A GREAT Commercial?

Recently, someone sent me a link to a commercial, as people do.

The subject of the email was something like: "Re: Re: Fw: Fw: Re: Re: This is a great commercial". I think the email had been forwarded just a few times, don't you?

Here's the link: http://joshspector.com/2011/02/13/now-this-is-a-great-commercial/

Go and watch the commercial, but be warned that it runs for three minutes. It's not a "normal" commercial. It is worth watching, I think.

You've watched it now? Do you think it was a GREAT commercial?

I think it was sloppy, sentimental, gooey glop.

Beautifully done, beautifully made. A real tear-jerker. Inspirational - especially if the participants were the actual people and not actors.

Another Trade To Learn

We've been renovating and extending a house. Twelve months after the builder started work, we moved in. Oh, it's not finished, we just got sick and tired of waiting for the builder. For 6 of those 12 months, I was the unpaid labourer on the site. Learnt a few things - mainly that I'm too old and too slow!

We're moved in now, and I don't think we've seen the builder on site since then. That was 4 months ago. Seems to me that he's worked out that it'll cost him X plus Y dollars to finish the job, while we only owe him Y dollars under the fixed-price contract. So he's not so much disappeared, as just never available.

In the meantime, I've been learning. Mainly I've been learning how NOT to do things. I try to do something and make such a mess of it that I have to demolish it. I try and limit my activities so that they are outside. If It goes wrong, there'll be no long-lasting, structural damage to the house.

Blogging And Posting

Seems ridiculous. Create a blog, and then not update it. Don't most people create a blog, update it furiously for a month or so, then update it every now and then for a year, and then forget about it? Seems like I've jumped straight to the last step. I was never completely normal.

My mother would have been happy to hear that. She always seemed to think that I was boringly normal ... or normally boring. And she was probably right. But I do have my quirks that make boringly normal with twist/s.

What's this blog about? It's about me working away in, say, the garden, pondering the great questions of my life. Every now and then, I come up with a thought or chain of thoughts that I really should write down. Unfortunately, I spend so much time in the garden and so little time on this blog that the thoughts - brilliant though they are - are forgotten by the time I feel like doing a new post.

Perhaps this blog isn't for anyone to read, but me.

Why Blog?

I read somewhere recently that if you don't write on a regular basis, your mind goes to jelly - well, the source, whatever it was, didn't exactly say it that way, but... - so I thought I'd start my own blog.

Two hours later, and I've got to the first post. The problem wasn't finding something to say, but finding an appropriate title for the blog. All of the titles and addresses I wanted are already in use.

I wanted to call this blog "But That's Just Me" as that was a line I used to use when I wrote a column for AtlasF1 - a sad loss - but the line was taken already.