Couples With Right Chemistry Have Love Down to a Science

For three decades, relationship research psychologists have been able to

pinpoint behaviors in couples that lead to successful, fulfilling and enduring

relationships and conversely, behaviors that are corrosive, insidious and deleterious

to the bonds of love.

Over the last dozen years, such relationship data have spurred an explosion of

therapeutic approaches, relationship education courses and 911-emergency-like

interventions for the divorce-bound. There is a kind of science to staying in love,

many psychologists and therapists agree, concrete ways to invigorate a couple’s

bond and to inoculate couples against the predictable lows and endemic conflicts

of long-term love.

But these efforts stand little chance if a couple doesn’t have chemistry,

psychologists Janice R. Levine and Howard J. Markman write in Why Do Fools

Fall in Love?, a collection of essays written by leading

relationship researchers and psychologists pondering the mysteries of love. LA Times

Is Environment Triggering Male Reproductive Problems? “Doctors and scientists are almost certainly missing evidence that adverse

environmental factors may be responsible for an increase in a range of

problems in male reproductive health, according to a leading Danish fertility

expert.” UniSci

The people’s Net: Douglas Rushkoff says “the Internet is back. That’s right: alive and well. Not slumping or waning, slowing up or winding down. It may be a little shell-shocked, but that’s only because it’s just won a war.” Yahoo!

Keep Barney Pure: “B*rney may be a dinosaur who chants about hugs and love, but his lawyers aren’t afraid to

get nasty when protecting their plump, purple trademark.

In the last few weeks, a law firm representing Lyons Partnership — which owns the rights to B*rney — has

stepped up its efforts to yank hundreds of humor sites poking fun at the children’s cartoon character that

so many Internet users love to hate.” Wired It’s extremely curious to me why B*rney almost universally inspires such a visceral revulsion among so many, myself among them. Before I had children, I’d never seen B*rney and was only aware of its existence from the disdain showered on it on the ‘net, e.g. in usenet groups with names like alt.tv.barney.kill.kill.kill or the like. As cynical as I fancy myself to be about conformity, I could dismiss the phenomenon as being like schoolyard teasing, jumping on the bandwagon to hate someone that everybody else with nothing better to do loved to hate. You know, the kind of thing to which the proper rejoinder is, “Get a life.”

But more recently, as a parent who begrudges my children very little that I notice delighting them, I still can’t sit in the same room when Barney comes on. My son’s B*rney stage, partly because of his parents’ discouragement, was quite brief, but my daughter is smackdab in the middle of being enthralled by him and it shows no sign of slowing. The closest I can come to understanding my contempt is that it’s about the enraging, smarmy falsity of the good feelings both B*rney and his cast of fixed-plastic-smile kids have. I imagine it’s similarly painful for them. How I long for a repeat of that fabled children’s television scandal in which a microphone gets accidentally left on and the character’s candid expression of disdain forever dethrones him!

It fascinates me that grownups — but unfortunately not the legions of entranced children — can universally detect such falsity and react with such visceral pain to it. Seems built in; wonder what the evolutionary psychologists would have to say about the adaptive value to social interaction of having such a “bullshit meter.”

And can you imagine how twisted into knots might be the innards of the recent law-school graduate waking up each morning to remember that his firm’s assignment has given him a full-time career made out of defending the B*rney trademark?

CorpWatch, until recently known as the Transnational Research & Action Center (TRAC),

… counters corporate-led globalization through education and activism. We work to foster democratic control

over corporations by building grassroots globalization–a diverse movement for human rights, labor rights and

environmental justice.

For the past four years San Francisco-based CorpWatch has been educating and mobilizing people through the CorpWatch.org website

and various campaigns, including the Climate Justice Initiative and the UN and Corporations Project.

And the unrelated Corporate Watch, the epigram on whose website is from Utah Philips, “The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses,”

… is a radical research and publishing group, based in Oxford, UK. It was set up in late 1996 to support

activism against large corporations, particularly multinationals. As a radical group, we are reliant on support from

individuals and groups who want to help further our aims.

Web-myth debunker’s life threatened by Steve

Gibson Groupie: “Techno-myth debunker Rob Rosenberger has received a death

threat as a reward for his efforts to expose GRC.com founder Steve

Gibson’s recent rants on the Win-XP raw-socket terror for the

rubbish that they are.” The Register

Mean Cuisine: Alice Waters, doyen of American chefs, takes on the President, and prompts this essayist to opine: “Gone is the Joy of Cooking. Today’s celebrity chefs

are serving up a menu of global doom and politically

twisted snobbery.” Washington Monthly [thanks, Walker]

The ‘Agony and the Ecstasy’ Dept.: A weblogger whose work I follow recently published some somewhat cryptic comments about reforming his approach in response to some perceived criticism about his weblog persona. To my gratitude, when I wrote him wondering how it might bear on what I’m doing here, he amplified privately to me not only to reassure me but to give me the blow-by-blow. Turns out there’s this phenomenon in which webloggers who read one another regularly enough allude (usually critically) to one another’s posts in a kind of call-and-response dance across the weblogging universe. Certainly, there’s alot of room for interpretation, but my friend’s email to me — full of links to these other bloggers’ posts — makes it clear he hasn’t just been being paranoid or overreading them. There’s just too much circumstantial evidence and temporal coincidence. He’s keeping his sense of humor about it, because as he points out his respondents are such clever writers.

I’ve been blissfully ignorant of this undercurrent in the weblogging world, partly because FmH is more about the world than the world of weblogging. I’ve never joined the cliques — you know, commenting on what the major weblogging players, referred to by their first names only, are saying or feeling. And partly, it’s because I don’t read the A-listers enough to see any correlation between any aspersions they may be casting and anything I’ve posted, even if they are there…which they probably aren’t, because they probably don’t read me, regularly if at all, either (I don’t study my referral logs very obsessively…). In fact, I have enough trouble keeping up with explicit mentions of FmH, like the recent one I noticed and responded to in Lynnette Millett’s Medley or the nod I got in David Anderson’s Metaforage. It seems many webloggers who’ve been at it long enough, each in our own way, are struggling with how thoughtful we are, or ought to be, in our work. I see it as a part of the maturational process for the weblogging medium. My friend’s email to me sees this same struggle reflected in the oft-noted recent trend of many quality bloggers to attenuate or suspend their posting activity. (Hopefully some of the more creative ones are “woodshedding” and not just hanging up their holsters.) That was what my exchange with Lynnette was about:

I feel my weblogging is more “on” when I can give you my own take on things, and most

of the posts at FmH to which readers respond are those, rather than the ones I excerpt or

point to without exposition. I sometimes barrage you with alot of frantic webclipping,

and I often feel I’d rather slow it down and be more thoughtful.

But — who was it who said something like “The perfect is the enemy of the good”? — I like how I’m doing this well enough, and it’s to be hoped you do too.

What I’m after here boils down to asking you this: if you’re out there reflecting on what I’m doing here at FmH, any cryptic animadversions are going to go right over my literal-minded head. Please let me know directly. I welcome your constructive criticism about content, form*, or even personality [grin]. And though I appeared to agree with another weblogger (whom I quoted over in my sidebar as saying, “If

anyone’s offended by anything on this

site then please do notify me

immediately. I like to keep track of

those times when I get something

right”), my reply will probably not be arch or coy. And, to you, my esteemed and anonymous weblogging colleague who it seems recently went through the long night of the blogging soul, consider yourself appreciated and supported, if I may so presume…
_______________________

*In fact, you’re welcome to explore the code for this page and tear it apart critically, if your HTML skill is less brain-dead than mine is [grin].

Addendum: Thought I’d share what another friend, and trusted critic, said about the above post after its initial appearance earlier tonight:

This evening’s post and extended thoughtful description of a somewhat

personal interaction seemed outside the general bounds of your site. It

smacked of a much more outwardly personal site than you have been running

(at least it’s not a webcam of your office). This is not necessarily bad,

though your personal-ity and thoughts and philosophies are painted more

interestingly (and maybe objectively) through your blogged items.

“We have now moved to the stage in brain studies when we can profitably start asking questions

about subjective mental states.” Why we all like Picasso —

“It’s all about brain wiring. Beauty leaves a physical imprint of its passage through the brain, and new research has shown that

certain brains may be more receptive to it than others… Neuroesthetics, an entirely new field of scientific inquiry, has jump-started a debate about the

neurological basis of art by raising new questions about vision, genetics and beauty and their

commingled relationships.” Here’s where the claims get abit overblown, IMHO: “(A California neurologist) says his rules can predict which art movements will succeed. Furthermore, a computer can be programmed to follow these rules,

and use them to distinguish art from junk, or to produce original pleasing images. (He) stops short of claiming that

neurology will allow machines to create works of human-like creative genius.” [mercifully] National Post

From Need to Know: banner ads so inappropriate their bona fides are suspect.

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle

Squirrelly Goetz gunning for NYC mayoralty: “Bernhard Goetz, the New York City vigilante who shot four black teenagers on a subway train in

1984, launched his campaign to replace Rudolph Giuliani as mayor by releasing a picture of himself

cuddling a squirrel.” National Post

What Is The Next Big Idea? Buzz Is Growing for Empire; this densely-argued book about globalization by a literature professor at Duke may fit the bill as the basis for the heavily-sought-after Next Big Theory for the humanities. Should we call it “empirical theory”, though? New York Times [via MetaFilter]

Wilderness and the Hyperreal: “Faking nature? So what? Isn’t human intervention the best path to

the sacred and preservation?” — Peter Warshall Whole Earth Review

Via boing boing, scans of covers of 76 editions of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and an explanation of why. Makes more sense to me than, for example, the man who claims he’s building a collection of moist towelettes. [via Spike Report]

Betting on beaming: Palm hopes infrared stations expand audience for PDAs. I saw these, installed but nonfunctional, at busstop shelters on a trip to NYC last month and thought they were a fantastic idea for those of us who haven’t gone wireless — to download area streetmaps, guides to eateries, local attractions, etc. They’d be very useful at conferences. Now, how to filter out the inevitable ads and other lame non-content they’re likely to send my way. SF Chronicle