Notwithstanding the excellence of the Shark helmet itself, corporate marketing to North America follows a different metric than that followed by Coke. Or Yugo, for that matter.

We’re not going to beat the French up for this particular instance of bizarre imagery, not when that country is head and shoulders above us in using perkily great topless billboards to sell what you got.

But whoever’s behind this latest in a series of just plain goofy juxtapositions needs a hard shove out the door. (When they added a Canadian distributor a few years back, the event was accompanied by umbrella booth girls clad in, wedding dresses, followed by print ads as something slightly less sophisticated than The Club for cars.)

Now it seems as though “Protect Your Crotch!” is all that’s missing from the wordless lips of Mr. Crash Test Dummy and his androgenous package sidekick. The cruel irony here is that suddenly the universal refrain uttered by women everywhere – that all men think with their appendage – may, in fact, be the real inspiration behind this messy message.