And the World Cup comes to the computer mall. One of the main floor demonstrations at Funan was ``HP PRESENTS: KICK A GOAL SCOREBOARD''. This was a pair of training-type soccer goals, with small nets and little paper triangular prism lanes around both nets, all of this sitting next to a plasma-screen TV showing Ice Age. At any given moment a third of all Singapore's public plasma-screen TVs are showing Ice Age; a third are showing Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, and the remainder show segments of either Generic Disney Creepy CGI Rendering of Their Classic Characters, Often In Snow, or the TV's demonstration video that proves it can show pictures of women in bikinis, or the Internet surfing scene from The Adventures of Rocky And Bullwinkle: The Movie That Is Better Than You Think, Though Not Necessarily Good Enough To Watch.
The posters around it were advertisements on the theme, ``Kick a Goal! Be Original, Win For Sure!''. By ``Be Original'' what they mean is ``buy HP printer ink thingies''. To reinforce this valuable lesson about originality the goals were labelled ``Counterfeit'', which was completely open, and ``HP Original Cartridges'', which was fully blocked by a poster board showing the HP printer cartridge logo, and in several rainbow colors such inspirational slogans as ``Get True-To-Life Color Prints'' or ``Enhances Your Printer's Life'' or ``More Prints Per Cartridge''.
I saw no one actually taking the chance to kick a goal, although I noticed the scoreboard listed ``HP Original Cartridges'' and ``Counterfeit'' in reverse order to how they were on stage. It's very hard for me to not suppose that if the ``Kick A Goal'' challenge is to kick a goal, then Counterfeit is definitely the way to go, since scoring with the HP net is impossible for beings based in three spatial dimensions. Maybe you're supposed to pretend you're on the team opposite the identified goal, but that means if you do score a goal you're with the team that's cheating horribly. I think they didn't think out the kick-a-goal project.
Trivia: The Black Prince, Edward, took the motto ``Ich dien'' for the Prince of Wales following the death of King John the Blind of Bohemia at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. Source: A Distant Mirror, Barbara W Tuchman.
Currently Reading: War for the Union, 1862-63: War Becomes Revolution, Allan Nevins.