Simplicity

I have a lot to say about monomania, Lee Child, and what happens if you don’t prune your rosebush. But first a note on simplicity.

So the Simplicity Concierge and Simplicity Sweepstakes are offering -- I mean “featuring” -- “a host of inspired prizes designed to simplify life.” This is good; I hate competing for uninspired prizes. (Meanwhile, who the heck are the Simplicity Concierge and Simplicity Sweepstakes? Who knows? But they offer prizes and simplicity, so it’s got to be good, right?)

Here’s how you enter to get your inspired simplifying prizes:

“Simply text ‘Win Philips’ to 82222. By texting you agree to receive a text message that will include a toll-free number for full rules. Upon receipt of reply, text ‘Win’ and your e-mail address (e.g. Win name@yourmail.com). Standard text-message rates apply. ... By texting users agree to receive two (2) confirmation message from Philips to complete entry....”

Let’s deconstruct this. First, notice the pleasingly misleading use of the word “Simply” to begin these multi-step instructions. Simply text a phrase to a number! Then simply receive a text message that will INCLUDE (not merely consist of -- you obviously have to scroll through a lot of stuff to get to it) a phone number. Simply text another message! Simply get two more messages! That’s so simple! What could be simpler! It’s so simple I bet you could just repeat the instructions back to me right now without looking. Go ahead. I’ll wait. I’m humming the “Jeopardy” theme song. You’re having a little trouble? Well, maybe that’s why you need to simplify your life by entering to win these inspired prizes.

What are the prizes? It’s not clear from the notice in Vanity Fair. “See official rules at philips.com/entertainment.” Ah, apparently the Simplicity Concierge is a “mobile travel companion.” Good, I’d hate a travel companion to be immobile. Actually, I’d like a travel companion to be Ralph Fiennes. The Simplicity Concierge is seven syllables’ worth of simplicity, so that’s a whole lot of simplicity. Strangely, it looks like a phone. But there’s also a year’s membership in Quintessentially (six syllables’ worth of simplicity!), which is a, or the, “premier concierge service.” Might as well jump straight to premier for all my concierge service needs! Now that’s inspiring.

But also notice two more tiny nanocomplications that desimplify this exercise. First, there’s the word “Philips.” How many l’s does that word have? In the notice, it’s in small print in sans-serif type, which makes the minims (the up-and-down letters) difficult to sort out. It was for precisely these reason that the Middle Ages added the dots to i’s -- to distinguish them from other minims like l’s. (Seriously.) I had to get out the magnifying glass to decipher how many l’s there were in Philips. No doubt the estimable people at Philips Electronics think everyone should already know how many l’s Philips has, but let’s face it, there are other people and companies named Philip in the world, and they throw around the number of l’s in the word with wild abandon. And woe betide us if we text the wrong number of l’s to 82222, right?

Which brings me to 82222. How many 2s are there in that number? It’s not a simple matter to tell, is it? There’s a reason numbers are usually “chunked,” i.e. broken into 3- and 4-digit strings. It’s hard to make out or remember longer strings. Reading a string of identical digits is especially hard.

So the Simplicity Contest is like that old Simon and Garfunkel song, “A Simple Desultory Philippic” (one l, two p’s), which contradicts itself right in the title.

My bet is that they’ve thrown just enough small complications into this Simplifying comtest to reduce the number of entries significantly. Of course, it doesn’t matter to them. And if we don’t enter, our lives are already Simpler! So maybe it’s win-win? Except that I was looking forward to some real nonuninspired prizes.