Mr. T's Homophobic Mars Chocolate Commercial

A friend alerted me to the controversy that has (rightly) erupted in the UK following the airing of a Mars chocolate ad featuring the man who never goes out of style, Mr T. (see the ad, above) If you cut and paste the url below you can read the TMZ story about this brouhaha. http://www.tmz.com/2008/07/29/mr-t-i-pity-the-homophobic-fool/

Since I am equally as juvenile as the advertising creatives that conceived the ad, I could not resist the thought of another reaction to the ad: the "academented" one.

This is so problematic, in so many ways, swishy walk, 1970s aerobic short shorts, a cannon aimed at a backside, the nuts in the chocolate....and SO SUBTLE too, you really need a PhD in Semiotics from Brown to figure out the nuances behind the textual and visual tropes, I am impressed that TMZ parsed the subtext so ably and then explicated it to the un-schooled audience. Is somebody going to give a paper at the MLA about this? "Aiming the Can(n)on: Mr T's Nuts, Subaltern Mimicry and Queer Minstrelsy"

Walter Sighting: The Astrologer Dispenses Beauty Tips

The bulletin below was sent in by one of my fabulous friends, an academic who is a scholar of all kinds of Visual Culture, and an expert on Boricua culture at large, after a Walter sighting at a place on the Island called, appropriately enough, FRESHMART:

He looked exactly like that when I saw him last week at a health food store in PR. Incredible style: white shoes, white linen pants and a shirt with pink little flowers. Flawless hair highly sprayed and fleshy, pouting lips.

He happily disclosed the use he would give to the organic potato he was buying: putting it raw over his face, as Harrison Ford and all the Hollywood stars do to combat unmerciful signs of age. When a guy in the line said, a bit mockingly, that he would try it too, Walter answered: "No need to. You look great."

go buy your potato now if you wanna look like that!