my boring weekend

Yes, the boring weekend stretches endlessly on. After a short, ill-advised nap, I am now unable to sleep. If you guessed that in order to try and induce sleep I'm subjecting myself to additional heinous low channel programming, you're right. Go directly to the Land of Endless Good Movies and informative, educational programming. So there are a couple of things I'm going to comment on in this post - commercials I happen to see and the movie The Last Samurai.

So, a Zyrtec commercial that just reinforces the belief that not only are women inept in the business world, they can't do anything other than interfere with men and cause them shame and failure. All this from a commercial about allergy medicine you ask? All this and more, I reply.

The entire commercial takes place in the boss' office. The attentive, attractive, and focused man is completely distracted from doing his job by his pathetic female coworker's allergies. She's sneezing & nose-blowing and that's just an unbearable distraction for this poor guy. He absolutely cannot do his job and it's all her fault. He misses the everything the boss says and walks out of the office, asking the female coworker if she got notes. She flutters at him, with a phlegmy simper, and replies, sadly enough, no she didn't.

Next, we see that he's immediately given the lectern and told to recap the information to the entire sales force! That poor guy - just another man who suffers miserable failure because of a woman. Do I even need to say any more about this effing idiotic piece of garbage?

My next comment is on The Last Samurai. I enjoyed several things about the movie including the landscape, the portrayal of the samurai (pre-Tom Cruise) and the general sense of historical Japan. What I want to comment on is the whole 'white men as savior' theme. I mean, we're talking about a culture that has been around for thousands of years and they can't seem to manage this conflict without Tom Cruise showing them what to do. In fact, the samurai couldn't save themselves or influence the emporer until Tom Cruise came on the scene and proceeded to take care of it for them.

The biggest irony? One of the reasons the samurai and the emperor were at odds was because of westernization ( or modernization)! I don't know enough about Japanese history to know whether or not the movie's at all factual but I do know that contact with white/European culture had a huge impact on all of the Asian cultures. Those poor backward people, with their undeveloped, backward cultures. Thank god the white men showed up to save them from themselves (and rape their culture in the process)...