I think LOST is great, but after going through 3 seasons, these are the things I learned..

1 .The miracle of water. No matter how serious the injury is, whether it is a gun shot wound or being pierced in the lungs with a sharp object or being attacked by a weird black cloud - water can fix it. Every time.

2. If you hoard stuff, keep it a secret. Every do-gooder will want to kick your ass or even worse an ex-Republican Guard will try to torture you to get to your stuff. Of course you just might get a kiss too, but that is only after getting your ass kicked in the first place. To add insult to injury, you still get no respect for a couple of seasons.

3. Don’t have sex on deserted islands with no birth control. You know what sex leads to right? Unless it is with Kate or Sun or Niki or Ana-lucia or Shannon.. er Rose? OK, maybe not Rose.

4. If you are feeling particularly bored, then stop entering the numbers into an old computer. That way you get to see experience some drama and see weird Technicolor effects in the sky. You will, of course, have no idea what you just saw – at least for a couple of seasons.

5. Obsessive people can kill you. They will make you follow them while they try to save their son, they will make you climb up trees to reach a plane that has somehow crashed yet still teetering on top of the branches, they will try to blast open hatches as you try to stop them from opening it. If you find yourself in any of the circumstances, tell them to get lost and go back to your beach hut or shelter and eat some more DHARMA branded food stuff.

6. Eating generic brands like the DHARMA Cereals, DHARMA Beer, DHARMA Ranch Dressing, and Apollo Candy Bars can make you irrational, emotional, prone to flash-backs at the most inconvenient times, and highly susceptible to weird theories of why your plane crashed. Even if one of the producers have said that there is a perfectly scientific reason.. this should be good.

7. If you are easily offended, don’t hang around Sawyer a.k.a James, because if he sees something unusual, he will always say S.O.B (yeah you can figure out what). And if you are close enough you even get to see him do his squinty frown.

8. If you miraculously survive a plane crash and a guy called Desmond starts following you, don’t bother going camping, sailing or diving with him. You are dead already.

9. Don’t join weird cults with names that don’t make sense. Especially if they put bastardized Ying-Yang symbols on everything they own, from buildings to cars to uniforms. Related to this learning is not to trust some oriental doctor who speaks like he grew up in California, yet greets you with an Indian greeting and only appears in black and white films to indoctrinate you.

10. A love Triangle is not complicated enough. Bring one more into it so now you have a love square. Add complexity by having the fourth person lie, cheat and beat up one of the original three.

11. You can make people think you know what you are talking about if you speak in riddles. It’s helpful if you have an unusual look (like no hair or have a reptilian gaze or have a weird name that rhymes with Gecko). That will keep them guessing and coming back for several seasons hoping that at one point you will give them the answers they want. Hah!

12. People are generally stupid (see above) and will accept answers even if they don’t understand it. Although by Season 3, some are getting pissed off, so someone, somewhere better come up with answers. Soon.

Over time, advertising has been accused of many things, from beer guts (surely that can’t be blamed on advertising?) to the mysterious craving to go to White Castle for square-burgers to unreal expectations about things in life. But isn’t advertising about selling more stuff?

Can I be Empowered? Pretty Please?

More and more brands are talking about empowering, enabling people to go out and do great and wonderful things – after buying their products of course. Psychologist have known this for years now, that we want and need approval for most of our actions. Just to know that it is OK for us to do things or to feel a certain way.

Nike is a good example of how it empowers you to go out and just do it.. whatever that “it” is. Over the years I have not been able to figure out what that “it,” is. Perhaps I am not Nike’s target audience. Of course, I do have a pair of nice Nike sneakers, and the only thing I do is go shopping in them on weekends or walk to the bar on casual Fridays!!

I Empower Thee To Be Beautiful

Now here is a perfect example. For over two years Dove has been running a campaign called the Campaign For Real Beauty. The purpose of the campaign, and I paraphrase with great liberty here, is for real women to feel beautiful. Apparently it has empowered women from across the world from Europe to Asia to Australia to feel beautiful by being exactly who they are. What an idea?

It is a wonderfully insightful campaign, executed in a relevant manner in a truly global way. As far as the brand is concerned it is a successful campaign. It has generated the necessary response required of such a campaign and has received enough attention for it’s efforts. And I am sure that sales have been quite good too.

We (don’t) Have The Power

But why do we need advertising to “empower us,” why do we need strangers, sitting in their air conditioned offices want to “empower us,” for things that we should be doing on our own? I mean a little encouragement now and then is fine, but “enabling,” us?

Do women really need Dove to tell them that it is OK to be themselves? Do we honestly need Nike to urge us to go out and just do it?

Think 2.0

Since the good old Think 1.0 was not working, perhaps we need a Think 2.0. We need to be more critical of the things we read and hear on mass media – we need to be able to think and analyze the information we receive.

Advertising is all about selling more stuff – no matter what guise it comes in. The annoying used car salesmen is but an obvious and highly visible part of what advertising is. Just because you skip the ads on TV doesn’t mean that you are not exposed to advertising. It is everywhere you are because advertisers know where you are. They know where you live, what you drive, where you shop and what makes you tick. They will find a way to reach you.

The only defense is to be critical and Think. We need to be aware that we are being advertised to. What we do with that knowledge is up to us, but we need to know. Now that I am done with this, I will go out and check out the pair of really cool Nike Shox that I found on the Nike website, afterwards I will go for that light beer - you know the one that is sponsoring the NFL.

More than a few movies both on and off the big screen have tried to tackle the Bermuda Triangle. The results so far have been predictably bad, until Bryan Singer of the X-Men fame and Dean Devlin of the Star Gate and Independence fame decided to do their version of it.

Last night I watched The Triangle marathon on cable. Originally produced for the Sci-Fi Network, it lasts over 225 minutes and was shown in 3 parts. It features several well known faces from TV and some from the Movies.

The premise of the series is that a eccentric billionaire (we were told he was eccentric OK?), played by Sam Neil, who has lost several ships in the Triangle puts together a team of misfits OK, not so misfits to investigate why and how his ships were lost. The incentive was an-offer-you-cant-refuse five million dollars each.

We are thus introduced to the Eric Stolz character, formerly of New York Times, but now is writing for The Observer (kinda like the Enquiere) to feed his family. Then we are introduced to Catherine Bell of JAG fame, yummm, who got fired from her job, don’t ask. Her specialty; deep seas something or the other. After, we are introduced to the Bruce Davidson character who played Senator Kelly from the X-Men movies, who plays a Psychic of dubious background and lastly to Michael Rodgers of, I dont know where this guy comes from, he speaks in an Australian accent and plays a adventurous weather scientist.

And not to forget the Lou Diamond Phillips character, who plays a Greenpeace activitist who survives the Triangle and now begins to have strange episodes.

The mini series is well researched and tries to touch all the lore surrounding it from Christopher Columbus reports to the missing flight of Avengers to the USS Cyclops.

It starts off promisingly with a series of mysteries, obligatory introduction to the five characters, their background, their issues etc.. While not the greatest of introductions it gets the job done, makes the characters more multi dimensional. But that is where they pretty much stayed until the end.

Personally I don’t think there is enough material in it to be a 225 minute presentation, it could have easily been done in 90 to 120 minutes, and it would have been a tighter and more entertaining experience. Sadly as genre fare goes, this is not a bad mini-series, in fact it is quite good - kinda like the Hallmark mini-series; but the problem I have is why do genre fans have to put up with such half-hearted attempts at mini-series. Compare this to - Battlestar Galactica from the same network and you see a big difference.

It tries to wrap up the whole Bermuda Triangle Mystery of the how and the why; while it manages to do that - quite neatly I might add, it leaves one wondering what it was all about at the end of 225 minutes with the strangely anti-climatic ending. Maybe that is one of the mysteries of The Triangle. I am fan of most of the people who are involved here - from the writers to the actors, but better to have re-watched the Battlestar Galactica or gone to see Snakes On A Plane.

Verdict : If you are a fan of genre sci-fi and have a few odd hours, do see it. But whatever you do, don’t buy the DVD.