IT looks like TIME, and in places even reads a little like TIME. It feels like TIME, and has about as many pages. There is the red-bordered cover with a slash across one corner, and the usual news sections from ART to WORLD. Actually, it is not TIME at all, but a Harvard Lampoon parody of TIME, the third since 1941. Some 500,000 copies of the Lampoon will go on sale this week across the nation. How to distinguish it from the genuine weekly newsmagazine? It will cost $1.

If parody is the sincerest form of flattery, TIME is flattered indeed; it has come in for more than its share of parody since its birth in 1923. Imitations have been done by such well-known writers as Wolcott Gibbs (1936) and Art Buchwald (1966), and by such distant institutions as the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa (last spring). Why TIME? "It is a universally recognizable magazine, a quality essential to any successful parody," explains Lampoon Staffer Douglas Kenney. "We needed TIME'S shotgun effect to take after American society."

Take after the Lampoon did, with such items as:

>A TIME-Lou Harris Poll on changing morality that includes these findings: 1) Most Americans believe that "a white grocer who sells green tomatoes to a black customer is worse than a white Russian who sells red caviar on the black market," and 2) "94% believed that if God had meant man to take drugs on the street, He wouldn't have invented drugstores."

> A TV Listings mention of " 'Copy Cat,' a hilarious, gentle play about an almost human copying machine which befriends a lonely ghetto boy."

> A report in THE NATION on the schedule for the Apollo 12 astronauts, whose five hours on the moon will "allow time to talk with the Vice President, the Chief Justice and the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare."

> A letter to the editor from a man who was withdrawing his earlier self-nomination for Man of the Year: "It is with deepest regret that I must ask you to disregard my letter of some months ago. A. Fortas, Washington, D.C."

The Cover: Grease pencil and watercolor by Edward Sorel. Caricaturist Sorel's first cover for TIME on the leading candidate for mayor of New York City gives him one more opportunity to indulge a favorite pastime: "Making faces at some sacred cows." Earlier targets of his pointed pen have included Billy Graham, Cardinal Spellman, Lyndon B. Johnson, President Nixon and Frank Sinatra. Sorel's depiction of New York mayors past, present and possibly future is derived from Eugene Delacroix's painting of Liberty Leading the People. On the left, gazing up at Procaccino, is Mayor John Lindsay. Former Mayor Robert Wagner lies defeated in the foreground. The legs of the supine man at lower left may or may not be those of Republican Candidate John Marchi.

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