JCPenney has officially denied that a tea kettle being advertised on a billboard on the 405 Interstate near Culver City, Calif., is intended to represent Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator during World War II.
The notion that the kettle looked a bit like the architect of the Holocaust caught on after someone posted a photo on Imgur, the photo sharing site, showing what the image of the kettle looks like if you squint at it.
Sure enough, a black sweep of hair, a moustache and a saluting "arm" appear, sort of.
The Telegraph wrote a story about it, and JCP responded in a tweet that said, "Certainly unintended. If we'd designed the kettle to look like something, we would've gone w/a snowman." (It's a rare day when a major retailer can get away with tweeting a Hitler joke — but JCP has pulled this off.)
Here's the Imgur photo:
Here's JCP's tweet:
JCPenney / Twitter