There is no Frigate like a Sony Betamax

 

 

 

Cover of a National Lampoon anthology (1977).  The seventies were not the sixties, nor were they the eighties.  National Lampoon was a magazine which I collected, read enthusiastically, chuckled at, and which had a distinct effect on me, considering, for instance, difficult-to-classify short fiction in this collection such as Doug Kenney's Trespassers will be violated.

 

There is no Frigate like a Sony Betamax -- this phrase originates in one of National Lampoon's fake letters to the editor, a letter allegedly written by Emily Dickinson.  The irony of this is that the Sony Betamax is now outmoded, and books aren't.