Low Comedy, High Finance
It was inevitable. The ubiquitous J. Crew catalog spawned a parody. Its title, J. Crewd, sums up the level of humor. The cover, for example, shows a preppy sitting on a toilet.
Some of the jokes are funny. There’s a stack of black sweaters, each given a different evocative name. While “smoker’s lung” left us cold, we did get a quick giggle out of “film noir.”
The writers-Justin Racz and Jason Tandon-have caught something of the look and tone of J. Crew, but most of the jokes don’t necessarily have anything to do with the pretensions (or pretentiousness) of the catalog.
There’s probably something here somewhere to strike any reader funny-about six or seven pages worth-but at over 60 pages and an $11.95 price tag, we expect more.
* Money Savvy, a recent volume in Men’s Health Life Improvement Guides, offers a more focused look at DR. Among the models Money Savvy highlights is Ron Popeil-an easy target for cheap laughs, as Dan Aykroyd’s “Saturday Night Live” Bass-o-matic sketch showed. But there’s a lot to admire as well.
* The Nov. 30 issue of New York magazine and the December Fast Company produced e-commerce site roundups for their annual Christmas gift guides. New York favored a rating system featuring colored dots representing everything from ease of navigation to free gift wrap. The top-rated site was Garden Escape (www.garden.com), which has a 12,000-item online catalog and helps consumers work out the details of a garden.
Fast Company chose to organize its selected sites by how many days the reader had before Christmas. The premise, however, promised more whimsy than the article delivered.-JB
