Normally, people hate watching TV commercials.  They will avoid watching commercials by pressing the fast forward button in recorded programs, change channels or go to the washroom in live programs.  I can’t believe I watched nothing but commercials for almost half an hour today.  I haven’t watched Hong Kong TV commercials for a long time.  Although I watch TV programs from HK quite frequently, those program are usually commercial free.  I am curious how the TV commercials in HK look like nowadays and what are the differences with those here in Canada.  I downloaded a collection of HK TV commercials and watched it half-heartly this afternoon.  Actually I am quite disappointed, out of the hundred or so commercials I watched, there are only a few good ones with a sense of humor or with artistic expression that is  pleasant to watch.  I always thought commercials in HK would be more interesting than those broadcast here.  I guess commercials are just equally boring everywhere.  Some commercials hire celebrities as speak persons, which I found quite this type of commercials often lacks substance and instantly turned me off.  Ok, commercials with showering scenes by famous female stars are exceptions, but I still won’t buy those products because of the stars.  Some commercials trying to be too informative, giving boring useless sales number to the audience so that they can forget in the next second.  There is one clueless commercial featuring Chow Yun Fat with lots of weird visual imageries.  It turns out to be the commercial for the new casino in Macau.  No wonder the advertisement company can make an expensive commercial seems so meaningless, that is exactly the effect they want to archive.  You can’t hard sell gambling in TV commercials.  To my surprise, I found some ancient commercials from my childhood days still on air these days.  The tag line of those commercials are part of the collective memories among people form different generations.  Actually, I am more surprise those products are still in business.  Who wants to by a product running an aging commercial?

What is a good life?  I have been asking this question to myself lately.  The definition of good life have different meanings to different people.  Someone want to be rich and powerful, someone want to live simple and humble.  At the end of the day, it comes down to the choice of life style.  It is a known fact that happiness does not correlate with wealth.  The pursuit of wealth may make other parts your life suffers.  But on the other hand, money can fulfill many of your desires.  One way out is to eliminate your wants like a Buddhist monk or convert your desires to intangible spiritual values that comes free like those religious people.  It seems to me forgoing the wish for materials is an adjusted preference that people change their expectation when they realize they can’t achieve their original goal.  Then they justify to themselves why the new goal is better than the old one by looking down on the things they once aspired to.  I am turning middle age and I have done some reality check on myself.  I know I can’t fulfill all my wants, so I have to discard some of them to keep myself in balance.  I have decide what to keep and what to let go yet.  But one thing is for sure, I won’t look down on the things I once like.  I sacrifice some goals to archive some other goals.  I should happy for those who can do what I can’t fulfill.  The things I would look down on is those that I never had and never will have interest.

I have a good chat with an old friend tonight.  I told him I was taking philosophy.  He said he is quite interest in eastern, especially Chinese, philosophy too.  We talked about the difference between western and eastern philosophy.  Both philosophy originated around the same period, 2500 years ago.  The two most famous scholars are Plato in Greek and Confucius in China.  Both of their teaching comes lots of things and enlightened later generation.  However the development of the two philosophy is very difference since then.  Eastern philosophy seems got frozen in time without getting much further development, we are still reading the same ancient books people read thousand years ago.  On the other than western philosophy has fully developed into a system covers almost everything knowledge man had ever known.  I think one the of key difference is that in western philosophy, philosophers are like scientist, their work is to discover the ultimate truth.  People respect the great philosophers, they learn from their works but they don’t take the works for granted.  In eastern philosophy, people regards the philosophers as the absolute standard.  Instead of trying to make improvement and discover more truth, they focus on figuring out what did Confucius really said in his books.  No one even bother to challenge whether the content of Confucians teaching is applicable.  It is important to understand the teaching of the great philosopher, not only that we want to learn from them, it is more important that we want to surpass them.  A forward looking culture brings progression and strive for greatness.  A backward looking culture always points to a golden standard in the past can only be deteriorated and slowly rotted away.

I met a professional tennis player over the weekend.  He ranked number 120 in the world and he plays in open competitions.  I thought with his ranking, he would get at least some sponsors.  The reality is tennis is not a very well off professional sport.  Other than his racket, T-shirts, shoes, bags, he does not get any sponsor’s money in his pocket.  There are not much money in tennis.  Individual sport’s pay out is not as good as team sport.  Think about how much money number 120 hockey player or soccer player will make.  Golf got the most sponsorship money among all the individual sports.  The reason is the sponsors get to play golf with the professional players.  Probably golf is the only game the armature can play with the professional at the same time, actually although they are in the golf course at the same time, they are really playing their own games.  When I have kids, I will select carefully on what sport to train him on to maximize the return.  Look at all the professional sports, probably baseball has the best return.  Soccer or hockey player has to retire early, and tends to get lots of injuries, but baseball player can still stay in the field even they well into middle-age and have a big tummy.  Look at how much an average professional tennis player makes, tennis training is not a very good investment on the children.