Sweet Lady Fortune, oh how I love thee. And Hugo Salgado, you’re pretty cool too.
After a long day at the office, walking home with a splitting headache and trying to pronounce “Ich wohne mit mein Mann hier” in the bitter cold, I walked into my apartment complex and checked the mail. And hidden beneath the bills, Pennysaver and other junk mail lay a gift from the hispanic Gods: the Sports Illustrated Latino Swimsuit Edition.
Let me explain to you something. For almost a year now since I moved into my apartment, my roommates and I have received all sorts of mail addressed to previous residents of our humble abode. In fact, if we desired, we could probably have a healthy identity theft ring going just by opening all the misdirected mail. However, being upstanding young citizens, we send it back with a “Return to Sender” and go about the rest of our days as normal. That includes the issue of SI Latino we received last June, but apparently the good folks at Sports Illustrated disagreed with our assessment that Hugo no longer lived here, and decided to continue sending us their magazine anyway.
My roommates and I all dabble in a little Spanish (or “un poco Español,” si quieres), so we would usually leaf through the pages of each issue and then leave it on the coffee table so that to the outside observer we might appear more multi-cultural. However, this mail mistake has not paid off quite so handsomely until today, when I pulled the issue out of the box and found Daniella Sarahyba inviting me to gaze upon her “cuerpo maravilloso.”
Sadly, from my brief glances, it seems SI Latino lags far behind Sports Illustrated in terms of swimsuit issues. Where SI regular devotes nearly an entire issue to scantily clad sex objects… er, swimwear models, SI Latino has just six pages, thrown in at the back of the magazine almost as an afterthought.
Nevertheless, whether this answers any questions about cultural differences between readers of SI Latino (presumably, latinos) and readers of SI regular is not my concern. After all, we’re not in the business of answering big questions, we’re in the business of misusing big words.