Splat-ter of the Week: Banana Boat!

With the elections in the home stretch, Splatospheric had no choice but to go into hiding this week.  Our headquarters sits not just in a swing state but a metropolitan area where national politics is also the local news.  We’ve been avoiding all media outlets.  We haven’t even wanted to venture outside, because that requires us to walk past the sad remnants of our mailbox.  

After weeks of being stuffed with partisan garbage, it finally exploded, blanketing our lawn with campaign shrapnel.  We know we’ll spend weeks picking up scraps of paper helpfully reminding us that Obama interned for Stalin and that Mitt Romney doesn’t care about carbon-based life forms.  We can’t even call this stuff campaign literature—it’s pulp fiction.  (Oddly enough, these balanced, informative handouts don’t seem to talk about the environment.  Perhaps this is because you can’t projectile vomit campaign flyers statewide and then criticize your opponent’s stance on waste. ) 

But we can’t leave you hanging like a ballot chad in Florida, so here we are.  

We resurfaced to a deluge of nominations for Splat-ter of the Week.  Lance Armstrong won by a mile for the latest chapter in the blood doping saga, but even before we finished writing about it, the International Cycling Union stripped him of the title.

While we decide what to do about Armstrong’s lucrative Splatospheric endorsement deal, we’ll pass the mantle to the Runner-up: Banana Boat. The company that has brought us sunscreen products for years announced this week that it’s taking some of them back.  It recalled many of its sprays “due to a potential risk of product igniting on the skin if contact is made with a source of ignition before the product is completely dry."

Allow us to translate this into plain English: spray on a little Banana Boat and you might become Bananas Foster.  

We do, however, commend the company for its swift response: they only let five people catch fire before issuing the recall.

So congrats, Banana Boat.  Step on up to claim your golden pancake. But don’t get too close to the griddle, lest we all go up in smoke.