1. The Future Shock - a three year prank turns into an epic journey for one lucky guy.

2. Mattress ad depicting home birth makes me joyful - beautiful.

3. Ten years later, the real story behind Columbine - ceruleanst gives zir opinion here.

4. Can anyone find a digital version of Haruki Murakami's short story The Little Green Monster? I'm having no luck.

The world really is awesome.

So, I decided today that I'll do my honors capstone through a local GLBTA Organization. With this in mind, I picked up a copy of the Washington Blade and began to walk to my car. Halfway to my car, I happened to glance down at the back page.

American Apparel has been doing an ad campaign that I've been seeing on the back of City Paper. It caught my eye initially because it was incredibly brassy, even as far as fashion advertisements go. The style is somewhat amateur porn-ish, without actually being pornographic, and is definitely way more about selling an image than actual clothing. (I know, I know, welcome to the world of advertising.) It's interesting because it's very amateur and minimalist and hypersexual and occasionally, just plain bizarre.

The ad that was on the back of this paper, however, was extremely strange for several reasons:

1.) It featured two women kissing (which is not immediately evident because their faces are... well, locked in a kiss, and they're not super-curvy women, and newspaper print isn't the best for the reproduction of photographs) but is after a few seconds of observation. (Which was odd because I momentarily forgot what paper I was holding.)
2.) Both of the women have underarm hair - it's subtle but there. (Which was odd because... let's face it, how much underarm hair on women do you see in advertising?)
3.) One of the women has a full breast and nipple showing. (Which was odd because in the US, it's not that common to see nipples in mainstream advertising.)

But there was something else that was different about this ad, and it took me about ten minutes to figure it out. I only realized it, too, when I turned over the paper and remembered that I was holding a copy of the Blade and not City Paper.

This advertisement was, for the first time in my memory, that I have ever seen an ad with two women (presumably lesbians) kissing in a publication that is not geared towards straight men. Which is not to say that they're not being objectified in some way, merely that they're not being objectified in the usual way, which is interesting. It gave me a lot to think about.

(Incidentally, it was only appropriate that I stumbled across this in The Onion on the same day that I made this discovery.)