National Geograffix

If there’s one thing besides children’s programming that we are critical of here on the Door Hinge, it’s magazines, and today I was thinking about National Geographic. I know the cliché joke- that everyone looked at National Geographic when they are 11 to see some big floppy brown titties. Well, so did I, but that is not the point.
I actually would have had more complaints about it when I was 11- they have solved many of their more problematic issues over the years. At the time, I was always flummoxed by the fact that they pretended the page numbers extended across magazines to an entire year’s worth; therefore you’d open to page one and it would say “page 1112”. Also in the past is their policy of actually forcing prospective customers to be recommended to be a member of their society by another member if they actually wanted to purchase the magazine. Nowadays, you open it and twelve business reply mail index cards fall out begging you to subscribe just like, say, Swank. Another thing they used to do, and they now admit to this, was stage and pose many of their famous Pictures of Indigenous Peoples. They even had their cameramen carry around a red shirt, which they would then tell the subjects of potential photographs to put on, under the theory that a red shirt looks good in a picture. If you look at some old National Geographics you can occasionally see someone wearing a red shirt, with some other shirt peeking out beneath it.
Today, however, if you see a picture of an African with his dong hanging out spitting a blow dart at a monkey, you can bet it’s genuine.