Hell, pizza and condoms: the Jerry Springer school of abstinence
To say that Hitler is always good copy is a bit of an understatement. Like saying the UN is good at talking or that the Pope has issues with recreational sex.
It’s not often that you can see the old Führer trying to flog fast food from billboards though - and when you do, you sure as Hell won’t be able to enjoy the sight for very long:
The Hell pizza chain is removing its billboards of Hitler saluting with a pizza slice after complaints from the Jewish community. The chain, which has had a string of complaints about its advertising, said the Hitler billboards in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch were meant to lampoon Hitler rather than be offensive.
The Nazi leader is shown in a Heil Hitler salute with pizza in his hand, next to his quote: “It is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell.”
Kirk MacGibbon, from Cinderella, the Auckland agency that handles the chain’s advertising, said yesterday he had received three complaints from Jewish people in Auckland who were offended by the Hitler billboard. Some had lost family members in the Holocaust.
“We hoped we could get away with people seeing Hitler with a piece of pizza would be funny,” MacGibbon said. “We do recognise there were some horrendous things done and if people are not seeing it as lampooning, we are dealing with a slightly different animal and we will back down.”
Yesterday afternoon the Hitler billboard in Christchurch’s Lincoln Road was replaced with another one in the chain’s famous-quotes campaign – Pope Benedict saying “Hell is real and eternal”.
It is nice that people still have some historical awareness - and it must be said that whatever Mr Kirk MacGibbon might lack in good taste, he definitely makes up for with his fine use of understatements. “Some horrendous deeds done” indeed.
One might also ask oneself the question if Pope Benedict enjoyed the idea of being Adolf’s understudy and actual back-up. On the other hand, he will probably prefer it over one of Hell pizza’s earlier campaigns. While the Vatican’s stand on Hitler is historically speaking a bit dubious, the Pope has never been shy condemning the kind of product the Hell pizza people gave away when they were trying to sell their ‘Lust’ line:
Wellington- New Zealand’s Hell Pizza company sparked a storm of protest Thursday after putting 170,000 condoms in mailboxes with leaflets promoting a new meat-lovers’ pizza called “lust.” Catholics and family protection groups joined about 30 complaints to the country’s Advertising Standards Authority about the mail drop and called for a boycott of the company.
Still, while the Pope might take issue with the actions of certain food companies, he will have read with the greatest approval about a certain Chinese gentleman whose quest for a long and healthy life has lead him, for purity’s sake, to forego meat - all meat…:
A Chinese man has abstained from making love to his wife for 17 years because he wants to live forever.
Chen Dong, of Chongqing city, who is in his 50s, changed his way of living after a colleague told him he would live for 1,000 years if he became a celibate, vegetarian.
“He believed it completely, and since 1989 he has had me prepare him only vegetarian meals, and stopped living with me in the same room,” says his wife Yu Hui.
Chen believes he has found the secret of eternal life.
“Simple meals can clean my body, and an asexual life can keep my energy from becoming depleted,” he told Chongqing Business News.
I’m sure the Pope would wish that all his priests shared this Chinese gentleman’s abstentious instincts.
On the other hand, one has to ask: live a thousand years on tofu products alone, and no sex…?
Why bother?
However, if you think the prospect of living a thousand terminally boring years without sex is bad, spare a moment’s thought for the poor, bedevilled ‘bdelloid rotifer’:
A tiny creature that has not had sex for 100 million years has overturned the theory that animals need to mate to create variety. Analysis of the jaw shapes of bdelloid rotifers, combined with genetic data, revealed that the animals have diversified under pressure of natural selection.
Researchers say that their study “refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species”.
The microscopic animals, less than four times the length of a human sperm, are all female, yet have evolved into different species that fill different ecological niches. Two sister species were found to be living together on the body of a water louse. One of them specialised in living around the louse’s legs and the other stayed close to the chest.
Mind you - and I’m not trying to slag off the work of these wonderful scientists - but there is something odd about this story.
Here we have these all-female creatures, who supposedly are not having any. They do live together in some strange threesome with a louse. The women refuse to have sex with the louse.
Okay, so far, so good but the fact that they are not interested in fucking some no good louse, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are celibate.
Call me a dirty-minded so-and-so but that does remind me of the kind of scenario where that louse would complain that none of the women he was living with was giving him any - and that they didn’t even let him watch while they were going down on each other.
All in all, it might be a good idea for these biologists to live a little, before making such sweeping statements. Or at the very least watch a few Jerry Springer shows.
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