Tag: Rob Reiner

Wonderful Valentine

“And then she asks me, do I feel alright?”

Wonderful tonight.

We are all conceived out of love.

Love without reservation, or hesitation.

90% perspiration, 10% inspiration.

But we are all here, celebrating Saint Valentine and Goddess of Fertility.

Chocolate and flowers.

Kisses and hugs.

Wonderful tonight.

“I give her the car keys…I feel wonderful tonight”.

Rich and poor, gay or straight, we need the other to be complete.

The world is envious seeing lovers in the park. Public display of affection.

Unlike a scene in “When Harry met Sally“, Director Rob Reiner‘s mom utters a oneliner “I will have what she is having”.

Go out and have a wonderful night.

Remember to take a taxi (or give her your keys).

When I was young, I heard “L’Amour est blue”,

“Romeo and Juliet”  love forbidden, Titanic – love interrupted.

Somehow, love, as understood in Western sense, did not arrive until our young people started to explore French romanticism

(Tu Luc Van Doan).

Previously, it was forced and arranged marriage

But love? That’s a upper-class luxury.

Vietnamese lit is plagued with broken-heartedness rather than consummated love.

Whitney Houston, who has just passed away, rode her career on that single theme, as portrayed in “the Body Guard”.

(interracial, consorting).

The stronger the opposition, the harder it is to resist.

I have just finished “the Museum of Innocence”, a true love story set in Istanbul.

The last line, “tell the audience I lived a happy life”.

And what a love story that was.

No love no music.

No music no life.

Only the mundane and mechanical men in motion

In the Bicentennial Man, Robin Williams, our tin man, asks to be terminated, since he couldn’t cry (what do you expect from a machine).

Ever since, I realize God’s gift to mankind is that he could suffer because of love unfulfilled.

The best way to destroy humanity is to take love out of the equation. No love, no sacrifice, no commitment.

Love the one you got. Got the one you love. There isn’t much time as it used to be.

Feel wonderful tonight. It’s Valentine. You got my approval.

colonize, globalize and localize

In that order. Just like Guns, Germs and Steel.

Natural, then with pesticides and back to organic.

First, Mattel outsourced toy manufacturing to Hong Kong (ironically, G.I. Joe , the real one, first saw the larger horizon including the Far East due to the two World Wars) , then every company considers “if it can be outsourced, it must”. In military term, it’s called “mission creep”.

In manufacturing, plant closing. In fiscal term, tax evasion.

No wonder, there are movements which call for localizing (an understandable reaction to the sweeping force of McDonalization and Disneylandization). This makes freight companies quite unhappy.

There is nothing wrong with economy of scale, or homogenization of taste and style.

It lowers the costs of manufacturing (but in my case, it is time-consuming to go for alteration) and uplifts living standards (rising expectations) in Asia, the world factory. Imagine how costly it would be to replace all those vacuum-tube monitors and TV’s had they been manufactured by Westing House, RCA or Zenith in America. We wouldn’t be seeing our  Ipad 2.

Still, it doesn’t make sense to ship tuna from Maine to Manila or rare animal delicacies from Main Land to Main Street Chinese restaurants.

We must apply the circuit breaker for a moment to ask that Reaganesque question: Are we better off than four years ago.

In pursuing that cheapest of price, aren’t we bought in to the relentless pursuit of logistic nirvana.

Neil Postman wasn’t a Luddite, but he raised a good question: through a vast array of technology (such as the amount of available TV channels), we must ask ” what problem was it that this technology is trying to solve.”

I like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. They happen to be empowering technologies, pull and not push.

From the information flow stand point, they are quite disruptive (for the first time, any one can upload this and that, instead of just “downloading”. See my other blog on South-South information flow).

Tools to share our lives, our stuff and our ideals.

It is happening and will be on grander scale. No wonder youth in the Mid East are restless.

Like Rob Reiner‘s mother in When Harry Met Sally, they want “to have what she is having”.

Freedom and self-governance is frightening. But it’s what we are wired for. Just give us the tool, we’ll show it to you. BTW, Facebook fans are joining  and saying, “we are born this way” or “ah ha ah ha, that’s the way the way I like it”.
Why would you try to make us consumers, debtors, etc…. just because of your lack of imagination and innovation. One thing we won’t miss is containerization once localization takes hold.

Until then, we got FourSquares and Groupon to get us a deal (for goods that shipped in from China, via you know what – that’s right. Container).

 

Winning is contagious!

If you need to be motivated as I do, watch the Winter Olympics.

You will share peak emotions, peak performance and peak mountain spots of Vancouver.

Everybody loves a winner, and the winner loves to savor and share that moment .

We empathize with their struggle, their trial and triumph. In a word, we self-project.

Their hopes, fears and dreams become ours.

Think of that Newsweek cover photo of the US women soccer player who took off her shirt on the green (Olympic 96?). Spontaneous and sweet victory.

Or at SB44, when the Saints number 22 intercepted that football (he pointed the finger at the end zone, where he was sure he would be in seconds).

No point of stopping someone on a winning trajectory.

Down in Brazil and New Orleans, the parades rage on.

Good to be alive. But it’s better to win.

Unless you were into anti-hero theme, winning has been popular in literature, film and throughout history.

Sadly, to win, you need to learn from the mistakes of others. That’s where training films and failed-business case studies come into play.

Remember that uncle in your secret family history? It’s better to whisper and leave the past in the dungeon. We all involve in mental editing, of data scrubbing to reinvent ourselves, just like the bean counters of Worldcom and Enron, to show positive P/E. There is nothing wrong with self-reinvention. But we need solid “wins” to show.

At the Olympics, sometimes, winning comes after years of training and practice. Even loss of life. But so contagious is winning . “I’ll have some of that” (Rob Reiner‘s mom said that famous line in “when Harry met Sally“.)