If you had any doubts that Valentine’s Day was anything other than a cynical cash-in engineered by the greetings card industry, a way to make the single feel lonely, and force the coupled into spending cash out of guilt, those doubts can now vaporize, filed alongside Santa Claus as an ad-agency invention.
What inflames my cynical streak this morning? The "Love is in the Air… With MSI Wind" promotion. In it, happy non-singletons can upload a photo of themselves and their loved one to the MSI "Valentine Photo Gallery" in the hope of winning a special edition Wind netbook. It’s exactly the same as any other MSI Wind – 160GB HD, crappy keyboard, six-cell battery and an Atom processor – with the addition of a pink paint-job.
It even comes with a "My Valentine" thumb drive (2GB).
As an ex-restauranteur, I know the pull of this "special" day. We’d rack up two or three sittings on the night of the 14th, all tables for two, and add in an overpriced, easy to cook menu. The resemblance to a cattle slaughterhouse was remarkable.
Will I be uploading a picture of myself and the Lady to the MSI gallery? No. This year I will spend the most romantic night of the year the same way I have been forced to spend it too many times in the past. With a bottle of whiskey and a copy of Hustler.
Press release [MSI. Thanks, Mark and Dylan!]
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