Might as well face it

Cole Porter may have been onto something when he wrote “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

“For a start, a relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship. “It is fascinating to reflect”, the pair conclude, “that the face that launched a thousand ships should have done so through such a limited expanse of cortex.” The second surprise was that the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. “We are literally addicted to love,” Dr Young observes.”

Also, from the same issue of The Economist, a Shakespearean sonnet on the theme of love, “Love Makes Voles of Us All.”

You’re soaking in it

Adrants laments the death of lasting brand positions in the course of noting that Jan Miner (Palmolive’s Madge the Manicurist in the long running ad campaign) died on Sunday at age 86.

Interestingly, Palmolive is not among the entries in the “Advertising Hall of Fame.” For me, having grown up watching TV in the 70s, the phrases “You’re soaking in it” and “Softens hands while you do dishes” resonante far more than “Nothing runs like a Deere” (a John Deere slogan from the same time period).

Harder than it looks

A former British cabinet minister spends a week as a teacher, and the teacher she replaced has to watch on “reality TV.”

(I’m currently teaching a theater workshop to third and fourth graders, and the single hardest thing so far is maintaining discipline while also engaging the kids and keeping everything fun and informative. Well, that and remembering the names. I’m afraid I’ve more in common with Clare Short than Celine Viner, the replaced teacher, although I symphathise more with the plight of the latter.)

If you can’t post something nice, don’t post anything at all

Here’s an excellent, carefully thought and worded post on corporate blogging. I wasn’t sure at first what “corporate blogging” might be, but it turns out to be blogging from a company standpoint (as opposed to an individual’s standpoint). It’s what I’m recommending my web clients to consider … although so far all of them have said they haven’t the time, that they can’t commit to making daily or even weekly updates to a website, no matter how convenient the means of updating might be. I’m afraid they’re being short-sighted: Quick daily updates would keep their clients interested and aware of their products/services and help differentiate them (my clients) from the pack.

Then again, I have trouble getting to allt he tasks on my plate, so I also see the inherent problem in adding a new service that requires frequent attention.

Here also is Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto. The points are mainly focused on technology companies (because they’re the ones most likely to try weblogs at this stage) but they apply as well to companies providing other products and services.

(Both links courtesy of the delightful gapingvoid.)

Everyone who lives in Lidsville really flips his lid

“Have you ever thought you liked a terrible song just because you remembered it, mistaking mere recollection for actual nostalgia? That’s the way it is for me and “H. R. Pufnstuf.” I thought I had fond memories of the show until I had a chance to see it again, to hear the shrieks of an angry Witchie-Poo (the actress Billie Hayes in a ketchup-red wig), to be assaulted by swirling Day-Glo colors and a Freudian plot featuring a talking flute. Turns out that when I was 7, I had really, really bad taste.”

Emily Nessbaum of the New York Times Reruns: reconsiders the television legacy of Sid and Marty Krofft.

I was never very fond of most of the Krofft shows except for Lidsville, which featured Charles Nelson Reilly as an evil magician.

The TV Land website summaries the show this way: “After being wowed by a magician at an amusement park, teenager Mark is bent on learning the secrets that must be inside the illusionist

Gaming the system

A system error makes clear what everyone expected but couldn’t demonstrate: Writers and their friends anonymously give their own works high reviews on Amazon.

“Close observers of Amazon.com noticed something peculiar this week: the company’s Canadian site had suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews on the United States site under signatures like “a reader from New York.”

“The weeklong glitch, which Amazon fixed after outed reviewers complained, provided a rare glimpse at how writers and readers are wielding the online reviews as a tool to promote or pan a book