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Whack a mole
What’s whack-a-mole? Something like guacamole, the avocado dip?
Ha! It’s how Boris Johnson describes the Government’s new coronavirus policy: local lockdowns to bash down the infection rate where it flares up, such as in Leicester. The name comes from the arcade and fairground game in which moles continuously pop out of holes in a machine at random, and players have to clobber them with a mallet to make them disappear.
Sounds like a case for the RSPCA?
Fake moles, obviously. Although activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have complained that it promotes cruelty. Also, there has been academic research into whether it desensitises players to violence. (Findings: probably not.) After the financial crisis, in 2009, a Whack-a-banker version was installed among the amusements on Southwold Pier in Suffolk. It encouraged players to inflict retribution on capitalists for causing the economic crash. But the mallet broke because players were too aggressive and it had to be replaced. ‘I knew people didn’t like bankers, but I had no idea they disliked them quite so much,’ said its designer,
Tim Hunkin.
But who came up with the original?
Maybe inspired by the traditional Splat The Rat game popular at village fetes, where you have to hit a replica rat as it falls quickly down a drainpipe.
A version that originated in Japan in 1975 was spotted by two carnival operators in the US who saw its commercial potential. Both staked competing claims as to who successfully adapted it.
But Bob’s Space Racers has the rights to the game and sells a home edition, which it says is ‘whacking good fun’, from its base in Whac-AMole Way, Holly Hill, Florida. Most recently, the firm has ventured into selling hand-sanitiser machines.
So is whack-a-mole a good analogy for the Government’s Covid-19 policy?
Let’s hope not, since the phrase describes a repetitive and ultimately futile task of ‘whacking’ an adversary that, despite numerous attempts, keeps popping up somewhere else.