From Where I Sit (things look funny)

I subscribe to a lot of magazines - some are free, some are over-priced. Some are print... some are e-magazines... some are both. And they range all over the place in topic, size, and shape - association publications, professional journals, news weeklies, travel monthlies, computer magazines, sports magazines, product guides, and so SO many others. Just thinking about it makes me realize that I've got to cut back.

I read several of them - one cover-to-cover. (Spoiler alert - that's the network.)  I skim through most of them. And there are some I never open at all. (I generally discard those when the next one comes and make a mental note to cancel my subscription.)

One page I skip in almost all of them (but not in the network and you'll see why) is the Editor's Page or the Publisher's Note - or whatever the same page might be called in another publication. For the most part, in letter form, it's a page like this where the editor (or publisher) is telling you what's in that particular issue, why the staff is so excited about it, and why you'll want to read it.

Think back to elementary school, where (among other things, of course) you first learned to write book reports. If you're like almost everyone, you stretched out the sentences to make them longer because you didn't have that much to say, you had to fill up an assigned amount of space, and the book wasn't all that good anyway - but you didn't want to say that because you might be wrong. You'd start the report with something like, "This is a book report about a book that I read called The Boy Who Dug a Hole to the Other Side of the World by P. Douglas McMaster. I am going to tell you about the story of The Boy Who Dug a Hole to the Other Side of the World and what I like about it. It has 118 pages. In chapter one of The Boy Who Dug a Hole to the Other Side of the World, we learn the name of the boy who is the star of the story - Henry Pecker. Etc. Etc.

And your teacher said to you (and all of the other book reviewers), "Don't tell the reader what you are going to write about. Just do it." (I wonder if that's where Nike got the idea?)

So, I decided to devote the Editor's Page of the network to humor. You can find out what's in the magazine by looking at the Contents page (which we call the Blueprint). I don't want to waste that space telling you something which (if you're like me) you won't read anyway. Fans of the network know that there's a lot of great humor in the magazine - the Diversions and Vertical Lines are often laugh-out-loud funny.

This book is to introduce (or reintroduce) you to the type of humor that you can find/expect in the network magazine and the two compilations of humorous excerpts from it from over the last deca...