A very long time ago, before I had met Dr. Mrs. I, I found myself in a quite infamous Chinese restaurant in London. It was renowned for good food, low prices and serving staff who took masochistic pleasure in being rude to you. My partner - at the time - proved to be 'fussy', and when we went in it took her a very long time to select a table for us. Under normal circumstances this would have just been tedious, but I could see that the staff were just waiting to use this as ammunition. When we eventually sat down, a waiter came over, dropped a menu on the table and shouted 'Too much choice!'. By this I think he meant that she'd spent too much time trying to choose.
The phrase 'Too much choice!' holds a special place in my lexicon, and I've decided to use it to describe a series of blog entries that describe situations in life in which the number of options available to choose from is unnecessarily large, and I'm going to start with a particular fave of mine: Monopoly (the board game).
As a child I quite enjoyed Monopoly, I could play against my elder siblings, and had just as much chance of winning as anybody else, since it's not really a game of skill, just a game of rolling dice. As I became older I suppose I found the game a bit dull and old-fashioned. Recently it seems there's a huge, and pointless excess of variants: Dogopoly, Fishopoly, Harley-Davidsonopoly etc. This is nothing more than a thinly veiled money grab, to the extent that it's almost gratuitous. Come on Hasbro, do you really think we're fooled. The game is exactly the same apart from visually. If I was a pop star(*) and I made my second million with a catchy tune, and then re-released it dozens of times with differing CD covers, I'd expect that my career would end there and then. Yet with Monopoly, it's seen as clever and creative.
Seems a bit irrational to me. Too much choice!
P.S. Terry Pratchett look out, most of your books are based on just one story.
(*) It could happen!
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