"Local authorities in southern China are investigating a popular coconut milk brand for once again claiming the drink would enhance women’s breasts...."

Sixth Tone reports.

Coconut Palm...  has often attracted eyeballs and ire because of its sexist advertisements and provocative packaging claiming their coconut concoction makes women “curvier” and gives them “bigger breasts.”...

The drink’s latest advertisement has also angered its loyal consumers, with many calling it “obscene” and “tasteless.” The latest social media furor comes two years after Coconut Palm was attacked for a similar advertisement, which also claimed its product could enhance a woman’s cleavage and whiten her skin.

It makes some poetic sense — milk... coconuts....

It's basically the old doctrine of signatures, isn't it?

The doctrine of signatures, dating from the time of Dioscorides and Galen, states that herbs resembling various parts of the body can be used by herbalists to treat ailments of those body parts. A theological justification, as stated by botanists such as William Coles, was that God would have wanted to show men what plants would be useful for.... Plants bearing parts that resembled human body-parts, animals, or other objects were thought to have useful relevance to those parts, animals or objects. ..

For the late medieval viewer, the natural world was vibrant with images of the Deity: 'as above, so below,' a Hermetic principle expressed as the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm; the principle is rendered sicut in terra. Michel Foucault expressed the wider usage of the doctrine of signatures, which rendered allegory more real and more cogent than it appears to a modern eye:

"Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them."

Here's the Chinese ad. I wish I could embed it, because it made me laugh, but it's in Chinese and I can't figure out how to get the code. Screen shot (I think this is a "tweet" by someone who disapproves):



And here's the great Harry Nilsson song, "Coconut" ("Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?")(According to the Genius lyrics annotation: "The etiology of the abdominal pain is unclear, but could be due to the lime and the coconut, both the cause and the cure of this odd episode.")

ADDED: Let's hear from Melania:

"I’ve never eaten a strawberry in my life. I have no desire to do that... Absolutely not."

Said Tom Brady.

Never had any coffee either.

I never ate a strawberry until I was in my 20s. My sister had told me early on that strawberries were bad — strawberries and peaches and coconut. It's like she was my taster. If she'd suffered the pain and given me the word that these things were bad, I had the advantage of avoiding the pain. Never touched it. Still won't eat coconut.

"Man kicked out of Camp Randall pranks UW police with 240 coconut doughnuts."

"This was meant as a harmless way to both show general gratitude for the job you do (which is awesome) but slight disdain for my treatment Saturday (which was not so awesome)," said the anonymous man. "Donuts are awesome, but coconut donuts are not so awesome."

With President Obama going to Mumbai — where he will be protected from coconuts — I've started reading the Mumbai Mirror.

Here's "Coconuts removed from trees in preparation for Barack Obama's India trip." But searching for the story — I'd heard Rush Limbaugh exclaim about it — I ended up at a Mumbai Mirror article about the special dishes the local chefs were cooking up in honor of the visit.

O’Barry Pie

This recipe is as rich as Obama’s biography. It uses 44 ingredients in honour of the 44th American president’s life.

There’s nothing quite as American as an American pie.

Maybe people who hear the song or see the movie titled "American Pie" think there's a dessert we call "American pie." Americans say: as American as apple pie.

But this pie combines elements from the various places he’s lived in.

Cocoa and coffee from Kenya, of which Obama’s father was a native, Polynesian fruits like banana and pineapple because he spent his childhood in Hawaii, and a coconut-and-rice pudding from Indonesia, where he lived with his stepfather for a few years.... 

The result is new and unusual. A single bite brings on a rush of many separate elements and, at the same time, has its own overall personality, just like the person it’s named after. The attractive pie is garnished with hazelnuts and rice crispies.

Rice Krispies for the time he spent in Kansas?

So now, I'm really getting into the Mumbai Mirror. What's its explanation of why Obama is coming to town:

Unlike his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, who came to India and charmed Indians, President Obama will be here physically, but his mind is likely to be on what he can carry back home from this country.

Most notably, his eyes will be set on creating jobs, which he can accomplish to some extent if he can wangle some of the multi-billion-dollar contracts, especially in the defence sector, that US firms are keen to sign. But this would not be easy as India is not yet ready to sign the agreements for ensuring sale of defence ware to New Delhi.

He's not coming here to slather us with love like Bill did. He just wants our money, they're thinking?

Look how the Mumbai Mirror covers our elections:

Americans awoke on Wednesday to a vastly different political landscape, with Republicans retaking the House of Representatives as US voters punished Democrats over high unemployment and a sluggish economic recovery, delivering a divided Congress in Tuesday’s midterm poll.

Resurgent Republicans, led by the ultra-conservative Tea Party insurgency, steamrolled Democrats, taking at least 60 seats and a commanding majority in the House. It was one of the chamber’s largest political swings of the past century.

Ultra-conservative? I've never thought of the Tea Party as ultra-conservative.

Then there's "Indian-American Nikki Haley scripts history in US politics":

Daughter of Punjabi Sikh immigrants from Amritsar, Namrata Nikki Randhawa Haley who has become the first Indian origin woman to become the governor of a US state has been propelled to centre stage of American politics after her baptisation into politics in 2004.

She is the second Indian-American leader after Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana to have caught the attention of the Americans.

I'd never put that together. Two Indian-American governors now. Interesting. Both Republicans, for what it's worth.

It has not all been smooth sailing for the tall Haley, 38, mother of son Nalin, 9, and daughter Rena, 12 as she had to overcome allegations of extra-marital affairs and racial digs  to become the first Asian woman to don a US governorship.

What were the "racial digs"? I don't know, and I don't like Indians thinking we were awful to Haley.

Does God care about Twitter... and "Survivor"?

A mother's tweet: "Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool." Now, the poor boy died — 19 minutes after the tweet — and the mother is being criticized for using Twitter. Her tweeting had nothing to do with the accident, though, and it's not really wrong — is it? — for a writer to ask her readers for their prayers?

The woman, Shellie Ross, had over 5,000 followers on Twitter, and I don't think it was wrong for her to reach out to them in her time of anguish. At the same time, I cannot conceive of a God that would decide whether to answer a prayer based on the number of followers on Twitter!

And, did you watch "Survivor" last night? 2 contestants who had bonded over a late-in-the-game revelation of Christian faith found themselves on the same team in a competition that required them to pull ropes out of a structure without causing coconuts to tumble out. They started praying to God for victory. Like God should pay attention to whether coconuts are falling. I know Jesus said that God pays attention to every sparrow that falls, but he said nothing about coconuts. Or who wins on "Survivor." By the way, Team Jesus lost when a whole hilarious load of coconuts rained down as a rope was pulled by the Christian in a bikini. That doesn't, of course, mean that God wasn't paying attention. If you believe in prayer, no adverse result will ever shake your belief. In this case, the believer's explanation is obvious: God rejected the request.

Why would God help you win games? And, for that matter, why would God save a dying boy based on whether he had someone who knew he was dying and thought prayer might help? Why wouldn't He be irritated that you imagine him making decisions like that? Believers don't seem to worry too much about the possibility that their invocations displease God. In the case of the coconuts, maybe God actively preferred the people who declined to seek divine intervention. In the case of the boy, why must any child die?