So I'm watching TV tonight and I see an ad for the new 2003 range of Fords. Nice looking cars, despite the horrifying miles per gallon.

Anyhow,the ad says:

One hundred years ago, the Ford motor company tempted employees by offering to pay them five dollars a day. Now, a hundred years later (I suppose they have to say that for the adding-impaired) you can own a Ford for just five dollars a day.

And the caption says something about it being $148 a month.

Now, surely I don't have to spell out the insult to history: Hey, you with the children and the weekends at Ikea...you can own yourself one of these ecological disasters - and all it'll cost every year is the same amount of money as your great grandaddy earned in a year.

Now, you can tell me it's inflation and that what great grandaddy could have got for five dollars is vastly different to what you and I can get for the same amount. But let me ask you this: how much of the things we can't buy with five dollars are things we've decided we can't live without in the last hundred years?

My cellular phone costs a dollar and a half a day. Cable internet costs around a dollar seventy-five and cable TV about the same. Insurance for the car is three dollars a day and a Starbucks coffee here in Atlanta will set you back anywhere from a dollar eighty to four dollars and seven cents.

While I'm glad that cholera, smallpox and tuberculos are diseases I will very probably never have to worry my pretty little head about, I'm wonding if the social advances made over the last century are enough to pay for the moral delinquency and excesses of greed that have come with them.

In other news

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I sometimes had to tell myself that songs like Bridge Over Troubled Water were actually written by real people. You know,they just sat down to write one day and suddenly there was a timeless masterpiece that would move generations.

When I think of it I am sure that the list of songs that were just there, waiting for someone to discover them, is a short list. I'd include Let It Be...much as I think McCartney's writing is often times juvenile and overly simplistic (to the point of being stupid) that one there...it's a great song.

Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" is one, I think, and so is "That's Entertainment" by The Jam.

There are more and the thing that I reckon they have in common is that they all connect the listener, not to the musician, but to the muse that first moved them to start writing that particular song, and in a way that makes the song transcend the artist - songs like "Easy", totally embarassing that it's a Lionel Ritchie tune, but come on...it's just so perfect. Songs like "Under Pressure" by Queen and Bowie, despite it being the thing Vanilla Ice chose to sample; songs like "Under The Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers which managed to survive a terrifying cover by All Saints.

These are songs whose greatness is defined, not just in sales and radioplay, but also in the way that even as you hear them for the first time they're already familiar.

Feel free to pick this by-no-means-comprehensive list apart or add your own. I'm thinking it's mostly personal, but the ones that really count are the ones, like Easy, where you say - yeah, the guy's a complete dick, but that one song...