Archive for February, 2006
Valentine’s Day
15 years ago
My mum always had little stickers on the tiles in the toilet. Every sticker represented a month of the year and every month had a little rhyme. The month of february said: “Start de dag met een glimlach, want the 14e is het Valentijnsdag (start the day with a smile, because it’s Valentine’s day on the 14th). Coming from a background in which valentine is not celebrate very elaborately, I had to ask my mum what valentine was all about. I guess from that time the sense and nonsense of valentine has been imprinted in my memory as something silly and unnecessary. Maybe that doesn’t reflect her opinion, but it does reflect the impression I got from it back-then. Quite right…
My opinion about Valentine hasn’t changed much over time. Just like santa-clause, who was invented by Coca Cola (I hope you all know that he has nothing to do with the “spirit of christmas and was invented in the greatest marketing campaign ever), Valentine looks more like a another very carefully planned marketing campaign for flower-shops, restaurants and the chocolate industry. It would also not surprise me if Coca Cola is in this list as well, as they of course get their share through the restaurants.
So why do people celebrate Valentine’s day anyway? Because the minister of commerce says so! Together with the industry, every year the Valentine’s-campaign is planned extremely carefully and delicately through major PR in most media targeting at women. Many of these magazines elaborately write about Valentine and do their share of conditioning to create those demands. Now, the thing about demand generation campaigns is that you try to seduce a person into buying your goods. For the valentine campaign it works even trickier, instead of generating the demand at your target market, the demand is generated at their partners. This is a very smart and when the demands are carried over to the purchaser, the message becomes
Oh my dearest Haseenah!!
16 years ago
by jan
in Daily blogs
My dear wife has been reading my blogs everyday and everytime after she read a story, she always asks me why she is never mentioned in the story. Of course that’s not true, because you can even see her picture popping up on my blog. It’s just that she wanted to have a full story dedicated to her. Well, here you go my dear, a full blog-line dedicated to you. And yes yes, of course I love you my darling Haseenah! Hasssseeeeeeeeenaaaahhhhh!! (I’m sure this will keep her happy for a while)
By the way, she’s pregnant again! It’s 2 months now, while my eldest kid is barely 7 months. It was a bit of an accident, because we hadn’t planned to have another baby for a couple of years at least, but it happened. As they say: God moves in mysterious ways, especially considering the fact that we have just found out that Haseenah is pregnant with twins!
Wish us luck guys, that’s gonna be difficult to feed 3 crying babies at the same time. Oh and mum & dad, if you happen to read this, let me know of all the houses that are coming up for sale next to you. We really really need your help!!!
Muhammad cartoon vs freedom of speech
26 years ago
by jan
in Daily blogs
I wanted to write a story about the uproar that was caused by a cartoon in the newspapers in Europe. I had a story in mind about freedom of speech, but I’m not going to do that. Why? Simple, I don’t want to die yet: I’m too young and I have a family to take care of. Especially lines like “an Islamic group called for the artists to be put to death for blasphemy“ on the ChannelNewsAsia website are scary.
I think I would just like to ask people to be a bit open-minded when it comes so satire. The entire idea of satire is that publishers are looking with a magnifying glass into a certain topic and try to bring weird/fun/bad stuff to your attention. I would also like to remind people that popes, prime ministers, kings, dalai lama, Ghandi, Buddha and Jesus are very famous “actors” in satire and similar cartoons. Just to save the peace: please don’t over-react, it’s probably not worth it. I think you could take an example of my dad. My father used to to have a very simple approach when it came to the (ab)use of Jesus. If it upset him he just switched off the TV or even cancelled his newspaper subscription. Easy does it, right?
Oh, and this part from the ChannelNewsAsia report was also interesting: “One poster during the demonstrations in Jakarta said: Let’s slaughter the Danish ambassador!”. Obviously he forgot that neither the Danish ambassador, nor the Danish government has any authority over what’s published in the media. It makes me wonder what they were doing in front of the embassy in the first place. Shouldn’t they be demonstrating in front of the newspaper’s office instead? What does the embassy have to do with it? And did you know that the editor of the French and Jordanian newspapers that printed cartoons have already been sacked? The Danish cartoonists are in hiding, fearing for their lives.
What also struck me is the magnitude of the uproar about this cartoon-issue, and the number of people that have hit the streets. I understand the strictures in Islam against images of Muhammad, but Islam also doesn’t approve flying planes into buildings or exploding bombs in crowded markets for the purpose of killing the innocent. Yet after those attacks, there weren’t any demonstrations in front of the embassy of Afghanistan, there weren’t any protests again the killing of innocent hostages and there were no threaths to slaughter the Indonesian president for what happened in Bali…
At the other side: It wasn’t the most tactful thing to publish these cartoons… Naughty, naughty.
Anyway: Enough said. I want to live.
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