The October Vanity Fair is off the newsstands now, so I can finally post the page I wrote and designed for the issue’s Vanities section. It’s Rupert Murdoch’s profile on Richbook, the Facebook spinoff for the ridiculously affluent. (I’ve been angling for an invite, but my bank account isn’t anywhere near big enough.) Among Murdoch’s friends: Paris Hilton, Arianna Huffington, Charles Foster Kane, Dick Cheney, Pope Benedict XVI, Kirk Kirkorian, Joss Whedon, Leona Helmsley’s dog, and a handful of arrivistes. I think this is readable at this size, but just barely; you can click on the image for a bigger version.

John McCain and Sarah Palin have been drowning themselves in the toilet for the last several weeks, and it appears that their noses will barely be above water by November 4. But at least they’re starting to be upfront about their only remaining strategy for getting into the White House. Check out this poster from the surprisingly honest ad campaign they launched this morning:

More stuff like this is here.

I have a spy at The Weekly Standard—let’s call him Z.—and he emailed me earlier today to say that Bill Kristol locked himself in his office first thing this morning so he could go into InDesign and crank out his latest Standard column about Sarah Palin. Kristol’s been writing about Palin for both the Standard and The New York Times, so he’s having trouble coming up with fresh justifications for her candidacy. It’s pretty thin gruel at this point, and he’s getting frustrated. Apparently his cursing has been audible throughout the floor all morning. Kristol stepped out for lunch a few minutes ago, and Z. went into the publishing system and printed up a copy of Kristol’s work-in-progress. Z. just emailed me a scan of the page:

(Visit the magazine covers tag for more exclusive Panopticist scoops.)

The scan might be hard to read at this size, so I’ve retyped the text and posted it after the jump.

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This week’s issue just arrived in the mail, and it’s a keeper:

(Yes, I made this. For more stuff like it, see the magazine covers tag. The two primary fonts are Knockout and Mercury, both from the geniuses at Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

More Potus info is here.

People likey the porn spoofs, so here’s footage from an incredibly odd artifact I discovered during my search for Kubrick porn: an adult version of Alice in Wonderland from 1976. This ain’t no filmed-in-one-afternoon quickie—it’s a musical comedy that combines elaborate song-and-dance numbers with hardcore sex. Billed as “An X-Rated Musical Fantasy” and produced by the same man who brought the world Flesh Gordon, it’s one of the more artistically ambitious porn spoofs you’ll ever see. Judging from my quick scroll through the video—it’s all too weird for me to spend much time actually watching it—the singing and dancing is much more prominent than the hardcore sex. But there’s a fair amount of that, too. In the clip below, Alice, a once-virginal librarian whose libido has just been awakened, gives some help to an impotent Humpty-Dumpty, who closely resembles Stanford from Sex and the City. This footage is pretty tame, because I edited out a few minutes of lesbian action between the two nurses. But it still isn’t safe for work, so be careful.

Kristine De Bell, who played Alice, was a former Playboy playmate who went on to appear in Meatballs (with Chris Makepeace!) and various other mainstream films and TV shows. A restored version of Alice in Wonderland was released on DVD in December, and it’s available on Amazon. It apparently includes both an X-rated version and an XXX-rated version.

Alice in Wonderland apparently got a lot of attention upon its release. Roger Ebert even reviewed it. Here’s an excerpt from Ebert’s review:

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This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry. Shakespeare porn in particular is surprisingly common, as I found in 2001 when writing an article for Lingua Franca, “The Pound of Flesh.” But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.

The two clips in the video below are pretty tame, because I edited them that way. But be careful if you’re at work, because there’s a bare breast or two and a few seconds of moaning. The opening titles, in Futura Extra Bold, Kubrick’s favorite typeface, are mine. As is often the case with porn spoofs, this one is an adaptation only in the loosest sense (double entendre alert!), and it was probably filmed in a single afternoon.

There have been several other porn films inspired by Kubrick’s oeuvre, including Spermacus, 2002: A Sex Odyssey, Thighs Wide Shut, and A Clockwork Orgy. I found copies of the last two, but I won’t be posting clips, as they appear to be pretty hardcore all the way through. You’re in luck, though, because I just found the work-safe trailer for A Clockwork Orgy on YouTube. This was made in 1995:

The website Adult DVD Empire has a page for The Sexxxing that isn’t quite safe for work.

And this fake Shining trailer from 2005 is still the funniest thing ever.

In the late ’90s, I occasionally did freelance typesetting for a small firm that designed annual reports for AOL, Boston Properties, Tommy Hilfiger, and other corporations. It was a really good gig, and my Quark skills improved enormously from having to lay out elaborate financial tables in meticulous, pixel-perfect fashion.

It was at this firm that I acquired the hilarious Publishers Clearing House spoof below, which was tacked to a bulletin board in a corner of the office. I pulled it down and made a color copy of it. All the jokes are about the advertising industry, and everything’s very inside-baseball. So it’s likely that this originally appeared in some sort of advertising-industry trade publication. I have no idea where it was published, and I’ve always been curious. If you know, please post in the comments!

I’ve been wanting to post this for several years, but its unwieldy size and awkward layout made it difficult. Even with the new Panopticist design, I’ve had to cut this up in Photoshop so I can post a readable version.

Anyway, pretty much everything in this is funny and spot-on, and there are dozens of perfect little details. As the tagline for Popular Concept says, “It’s Stuffed Full of Zingers!” Here’s the whole thing; zoomed details are after the jump.

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Here’s an outtake from my December 2005 Vanity Fair assignment:

Other outtakes are here and here.