The current offering from Bow Street is just about the same as its recent predecessors. It contains twelve cartoons, drawings and pictures, of which two or three are mildly funny. Instead of the usual feature of the freshman issue, an annotated street map of Cambridge, the center spread is a scrawled but reasonably accurate picture of Scollay Square. The poetry and prose departments are lukewarm at best-the best being a nicely illustrated but overlong discussion of the Social Register by one Rex Pose. Perhaps the funniest part of this issue is the absence of all titles behind the names of the executive board on the masthead.

The principal ailment of the Lampoon's and also the Record's stories is longwindedness. The authors take so many columns to get to the point that only their editors, roommates, fiancees and perhaps an occasional reviewer ever reach the end, or even the middle. On top of that, the clusive "point" frequently remains invisible right up to the cryptic signature.

The "Here We Are Again" issue of the Record is a somewhat better job than its Cambridge counterpart principally because the Record has better artists. Beginning with a melancholy but extremely eyecatching cover, the issue contains half-a-dozen pictures and cartoons which are really funny, not just silly or amusing. Most of these are the work of two Elis named Kochler and Voulgaris, who seem to be solely responsible for putting their magazine several notches above other college funny papers, including the Lampoon. The rest of this issue consists of some involved and mostly unfunny stories, all based on ancient gimmicks, a pot of putrid he-she jokes admittedly culled from the 1920-1921 editions of the Record, and the phrase "'53 Skidoo" repeated six times throughout.

It seems to be the thesis of the Lampoon's high command that their journal is published purely for the amusement of themselves, their minions, and those of their friends who share their exact estimate of what is funny. This would be a valid argument if the Lampoon were typed on Kleenex and passed fraternally from hand to hand. However, the Lampoon is a bona fide publication, "Copyrighted . . . entered at the Boston Post Office," and engaged in selling advertising space to merchants who presumably expect to reach more people than are usually gathered in the Great Hall of the aviary.

The Lampoon is a legend, based partly on tremendous physical stunts but mostly on the work of a great many talented men who considered their magazine something more than a toy to be used for completely private amusement.

In fact, most people who buy the Lampoon, other than freshmen with no sales resistance, know that the Lampoon was once by far the best college magazine in the country, and every time they put down their quarter they hope that the present phase has ended.