For as long as I can remember (which, at my age, admittedly isn’t very long, perhaps twenty minutes at a time and then I need to take my rememberer out and let it cool down for awhile) on this blog the #1 post in terms of hits, year after year, has been Britney Spears Sex Tape, which, once I realized wasn’t Britney in it at all but rather someone else who looked like Honeymoon Britney (which many people would watch happily, I’m sure, over and over, the way they close their eyes and think of The Country or The Postman or The Hot Guy In Marketing Who Wears Those European Suits) I edited the title of to read Britney Spears (?) Sex Tape but it made no difference: they still kept coming.

So to speak.

Which reminds me of the ad I saw yesterday at the Skytrain station; the first ad for an “adult recreation” product I’ve seen in a mainstream location. It was for something called Stallion, and it was unspecific to the point of complete opacity. Basically, it just said “Men, buy this stuff right now.” That’s how I figured out it was dirty.

For I am way clever, yo.

But as I was standing there, running over all the stallion references in my head (alas, I’m not in top form when I’m on Concact-C, for the only thing I could think of was Bill and Ted’s band Wyld Stallyns) I saw some fine print at the bottom of the ad, and if there’s one thing I love, it’s fine print on adult product ads. No, really.

“Product contains Lidocaine.”

Topical anaesthetic. It’s the stuff I spray on my legs before waxing, to deaden the pain.

Whoa!

But (and not to make an abrupt transition, but whatever) now we at the ol’ raincoaster blog have encountered a phenomenon more powerful than a sloppy ersatz-Britney blowjob.

Behold the power of Banksy in Birmingham:

Banksy stats, baby!

And yes, that baseline is 2,000, not zero.