Saturday, January 3, 2009

How about Blog-opoly?

I bought a Monopoly game the other day. To get to it on the shelf, I had to browse past Star Trek-opoly, Star Wars-opoly, MLB- NFL- and NBA-opoly, the Batman, Beatles, Boston Red Sox, and Chicago White Sox editions, and the Christmas Story edition (no doubt a heartwarming holiday tale of mortgaging your toy train while it's still under the tree to buy a luxury condo). There's a Monopoly for Indianapolis and one for Minneapolis, and in the Superman edition, you can buy up Metropolis. There's the Lord of the Rings edition, the Harley Davidson edition, and an edition for seemingly every syndicated TV show from the past 30 years. M*A*S*H-opoly, The Simpsons-opoly, SpongeBob SquarePants-opoly. Even I Love Lucy-opoly. "No, Ricky, stop! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!"

I bought a computer book the other day. To get to it on the shelf, I had to browse past Visual Basic for Dummies, Windows for Dummies, MacOS for Dummies, Linux for Dummies, Java for Dummies, C, C++, C# for Dummies (I didn't see the Bette Midler edition, C-Minus for Dummies), ASP, PHP, SQLServer, Oracle, and SAP for Dummies. There were Excel for Dummies, Access for Dummies, Word for Dummies, PowerPoint for Dummies, and to provide equal time, OpenOffice for Dummies. There were references for Dummies on computer languages I've never heard of and ones I wish I hadn't. Reeling, I sought refuge in the other aisles and found that the entire target market for retail book consumers now comprises nothing but Dummies. This was likely the conclusion of some publishing executive who'd read Market Research for Dummies on his lunch hour.

Only one place to go with all this madness: "Dummies-opoly". The first one to trade in four independent bookstores and erect a hotel on Amazon.com wins.


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