quot et demonstratum (qed)

came upon a most interesting quote today, which has been happening every day now that i have changed my browser homepage to Google. previously it was the CNN page but i did get quite wearisome of waking up, switching on the comp and being blasted with details about gory deaths, sordid affairs and lurid politics while i was still rubbing sleep out of my eyes in a haze of smoke

oh no, i'm not pretending i haven't seen the date or don't know what day it is - i think i have done my fair part in keeping the commercialism of v-day going. ever since i was a scruffy undergrad trying to scrounge together some change to pick up any flowers bearing a shade of red, i have bowed to the gods of marketing who have deemed that this fourteenth day of february be used to not only enshrine the female half of every relationship equation, but further propagated onto pretty much every other girl/lady/woman who plays some part or the other in your life.

it is thanks to these glamorous denizens of television commercials who in breathy voices gasp their ecstasy to the men in their lives who shower them with jewelry that a pretty comic moment was played out between the gf and me yesterday. having procured well ahead of time a pretty necklace which was proclaimed on the idiot box to be the flavor of the season, i sat confident watching men everywhere scramble to get out of the doghouse. so here we are watching tv, and an ad comes up for the very piece that i have purchased. i ask the girl what she thinks of that, and with a cursory glance she goes "nahh" with nary a thought that there might be subterfuge involved in why i was asking her that! now when i fish the necklace out from behind my back, she ends up looking sheepish and i end up green to the gills. i dunno, i guess you just had to have been there.

anyways, back to the quote i referred to in the beginning:

"Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?"

Philip G. Hamerton, "The Intellectual Life"