For two days last week I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to read, or talk to people. I certainly didn’t want to work. All I wanted to do was stare at little squiggles on a screen and guess which logos they represented.
上周，我有两天什么事都不想做。我不想阅读，不想跟人说话，当然也不想工作。我唯一想做的事就是，盯着手机屏幕上弯弯扭扭的小图案，猜测它们是哪些品牌的logo。
It all started when one of my sons shoved his iPhone under my nose and pointed at two excessively curly letters in a blue circle. “What’s that?” he demanded. “General Electric,” I replied in a flash.
这事的起因是，我的一个儿子把他的iPhone猛地递到我的眼前，指着一个蓝色圆圈里面弯曲得很夸张的两个字母问我：“这是什么？”“通用电气(General Electric),”我脱口而出。
This was all it took. From that minute I was a slave to Logos Quiz, a game that for the past couple of weeks has been the most downloaded free app for the iPhone.
我在一刹那间就做出了回答。从那一刻起，我彻底地迷上了“品牌大猜解”(Logos Quiz)，这是一款过去几周里下载量最多的免费iPhone应用。
It starts off gently with images everyone knows – Starbucks, Facebook, and so on – but then gets harder, tantalising you with tiny parts of logos that you know you know, but can’t quite place. There is the rush of joy on realising that a thin white line with a red surround is part of CNN. A further jolt of pleasure comes with seeing that the two black S’s that have been eluding you are Hugo Boss.
一开始很简单，出现的是大家都认识的图案——星巴克(Starbucks)、Facebook等等——但随后难度就加大了，拿一些你以为自己认识、却又不太拿得准的logo的极小局部来让你干着急。当我意识到红底上的一根细白线是美国有线新闻网(CNN)logo的局部时，一股喜悦感登时涌上心头。有两个黑色的“S”我开始没认出来，但当看出那是雨果博斯(Hugo Boss)时，心里又是一阵狂喜。