Commentary on the appearance of Stallone on the cover of today's Guardian

Visiting the student union shop earlier, I was faced with a swarm of apathetic undergrads raping my vision, each one fondling bird-seed confectionary snacks wrapped in a marketing student’s homework. Like all foul stinks, they took an age to dissipate. When an opening in the body of the congregation invited my passer-by card, I slid between the cleft grouping. Pirouetting to avoid a trio of public schoolboys in rugby shirts talking about yesterday’s Telegraph, I lunged forward in the direction of the counter. And just then, as I was positioning my Diet Coke in the ambit of the shop-keep, I saw it.

Smirking like a demented wasp sucking crack rocks, I was drawn towards what, I guess, predicated on that analogy, could have been my mirror image. It was today’s Guardian, but rather than informing my myopic eyes of the latest blunder in Iraq, or the diminution of civil liberties, it instead gave me much fodder for mirth.

Straddling the cover, in what could have easily been a prankster’s witty superimposition, was our favourite sporting proletariat everyman, Sylvester Stallone.

Headed by the words “Rocky goes to the football”, the image, placed mighty prominently in the centre of the front-page I might add, shows Stallone in football fan attire (jeans, padded coat brandishing sporting insignia, excess abdominal girth, etc) on a football pitch, holding aloft a sporting scarf, and punishing the photographers’ sanity with the most excruciatingly emphasised smirk I have ever seen. His face, wizened by the progression of time and Assassins, is surely one large black hole to nonchalant gazes; I dare say the spectators at that sporting event came away with the image burned onto their corneas.

Smacking away the hands of a Comparative Literature student, I wrenched a copy from the receptacle. Clenching it in my teeth for fear of spontaneously exploding a tide of guffaws at the lady behind the counter, I paid for it and the aforementioned soft drink, and took my leave.

Now, back at HQ, I can engage with the image’s finer points without fear of someone misunderstanding my deep glances for some homoerotic enchantment.

Although, with that last point in mind, one can’t help but notice a bulbous package of denim emanating from below Stallone’s belt. It’s a protuberance given even greater stress by the effect of light and shade in this groin chiaroscuro; it could only be fate that drives the interplay between the peaks and valleys of Stallone’s haemorrhaging coital organs.

Such is the massive power of the smirk that Stallone appears to be lifting off the ground, floating northwards perhaps, as if formerly-dormant genes are now dictating his gravitational limits and/or facial expressions. Where could this lead him? In some sort of icy crater, surrounded by thousands of smirking befuddled strangers, their perma-smirks causing granules of ice to shake from the fringes of the topographical cavity only to coalesce at the base into shapes of cyclopean terror, and all ruled over by a maniacal technocrat from the east of the west?

Probably.

Anyway, apparently this is Stallone publicising his new film, Rocky Balboa (hereafter known as Rocky VI). I know what you’re thinking, where is the logic? Does it even exist? And if so, did it leave for a while last Tuesday?

Well, in reverse order, no, yes, and let me tell you.

You see I understand the perplexity that might befall the casual observer of this occurrence, but it’s all fairly simple. Rocky VI is a film about boxing. Boxing is classified under sport in porn rags. Sport has an allure to many people with nothing else in their lives. Ergo, it is popular. Football is too classified under the banners of sport. So there we have it; Stallone, getting all freeform discursive on it, promotes his sport film by visiting another sports occasion, and what’s more, due to the size of the throng, many people will be dealt empirical evidence that Stallone did not in fact die in 1998.

It’s quite an artistic masterpiece when all the threads are properly delineated; turns out the logic was in Stallone’s parka all along, nestled below a Yorkie.

(N.B. Since I could find no digital copy of the image in question, I decided to go with something of corresponding stupidity, enjoy.)