Since my current job requires a gratuitous amount of driving, I am exposed to all of LA's ever-changing contingent of billboards on an everyday basis. This has resulted in my having stronger opinions than most on the subject of billboards. For example, last night I ranted to my friends about McDonalds' new billboard, which shows a picture of eggs, pancakes, sausage and orange juice with the caption, "If Breakfast Had An All-Star Team". What kind of shit is that? What asshole doesn't draft bacon #1 overall for the all-star team of breakfast? Egregious oversight by the McDonalds advertising team, one that I'm sure not to forget for years. Indeed, my friends were equally stunned, but more because I was angry about a billboard.

             Perhaps if I had ranted instead about the above billboard, from the recent box-office "Meh" Eat Pray Love, my friends would have been less hasty to declare me an insane person. In reality, if the McDonalds billboard is "stubbing your toe," then this one is "being lit on fire inside of a sleeping bag." Meant as a metaphor for female empowerment, it instead depicts what is literally the exact opposite of female empowerment. As you can see, it's a billboard featuring Julia Roberts eating sorbet with a look on her face that says "SOMEONE STOP ME!" as if she's doing something she shouldn't be doing, like masturbating in public or drunkenly peeing on an elementary school in the middle of the night.

            Julia, you're eating a small cup of ice cream. You didn't get away with anything, except millions of dollars from impressionable middle-aged women. Honestly, what is anyone supposed to take from this billboard other than "Ooo, I don't normally eat ice cream, but now that I've thrown caution to the wind and learned to enjoy my life, I'm going to eat this delicious cup of ice cream and not feel guilty!!!"? Moreover, what otherwise-interesting women look at this and say, "Hell yeah Julia! Eat that sorbet! Don't worry about your carb intake! Alright! I'm totally seeing this movie where this wildly unlikeable actress who is paid $20 million per film goes to Europe, eats ice cream and fucks Javier Bardem! Someone for the love of Christ take my twelve dollars!" You know what you can do when you're not in Europe? Eat a small cup of ice cream. Seriously, it's alright. Hit the gym for twenty minutes if you really feel guilty about it.

            In other totally unrelated news, we haven't yet had a female president.

            Also, as long as we're (I'm) talking about billboards around LA, I'd like to quickly touch upon the recent barrage of Mexican tourism billboards (none of which I can find on the internet at the moment) which individually feature the different activities one can partake in as a tourist around the country, in addition to what the Mexican tourism board presumes will be your bewilderment. For example, there is one that features a couple diving underwater with the caption, "Trees? 100 Feet Underwater?", another that says "Caves that are big enough for dinosaurs?" and a third that says "Beaches as far as the eye can see?"

            The problem here lies in the fact that within each of those three billboards, you could easily replace a certain part of each sentence with "Decapitated Police Chiefs" and it would make just as much sense:

"Decapitated Police Chiefs? 100 Feet Underwater?"
"Caves that are big enough for (stashing) Decapitated Police Chiefs?"
"Decapitated Police Chiefs as far as the eye can see?"

           In other totally unrelated news, the Mexican tourism billboards aren't quite working on me.