Archives for November 18th, 2005

A patchwork of recent Polet magazine covers.

When I was a boy, my mother would occasionally buy copies of German magazines like Stern or Spiegel,
which were available at some newsstands in the United States. Sometimes
these magazines would have nudity on the cover, usually to illustrate a
health-related story.

One
day, a religious couple came over
to our house for a visit and saw one of these magazines lying casually
on the living-room table. In the uproar that followed, they chastised
my mother for keeping
"pornography" in the house — stressing that it was even worse of her
to leave it out in the open where a young and impressionable boy could
see it. It took my Mom
a few moments to figure out what was going on; when she tried to
explain that even serious political magazines in Germany sometimes put
naked ladies on their covers, they didn’t believe it.

If that couple got upset about a harmless issue of Spiegel, I can’t imagine what the Slovenian magazine Polet would do to them. Simultaneous pulmonary embolisms, most likely.

Polet
(the name literally means "flight") is a weekly supplement that is
bundled together with Thursday editions of the leading Slovenian
newspaper, Delo.
It generally deals with light-hearted topics like sports and
recreation. One thing that sets it apart from other supplements is its
stubborn insistence on featuring naked people (usually women) on the
cover. Unlike Spiegel, though, the nudity is
in no way connected to the content inside. It’s just there. No explanations, no rationale: Just naked people.

Sometimes, though, the content and pictures collide in funny
ways. For example, you might have noticed that the cover in the top-right corner has the
words "Surf’s Up!" written over a woman’s arse. I also like the
bottom-left cover, which has "Juan Carlos Ferrero" written beneath a topless woman who is definitely not a Juan, a Carlos, or a Ferrero. But the absolute king of all Polet covers is this. (NFSW, obviously)

The unintended result is sublime.