All You need is Love, not a Blackberry

Based on the searches that led people to my blog yesterday and the Twitter messages expressing disgust over Blackberry using All you need is Love in their most recent commercial, let me explain just a little further why this upsets me specifically. Although I would hate the use of any Beatles song because I know how much they didn't want to be used commercially, this one is particularly offensive.

My kids tell me this is not their favorite Beatles song. I try to explain to them the significance of this song in a historical context. The Beatles wrote this song to represent Great Britain in the first ever World Wide Satellite hookup. What better message could they think of to send than All you need is Love. It may not be the most complex of their songs, but it's simple and to the point.

There are several reasons it irritates me personally. First I hate that Alan Klein was such a terrible manager that he let the Beatles catalog slip away from their control. Second, I hate that Michael Jackson was such a terrible friend that he stabbed Paul McCartney in the back after getting advice on where to invest in music, by buying the catalog out from under him. I hate that Sony owns a piece of it because Michael Jackson was too deep in debt and lost control of the catalog. I hate that every time one of these commercials air it pays money to Michael Jackson's estate.

But most of all, I hate that Beatles music, that somehow stands by itself in an iconic sense of time and place, is sullied in this commercial way. The Beatles would probably never have agreed to using their songs in an ad. Who knows? I just feel better knowing I'm not the only one who hates it.

What ever happened to jingles? Are people so lazy they can't hire someone to write a catchy tune? It would be a lot cheaper than using a Beatles tune.

All you need is .... a blackberry commercial??

I was watching TV and suddenly Beatles music strikes a familiar chord in my ear. I'm listening to All you need is Love in a Blackberry commercial, which made no sense by the way. I kept waiting for the tie in to the song, and there was none. There was the Hello Goodbye Target commercial. Then it was Come Together in a Macy's commercial. Is it a coincidence that since Michael Jackson died, I've heard more Beatles songs in commercials? I think not. The lawyers are doing everything they can to make money for his estate to cash in on the image he died with as opposed to the image he lived with. It actually makes me angry. Angry to know that Michael Jackson's estate and Sony are reaping the benefits of those endorsements. Angry because in my mind that's not what their songs are about. And angry because the artists have no say in it. I think if you write a song, you should be able to say whether you use it to sell a product. And before you say the commercial did its' job because I remembered who the commercial was for and that's the idea behind advertising, I would respond that I remembered so that I won't patronize those people.

My friends and I attended a quilt show last week that was fun. My friend entered one of her quilts that I had quilted on my Hinterberg. It was my first show for my machine quilting. I objectively (?) compared it to others and felt that it was just OK. I have a lot of room for improvement. I bought some pretty teal fabric with daisies. I love daisies. They have a fabric called gradations that includes 4 different shades of a color in the same yard of fabric. I had never seen that before. Of course I had to buy my favorite color - fuchsia.
My sewing room has two skylights and I also use the room to do stretching exercises. As I was laying on my mat the other day, I was staring up at the blue sky and the puffy clouds through the skylight. I started remembering the days as a kid when you laid on the ground trying to make shapes out of clouds. As I lay there, watching the clouds move across the sky, I realized that if I weren't stuck on the floor, I no longer have the patience it takes to find a shape and besides I can't see them right unless I'm looking over the top of my bifocals and how did I spend so much time doing this as a child?

Last week, I was trying to make rice for dinner. I had parts of 3 bags I was going to use and found some of those little rice bugs in the first and second bags, so I threw it in the sink and rinsed it down the drain. I made dinner with the good stuff from the 3rd bag. You know where I'm going with this, right? After dinner I couldn't figure out why the garbage disposal wouldn't work. My husband had to take the drain apart to fix it, and we discovered that rice expands even if you don't cook it. The entire drain and elbow was packed tight with rice. Even more amazing than the fact that it never occurred to me that it would happen, since I've thrown cooked rice down the drain multiple times, was the fact that in almost 32 years of marriage, it's not happened to me before. So, watch out for that rice!

Dichotomy of Life

I lost a friend yesterday. My friend was a librarian. She loved reading, taking walks, and being with people. She had a zest for life and loved to spend time with her children and her new grandchildren. I've never met anyone who was loved by so many. When she retired last November, she was looking forward to spending the next years enjoying her family. I'm so sad that her time was so short. And yet, as we often do, I put that away into a compartment for a few hours so I could celebrate the birthday of my cousin, surrounded by family, and carry on with the rest of the day. Later, when all was quiet, the door to that compartment opened and I had to examine the enormous feelings about the loss of my friend. As the tears slid down my cheeks, I tried to figure out how to fill the hole in your heart where a loved one has entered. The quote I've seen on a card came to mind: "Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay in our lives for awhile, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same---."

How true.