Logos Quiz

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I was browsing drearily on my iPad the other day, looking for some new diversion, and found something called the “Logos Quiz.” Stupidly I assumed (for various reasons) that this was a Bible quiz. And I’m just a fool for Bible games and such.

 

 

But the game is far more insidious than any Bible quiz.

 

 

You are presented with a table of several dozen advertising logos: images, typography, color schemes. None is complete. You must identify them.

 

 

At first I was sniffingly scornful. Some ad agency put this together, I thought; product placement as a game.   Hmm. Starbucks, of course. Firefox. Barbie . . .

 

 

Then: goodness, I thought. This is harder than it looks.

 

 

There are (I think) eight levels; I’ve only made it to Level Five. The brands aren’t just American, but worldwide. Some are achingly familiar; others are almost-but-not-quite obvious.  (Quick, describe the insignia on a Saab!) Sometimes it’s just a font, or a combination of colors.

 

 

I was amazed when I opened the Financial Times on Monday and found that the redoubtable Lucy Kellaway had  written this week's column on the Logos Quiz! (I was angry, a little, because I’d already made up my mind to write about it, and Lucy stole most of my thunder by making most of my points before I could. But she writes so much better than I do, so there’s no real harm done on the cosmic scale.)

 

 

Here are some of her points, and mine:

 

 

Point One: Advertising / logos are insidious. They dig into your brain and nest there. You will be amazed at what you recognize viscerally. (Quick! Sketch me the Nike logo! I know you can!)

 

 

Point Two: Things that are obvious to me as a fifty-four-year-old are not obvious to a twenty-year-old, and vice versa. (Lucy, close to my age, recognized the Kodak logo right away, but her young son didn’t; he recognized the Xbox logo right away, but was scandalized that his mother didn’t.)

 

 

Point Three (Which Lucy Didn’t Make In Her FT Article): The companies must be giggling about how this game is working in their favor. People are actually Googling their logos and corporate branding!  (My first thought, when I saw the game, was that it was somehow sponsored by a corporation or group of corporations.  I still think that this might be true. Who knows?)

 

 

Postscript: I don’t know if you read Thomas Gibson. He’s a little too FutureWorld even for me. But I read one of his novels, “Pattern Recognition,” a few years ago, and it made a little impression on me, mostly because its main character is a media consultant who reacts to corporate logos on an instinctive level.  You know the Michelin Man? She has a reaction to him that resembles anaphylactic shock.

 

 

I think I understand that. I used to feel the same way about Speedy Alka-Seltzer.

 

 

(Now: can someone explain to me the logo with the letter “N” shooting a laser beam off into space?)

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Solitaire: the gift that keeps on giving

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 When I was maybe six, my family stayed for a few days in Ocean Park, Washington, in a little cottage belonging to the parents of my sister-in-law Janet.  I don’t remember the beach, but I remember being huddled in the too-small cabin with what must have been six or seven other people.  They were probably miserable; I was in heaven.

 

 

And, to top it off, Janet taught me War.  And Slapjack.  And, best of all, Solitaire.

 

 

You may call it Klondike, or Patience.  You may play with slightly different rules than I do.  But I will always return to the simple deal-three-at-a-time version that Janet taught me in Ocean Park.

 

 

I spent many rainy summer afternoons at home playing it on my parents’ decorative coffee table at home, with two decks of bridge cards my parents never used because they didn’t play bridge.   I seldom won.

 

 

I took to it again in college.  I played compulsively, demonically, on my bed, my legs crossed in a Lotus pose that few can duplicate.  (I’m double-jointed.)  I actually got to the point, believe it or not, that I was winning two out of every three games.

 

 

I left the game for a while.  I came back to it in the Peace Corps, where it was useful for killing long warm dull North African afternoons.  My British friend Austin, watching me methodically lay out the cards one day, said in his picturesque way that it was “the most extraordinary waste of time and mental energy he’d ever seen.”  I thumbed my nose at him and continued to play.

 

 

Then computers came along, which revolutionized one-player card games, and one-player everything for that matter, if you know what I mean.

 

 

I got an iPad recently.  And it was not two days before it occurred to me to check the App Store for a nice free Solitaire app.

 

 

The game still takes me back to cloudy Northwest days, when I sat laying out game after game on my parents’ smooth cool Lucite table inlaid with petrified wood. There’s the quiet slap of cards as they're put down, and the whirring sound of the shuffle, and that's enough.  The rest is between me and Fate, also known as Dame Fortune, also known as Those Damned Cards.

 

 

I’ll have to drop a note to Janet and thank her for all these years of quiet absorbtion.

 

 

Now let’s just see if I can win three in a row.

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