Valentine's Day

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, as I'm sure you were all made aware. I think the constant onslaught of jewelry commercials ("He went to Jared!") should have been adequate warning. Hopefully now Jared and all of his jewelry compatriots will take it down a notch. Or twelve!

Gah, I hate those Jared commercials. They have basically no redeeming value. Okay, the radio ones aren’t so bad. Not much worse than, say, the Shane Company commercials. But the TV ads are just annoying. "Hey," the ad people must have thought, "I know who will make great spokespeople for our product! People everyone can really relate to! Professional ballroom dancers!"

"Oh, I don’t know, Bob. Is there any way we could make that commercial better?"

"How about an INREDIBLY ANNOYING tag line that can be repeated in totally obnoxious tone of voice by every person in the commercial?"

"Gee…that means we have to pay them all for having speaking parts."

"Trust me, Stan. It will be worth it."

Ugh.

Actually, regarding Shane Company commercials – I kind of like them. There’s something very reassuring about Tom Shane and his general demeanor. This is not a man who will try to rip you off. He won’t pull a fast one on you. He’s barely awake enough to read the ad copy, for goodness sake! But really, I think the Shane Company commercials are the best jewelry commercials, except maybe those old de Beer’s commercials with no talking at all, just that "diamond commercial" music. You can hear it in your head right now, can’t you? A diamond is forever.

So anyway, yesterday was Valentine’s Day and I actually had a date! Amazing, I know. We all thought this day would never come. If you want to know who won the Westminster Dog Show, I can’t tell you. For a change.

But I digress. Elliott and I went out for dinner and a movie. He picked me up at home, and came bearing roses! Beautiful red roses! I’ve never got flowers before. When I woke up this morning my whole room smelled like roses. So nice. I think I would have taken them to bed with me if they were cuddly at all.

We went to Café Trio for dinner (site of our first date, though at a different location because the downtown location had an hour and a half wait), and then to the Century theaters on 33rd (also site of our first date!) for a very long movie after 10:00 at night (also like our first date! Kudos to Elliott!).

Side note: Elliott is wicked good at Ms. Pack Man.

Side side note: Why is it Ms. Pack Man, and not Mrs. Pack Man? Mr. and Ms. Pac Man do get married in the game and start having little baby Pac People, do they not? Such are the mysteries of Namco.

To bring everything back full circle, the movie we watched last night was Blood Diamond. I had wanted to see it for a while, ever since we saw The Departed and Leonardo DiCaprio was very good in it. He’s very good in Blood Diamond too, even if the movie does seem to be about three years long. It’s a compelling story and brings out lots of good points and isn’t too preachy all the time, and is only marginally cheesy at the end (that could have gone very cliché very easily, but didn’t) . . . but . . . I think they could have tightened it up a bit in the editing. How many times do we have to see the main characters be attacked by rebels? How many minutes of footage do we have to watch of people walking all the way across Sierra Leone? It’s beautiful country, but I think a lot of that could have been trimmed without hurting the movie at all.

This is also the third movie I’ve seen wherein Leonardo DiCaprio plays the hero and then (spoiler alert) ends up dead at the end. Oh Leo, will you never win?

Anyway, it’s a pretty good movie. If that’s the kind of movie you like to watch, you should watch it.