The Mapparium is a tourist attraction here in Boston, a three-story stained glass globe that you can walk inside.1 It’s quite something, and at just $6 a ticket, it’s well-worth checking out if you’re in town.
Tour buses roll by my house frequently, to regale visitors with the tale of the great molasses flood. Some of these buses contain an ad for the Mapparium:
I love these doofuses so much. Let’s have a closer look. First, we can zoom in to take note of the tour guide pointing unnaturally:
Given the badge visible on the lanyard, I suspect this person is indeed a real guide at the Mapparium. I also suspect being told to pose like she was doing her job made her suddenly forget how to act like a human being. I hope her friends take selfies with this ad every chance they get and send them to her.
We can zoom in further, and see that the guide is pointing to “French West Africa”:
The Mapparium was built in 1935, and it was never updated after that. Hey, at least the land masses haven’t moved since then.2
Next up, let’s look at the engrossed attendee with the epically fake smile:
While I don’t think she needs the hostage and rescue team, I’m still not buying her enjoyment one bit.
These two people amused me for quite some time, before I eventually noticed what became my absolute favorite part of this ad:
Yes, there’s a third person in this ad, and she’s the best of all. Better than “guide pointing unnaturally” and “patron with phony smile plastered on” is “woman whose head is a vent”. Venthead, I salute you.
Footnotes:
Atlas Obscura tells us “the Mapparium gets its name from the Latin words mappa (“map”) and arium (“a place for”).” From this, we can surmise that an aquarium is “a place for water”, and that we should really not be putting fish in there. ↩︎
Much. ↩︎
