warmth is for sorry! this is not a hug (12. 995)

Via Kottke, we are directed to a gem of a McSweeney’s contribution from Robert Rooney, on par with their perennial offerings, with an imagined dialogue amongst the marketing and development staff of Invicta Games, LTᴰ on their packaging for Mastermind, a two-player board game for breaking code invented in 1970 by an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications specialist and later refined and released by the UK plastics company after debuting and unsuccessfully shopped at the Nürnberg International Toy Fair. The resulting box art since 1973 featured this photograph of a mature man in a suit jacket in the foreground seated with a young woman in the background—the two amateur models, Cecilia Fung and Bill Woodward, reuniting in 2003 to pose for a publicity photo. “Yes. Let the box look like it could pass a doctoral defence and start a coup d’etat at the same time.”