The "O" Should Actually Be a Little Heart

I just discovered in my "dropbox" a mini-poster from "POM," the company that makes pomegranate juice & tea. It's a periodic table; the joke is that they've added POM as element 122!! Shrug. The weird thing, though, is that the back of the poster says, in part, "Check out POM Tea's entire ad campaign and buy the collectible posters at www.pomtea.com." I guess they're trying to do an Absolut thing. But wait: check out their entire ad campaign? I thought the postmodern ad was premised on effacing its own advertorial purpose, because modern sophisticates won't deign to pay attention to something that transparently sells itself to them — hence the blog title "Ads without Products" (I mention this chiefly because said blog praised Michael Bérubé's awful, ignorant review of Unger's What Should the Left Propose?, to which I will return sooner or later). Somehow I feel this Pom periodic table resonating with a baffling press release put out by DC Comics and circulated in various places:

KRYPTONITE DISCOVERED IN SERBIA

[…]

A new mineral, matching the chemical composition for kryptonite suggested in ‘Superman Returns,’ was discovered by a team of geologists in a Serbian mine, according to London’s Natural History Museum. Unable to find a suitable match to a known mineral, the geologists turned to the Internet, which revealed the rock’s relation to the most famous element in comic books.

“The universe is full of mysteries, and some have been foreshadowed by comics,” said Paul Levitz, DC Comics President and Publisher. “We look forward to scientists figuring this one out.”

This has nothing to do with krypton the element, as it turns out. The story seems to be that the Serbian guy googled the chemical composition of his new mineral, and it matched some background text that shows up in the Superman movie. But kryptonite is radioactive, dammit! There's no way it's just sodium and boron or whatevs. Serbia and Hollywood are lying about kryptonite. 8 |