What is the point of an advert? My initial answer would be that they are there to make us, the public, buy a product or service; perhaps, also informing us about the item in question. Given this, why do so many adverts today seem to be more about completely unrelated ideas?

Consider this example: A man and woman are in a kitchen. The woman tells the man that she’s leaving him, to which the man replies with a request to wait. Now, 2 eggs come inexplicably from her mouth. The woman then says, “Where did you learn to do that?”

What was the advert about?:

• Saving relationships,
• How precious and wonderful eggs are,
• Or, the value of education.

If you answered with any of the above, you were wrong. It was about a rail provider. Now, call me crazy but I don’t see the connection between trains and that scene.

How successful can an advert be in doing it’s job if there is no connection between advert and product? We buy stuff in adverts because we remember the clever tagline, or annoying jingle, or because, in some other way, the brand identity established by the advert is engrained in our memory; not because of some weird imagery. It might makes us laugh or scratch our heads initially, but chances of us associating with a brand at a later time are next to zero.

So, advertisers: if you insist on marketing stuff, make sure there’s at least some relevance in your adverts.

Funny how there’s always 2 sides to a relationship: his and hers.

Apparently, every relationship has list like these. I can’t begin to imagine what mines would be like. I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon enough.

The thing about Cradle 2 the Grave that is most gauling is not that it has a number in place of a letter in an effort to be “street”. Or that it has the worst tagline of the year (“Born 2 the Life. True 2 the code. Bad 2 the bone”). Or that the direction is, at best, piss poor. Or even that the plot is flimsier than OJ Simpson’s defence (everyone is allowed one OJ joke per year) and gets progressively worse as time goes on.

No, the worst point is that, after lots of expectation, the final fight between Jet Li and Mark Dacascos is so boring. You have two of the best living martial artist actors fighting each other and still you get they audience yawning. Something is very wrong with that.

As of today, this site no longer uses expat-style parsing of the XML files that make up the back-end of the site. Instead, it now uses a convoluted (but much faster) tree-come-element-value-pair-type parser.

What does this mean for you, my fine readers? Not a lot. Other than that the layout of entries can be changed much faster than before. Everything is now separated from everything else: Content, Mark-up, meta-data, style, templates. They all exist separately.

Actually, if you look closely, you’ll notice that the date for each entry is part of the heading for that entry, rather than being next to it.

Tim Bray has an interesting piece on his site simply entitled Truth. I especially like the last paragraph.

Too many people, these days, take truth and integrity lightly. To me, a promise is something that you do not break. Ever. For any reason.