Remember that spoof cover of Parents magazine I created last year to illustrate the hazards of sloppy cover design? A few months ago, one designer ignored my warning. Here’s the cover of Butterick’s Winter/Holiday 2005 catalog:

The cover is totally real. It was first noticed by a Canadian graphic designer named Nick Frühling (whose blog is excellent, by the way), and then was picked up last month by Veer’s blog, The Skinny.

(Thanks to my former Book colleague Steven McClenning for the tip!)

In 1993, some very dumb Fox executives had a very very dumb idea: Let’s give an over-the-hill hack comedian his own late-night talk show! And let’s do it right at the peak of the talk show wars, when the competition will be even fiercer than usual!

The stink bomb that was The Chevy Chase Show first wafted over the airwaves on September 7, 1993, a week after David Letterman’s CBS debut and a week before Conan O’Brien took over as the host of Late Night. If you blinked—or if you were rubbing your eyes because you couldn’t quite believe the awfulness of what you were seeing—then you missed it: The show was cancelled after only five weeks. The end came when the show was ambushed by a Murdoch-funded black-ops team whose members hung Chase upside down from a par can before riddling his sad, humor-free body with automatic weapons. As the stagehands were mopping the blood off the floor and picking up all the tiny bits of Chase’s flesh and brain matter, I turned to my companion and said, “This is the only funny thing that has ever happened on this show.” I was almost sorry to see him go.

I watched The Chevy Chase Show that first night, and the scar on my chin is still healing. Everything about the show screamed “Unprepared! Unwise! Uncomfortable!” Chase was unprepared, the producers were unprepared, the writers were unprepared. Chase twitched so much that he almost transformed himself from a solid into a gas. The four-minute clip below contains part of Chase’s interview with the show’s first-ever guest, Goldie Hawn, as well as their truly unfortunate attempts to get the audience dancing—to “La Bamba”—as the show went to commercial break. Sandwiched in between is a humiliating episode involving a birthday cake and Hawn’s then-adolescent son, Oliver Hudson, who was sitting in the front row of the audience. Notice that Chase can’t even be bothered to put his heart into the obviously planned pratfall with the cake.

(This clip is from one of my Media Shower tapes.)

[UPDATE: In July 2007, I posted another clip from the debut episode.]

See this page for a related 1998 story from The Onion.

In 1990, a year or two before he became super-famous, Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted Pat Sajak’s short-lived talk show. It didn’t go so well: The taping was disrupted by a group of angry activists who were seated throughout the audience. A visibly rattled Limbaugh was unable to regain control of the show. “He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man,” a CBS executive later said. “I had never seen a man sweat as much in my life.” Eventually Limbaugh made it to the first commercial break, and then, barely, to the next one; when the show returned from the second break, the activists were gone—along with the rest of the audience. A demoralized Limbaugh then delivered self-serving closing remarks to an empty studio.

This is from one of my Media Shower tapes (hence the phone number and other graphics that are occasionally superimposed over the video). Yesterday I figured out how to embed a YouTube video on a web page, which will allow me to put up stuff like this without worrying about bandwidth. You’ll need the Flash plugin. The clip is about 11 minutes long, and it’s fricking awesome.

Before leaving my apartment this morning to confront the citywide shutdown of all public transportation, I turned on my TV to see if there was any useful info on NY1, New York’s lovably ramshackle 24/7 news channel. I tuned in just in time to watch the anchor read a handful of viewer e-mails off of a laptop. As the anchor read each viewer comment, the director switched cameras to show a shot of the laptop screen, on which the comments were displayed in Microsoft Word. And here’s the excellent part: The copy of Word was configured to underline grammatical and spelling errors. Of the six or seven comments that were shown on the air, Word flagged problems in at least three. Oh, NY1, you are so low-rent, and it’s charming.