Technically speaking, I haven’t yet filleted any public service announcements on this blog. But they are really just advertisement under another name, so I’m not doing anything groundbreaking in spotlighting one. This particular one was a part of an action week against racism in the Swiss capital city of Bern earlier this year.1 The poster looks a little like a Where’s Waldo? book, with a bunch of unrelated little vignettes. A startling amount of people are wearing orange or lilac.2
One of those vignettes shows an old man playing chess against a schoolgirl. They are floating, with their chairs and table, between the granary and a fountain manned by a couple of skinheads.
The details of the board are hard to make out. It is clearly an 8×8 board, at least, and it is set up correctly, but the pieces are so tiny that they’re hard to identify. I tried nonetheless:3
The identities of some of the pieces is far from certain. Worse, for some pieces I’m not even sure what colour they are. But the position of the kings is definitely correct and I’m pretty sure the pawns — and nothing but the pawns — are actually pawns. The kings, too, I’m quite sure of.
In any case, the position is preposterous. There is no earthly reason why black would have lost so many pawns and white so many pieces. Schauen wir gemeinsam hin, says the post, Let’s take a look together. I bet they weren’t thinking I’d look this close, though.
Realism: 2/5 Nothing is majorly out of place, but the whole makes no sense. Why are the kings still stuck in the centre this late in the game? Why are so many black pieces still on the back rank? It’s a mess.
Probable winner: Black, clearly. Whether that’s supposed to carry some affirmative action meaning, I don’t know.4
1. [Switzerland officially doesn’t have a capital city but their parliament meets in Bern, so I’ll call it the capital.] ↩
2. [The designer apparently has a predilection for colours named after trees.] ↩
3. [Apronus against bad chess diagrams.] ↩
4. [But I suspect not. I don’t think anyone thought that deeply about this poster.] ↩