I'm not in school.


Will National Geographic or Time help me stop my brain from atrophying?

just go to www.slickdeals.net. they often have free magazine subscriptions (as well as links to product discounts and rebates). I've been getting magazines for years now free just for filling out a short form. I suggest you use a different email address than your normal one if they ask for it.

Oh, didn't see Time in there.

No, Time will accelerate your brain's atrophying. National Geographic should help though.

FHM will make your brain just a teensy bit more like MVP's.

Back in the OLD days, when I was growing up, Nat'l Geo was always sitting in big stacks in the library, and was often used in middle school and high school social studies type classes.

You may want to take a peek at FatWallet and stuff if you're looking for popular magazines for cheap. There are some sites out there with names like Biz Magazines for Less and stuff like that that will sell magazine subscriptions very cheap during certain promo periods. Just looking on there now I see Glamour, Forbes, Elle, etc. for less than $5 a year. I'd go for the poker magazines cause you're not likely to find good deals on them elsewhere. Note that Absolute also sells subscriptions to Bluff, Card Player, etc. with their "reward points".

National Geographic is excellent and you'll find something interesting in every issue.

FHM is a total waste of time - it's a magazine primarily for illiterate panty-waists who can't find pornography on the internet and who thus spend their time flogging the log over unbelievably tame bikini shots of alyson milano with huge typeface taglines like "HOTTEST SHOOT - EVER!" and "THIS ISSUE WILL MAKE YOU ISSUE IN YOUR TISSUE" (OK, the second one isn't true....).

Computer shopper is for total tossers who shop for computers. Don't buy it unless you do lots of computer shopping. And if you DO do lots of computer shopping, make a point of getting the magazine subscription and then shooting yourself repeatedly in the stomach until every last vestige of your pathetic life drains out of your liver. If you need advice on an appropriate firearm to use, consult sister magazine "Gun shopper".

Readers digest used to be full of terrible short stories about horses that are involved in solving mysteries, missionaries in the amazon, and shit recipes for treacle tarts. Probably not that promising.

"Wine spectator" sounds like a magazine for anal retentives. I prefer "Excessive cheap wine drinker", a rival edition that I buy now and again. If you do take the plunge, make a point of writing in to inform them that wine is to be drunk and not spectated upon, and that everyone working on this snotty sham of a magazine should make sure the editor is aware of this oversight.

The writers of "Golf Magazine Hgift Pack" have clearly employed the laziest proof readers available to mankind and thus should be eliminated in the first round.

"CIgar afficianado"???? Well, do you smoke cigars??? Probably pretty cigar-smoker specific, I'd have thought. Unless you need some great tips on how to pronounce words with lots of vowels when you have chronic emphysema. But as you have never (to the best of my knowledge) worked in a North-Wales asbestos mine that's probably not the case. Give it a wide berth.

"Interview". Well that's not the lamest name for a magazine i've ever heard of. So who do you interview then? People? What, like, Kobe Bryant? Pol Pott? Newt Gingrich? Andy Warhol? Trent Reznor? Roger the alien from American Dad? Clinton the amazing talking Dachshund? Glad you made the content of your magazine so fucking clear by the lame title. You lazy pricks.

"Islands". Great. I've personally always preferred sister magazines "Archipelagoes", "Outcrops" and "Ox-Bow Lakes" but then maybe that's just me. Hey, call me a crazy, geography-loving brit but I just can't get enough of those HOT geological features! I can only assume "Bluff" is another magazine of similar content, specifically featuring articles and photography relating to tall, steep grassy banks, rather than, say, being a poker-related magazine. So I'd dismiss that one out of hand too.

"Entrepreneur". One problem. The world's leading entrepreneurs are busy making shitloads of greasy cash by selling crack and tobacco to the bustling, aid-rich third world. They have no time to read or feature in shitty free magazines. So I can only imagine "Failed entrepreneur wishing to drown his/her sorrows by wallowing in the cruel success of others" might be a more apt title. But hey, I didn't write the thing.

"Poker pro".... Well, you're a poker pro, aren't you? What do you want to know???? If I was a garbage man, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be too engrossed in "international trash collection weekly"....

"Giant", well, that sounds fucking BRILLIANT. A magazine about Giants is just phenomenol. If I was in charge of the first issue, here's what I'd be stuffing into the thing....

1) a posthumous "interview with jonathan swift" article about the kingdom of Brobdignag.
2) Article and nude photo spread of Gheorghe Muresan.
3) Giant porn.
4) An article about the world's biggest chair. I believe it's in Germany. A giant could sit on it, you see.
5) Giant porn.
6) An editorial about the thoughts of several leading geneticists on whether it's possible to engineer a human being who is 17 foot tall and has a voice deeper than the human aural spectrum.
7) Giant porn.
8) Movie reviews - The Princess Bride, The Spy Who Loved Me, Twin Peaks, Little Giants, Riding Giants, Among Giants...
9) Giant porn with baby oil. Kind of pseudo-intellectual "big/small" imagery going on there. With plenty of giant porn.
10) Medical section - symptoms and causes of acromegaly. Interview with WWF wrestler and acromegalic Paul "The Big Show" Wight.
11) Giant porn.
12) Porn with giants.
13) Attack of the 50-foot woman - interview with the cinematographer.
14) Hardcore giant porn.

I would also make sure that there was some sort of pornography-based photo shoot involving giants.

SO- In summary. Get the Giant magazine. You WILL NOT be disappointed. Unless you're a big hom who loves Computer Shopping and looking at boring pictures of islands. In which case you're probably making the wrong choice, and more importantly should not be allowed to breed. With humans at least.

I hope this helps!

Monk

readers' digest (or is it "readers digest" or "reader's digest"?): i used to read these when i was a kid. lots of disney-esque feel-good stories and jokes that your grandparents love. now i use "readers' digest" to describe anything vaguely disney-esque feel-good, grandfatherly, or coming from someone who might consider 'family-values' to be an election-year issue...for instance, i might say "that story [about handicapped gay orphans overcoming all obstacles to deport freeloading illegal immigrants and become straight] was ok, in sort of a readers' digest kind of way".

time: current events and pop culture, minus about a week. supposedly leans a little right whereas newsweek leans a little left. if i saw this on the coffee table of anyone under 40, i would probably get confused.

computer shopper: wow is this actually still around? computer shopper was the bomb 30 yrs ago or so before there was internet. 10 lbs and 3000 pages of ads + 10 pages of actual content = pure computer shopping sweetness.

national geographic: if i saw this on your coffee table, i would think you are quite sophisticated. the best part about NG is the small footprint so you have to throw them away less often.

wine spectator: from the minds that brought you 'soccer taster' and 'jazz caresser'. i am similarly confounded by the name. seriously, i can understand the origin of magazine names like 'sports illustrated' or even 'sports illustrated for kids', but how they got 'wine spectator', you got me.

poker pro/all in/cigar aficionado/bluff: please

And Molina, "Giant" is so big it's "delivered" by the physical might of its own phenomenal gravitational pull dragging hapless subscribers to a messy death on the expanse of its apparently infinite papery horizon every month.

AND THAT, my friend, is mudder-fuddling . And a lot fucking better than Computer-Cocking-Shopper.