Monday, 8 December 2003
2:30am

I

  am rather disturbed by a certain TV commercial. Perhaps you have seen it. It goes something like this: A man and a woman are in a European-looking plaza, with a bunch of pigeons around. The man stops the woman and says something like "Wait a minute. I have to do something," and then he proceeds to yell at the top of his lungs to everyone who is walking by, "I LOVE THIS WOMAN! I LOVE HER!", proclaiming his love for her to the whole world.
The woman gets embarassed and urges the man to stop, to which he says something like, "Then maybe I'll just do this," while pulling out a big diamond ring. Suddenly the woman melts, embraces the man, and whispers into his ear, "I love this man. I love him, I love him."
I'm disturbed because the message I'm getting from this commercial is that this woman doesn't particularly care for any of this man's expressions of love that don't come in the form of expensive gifts. Indeed, her own sense of embarassment is more important to her than the courage it took for the man to ignore his own self-conscious fears in order to take the risk of making such a public statement of his affections, which in my opinion, requires a higher level of devotion to her than just going out and buying a gift would entail.
A friend of mine, Omar (whom you might remember as being the arachnophobic RBPer from my Vegas 2k2 video), and I came up with the idea that someone should make a beer commercial as a spoof of this diamond commercial. After the woman sees the ring, and tells the man she loves him, the man shoves her to the ground and says "Well too bad, the ring is fake, just like your love for me!" and leaves her there, heading for the nearest bar where he orders a Budweiser. Fade to black, and put up the title card - "TRUE."
Yeah.