while on the bus reading the new yorker, i came upon the financial page, which i dutifully read, mostly agree with, but usually fear will take me a really, really long time to get through. anyway, this week’s column is about oil and the price of oil and how oil might have been the straw that broke the global economy by reaching $150 a barrel 11 months ago and how rising oil prices might override whatever signs of recovery there are (or as the column so metaphorically puts it: “higher prices at the pump could end up choking off the economy’s putative green shoots before they’ve even had a chance to grow”).
i was about halfway through when i noticed the picture. and maybe it’s just because i’m a pervert, but c’mon, that’s a guy humping a gigantic gas penis, right? not only that, but he has a really angry look on his face (ostensibly because he has to hump his way up the shaft to get the tip to spray everywhere). i can’t quite figure out if the obviously phallic (it is obviously phallic, right? i’m not really a pervert, am i?) gas pump was intentional or that nobody in the new yorker remarked to anybody else in the new yorker, ‘hey, doesn’t this comically tall gas pump look really, really phallic?”
