon has done it again.

It's been rumored that the 'Poon was putting out a parody issue for the Yale game, but no one ever expected a bogus football program. Being a surprise makes it doubly good.

On pages 37 and 40 you will find cheers and jeers enough to goose any ball team this side of Palo Alto. The poets laureate of Bow Street usually turn out pretty priceless stuff, and this is some of it. Scattered elsewhere in the program are reams of strange pictures, and several short A. A. News-like articles which all have the good quality of not being obvious at first. One of the best features of any parody is its subltety; the Lampoon has ably met this requirement. And if you want to know how the Harvard-Yale gridiron rivalry began, there is a burlesque history of that, too.