NLPhilia Blog

Fight for Kisses is a game and an ad campaign for Wilkinson Quattro Titanium razors. The trailer is hilarious! (Note: Requires Flash.)

Nick Kemp reports that he’s done a major redesign of his NLPMP3 site:

www.nlpmp3.com has just been redesigned and to date has free unedited interviews with many trainers including Richard Bandler, Frank Farrelly, Doug O Brien, Nick Kemp, Sue Knight, Michael Breen, Paul McKenna, Michael Neill, Steve Andreas and many more!

We are looking for new interview subjects for 2008 and all suggestions are most welcome. The subjects don’t need to be NLP trainers, but need to have something interesting to say from or on an NLP perspective!

Visit www.nlpmp3.com

Nick Kemp tells me he’s Jamie Smart has set up a new NLP resources site:

“You’re About To Discover Secrets That Most People including most NLP Practitioners Don’t Know About NLP” – www.myNLPresources.com

Looks to me like tons of free stuff and some purchasable stuff as well.

Walking past the ER Registration desk one day, I heard the clerk ask a mom if the little girl (the patient) had any allergies.

“She’s allergic to time,” the mother said.

“Time?!” the clerk asked.

“T-H-Y-M-E. The herb. Thyme,” mom replied.

I thought to myself, “Damn”.

“Crazy All the Time” was the title of a book I read a long time ago. It was about the psych ward at Bellvue State Hospital in New York. It’s been so long that I don’t remember anything about it, but I still love the title.

A couple of days ago* I was on the psych unit at my hospital (I think of it that way, as my hospital) when a long-time schizophrenic came up to the nurse’s station. This woman is as sweet as she can be, and she’s got tardive dyskenesia thanks to a lifetime of drugs to treat her socially-unaccepted behavior. She can be annoying at times.

Anyway, she looked at the nurse and said, “I been eatin’ chicken feathers. You see me eat all them chicken feathers?”

The nurse heard her but didn’t say anything, as she had her conscious mind on another task.

“I been eatin’ chicken feathers,” she said again.

I said, without really looking at her, “What does it mean that you eat chicken feathers?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just been gettin’ tickled at everything. Just laughin’ at everything.” (Note that “gettin’ tickled” is an idiom around here meaning “finding things extremely amusing”.) Then she walked away.

The nurse looked at me and grinned a little. “It was a metaphor,” she said, with that “Now I get it” look in her eye.

*Originally posted in Usenet on March 3, 2001

I’m a major fan of The Teaching Company. They’re an amazing business which takes the cream of the crop of University professors and records their best lectures on audio and/or video:

The Teaching Company brings engaging professors into your home or car through courses on DVD, audio CD, and other formats. Since 1990, great teachers from the Ivy League, Stanford, Georgetown, and other leading colleges and universities have crafted over 200 courses for lifelong learners. We provide the adventure of learning, without the homework or exams.

I’ve bought several courses from them and have listened to a few more from my local public library. I’ve been consistently impressed.

On occasion, they give away a lecture or two, usually to celebrate a holiday. I just received an e-mail from them with links to two free lectures on the history of Christmas:

Season’s greetings! To thank you for being our customer, we have specially commissioned two holiday lectures by Professor Patrick N. Allitt. Our free gifts to you, “Christmas in Victorian Britain” and “Christmas in 19th-century America” are available for download or streaming right now.

Included in the e-mail was an invitation to forward it to friends. I figured this was the best way to get the word out. 🙂

In “Christmas in Victorian Britain,” Professor Allitt explores the celebration of Christmas as we know it today, with decorations, music, and lavish gift exchanges, and where it began–Victorian Britain. While the holiday had older traditions such as those that celebrated the winter solstice, the Victorians enhanced and clarified the religious elements of Christmas and at the same time commercialized it.

After familiarizing yourself with the origins of modern-day Christmas, explore “Christmas in 19th-century America.” How did different ethnic groups in America celebrate Christmas in the early 19th century? Why did New Englanders often want to avoid all forms of celebration while Pennsylvania Germans dressed up, visited each other, and drank heavily? After the Civil War, Christmas celebrations began to be standardized throughout the nation under the influence of the new department stores, which ran the Christmas-oriented marketing campaigns we are familiar with today.

About the professor:

Professor Patrick N. Allitt is Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born and raised in central England and received his B.A. in British and European History from Oxford University. He earned his Ph.D. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Allitt has served as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School and at the Princeton University Center for the Study of American Religion.

Please download and enjoy these sample lectures. I’m sure you’ll be sending a hunk of your income to The Teaching Company as soon as you get hooked. 🙂

Incidentally, the links on this page are lifted directly from the e-mail, complete with what appears to be referral information specific to the e-mail campaign. I do not get referral fees from The Teaching Company.

Some recent conversations led me to do some Web browsing, and I found a couple of very interesting sites I want to share.

Eyes for Lies: The Human Lie Detector Blog:

Scientists have identified only 50 individuals who are able to spot deception with great accuracy after testing more than 15,000 people over several decades. Eyes for Lies is one of the 50 people.

This lady is able to detect lies 80% of the time, and she does a pretty good job of explaining how she does it. What she sees, hears, and feels, internal strategies she uses, and so on.

Truth About Deception: An Honest Look at Deception, Love and Romance

Discovering infidelity, or deception by a loved one, creates a lot of uncertainty. We try to help people work through their questions and concerns by providing a detailed look at deception, love and romance.

This site is slanted heavily toward deception within romantic relationships, but the information I’ve read there is applicable outside those as well. I particularly appreciate their article on how to get people to tell you the truth.

By way of Lifehacker comes this pointer to 250 Public Speaking Tips.

To be either pedantic or precise, whichever you prefer, there aren’t 250 tips here; it’s kind of heavily padded. And some of them contradict others or are otherwise worth ignoring. But there’s plenty of good stuff here, too. Look at the first one:

Audience always comes first; ask yourself, “How can they benefit from listening to me?”

Link to Eric Feng’s Public Speaking blog
Link to a free chapter of the author’s upcoming book

You just never know when an opportunity to take care of your kid is going to come along.

One of them for me was on a really hot day about fifteen summers ago. I was visiting a lady who lived a few miles from where I live, and I’d stopped on my way at a convenience store to get some ice cream. I really hate hot weather.

I was walking back to my vehicle and unwrapping the ice cream when I yanked a little too hard on the wrapper and I dropped the whole thing in the dirt. I was so mad at myself! I got in my truck and started the engine, giving myself a really hard time, yelling at myself for not taking more care, and began to pull back onto the street. Then in my head I heard a kid’s voice–my own voice from when I was a kid–say, “Why don’t you just buy him another one?”

I stopped, right at the edge of the parking lot, and paid attention to what was going on in my head. I was a lot more angry than the situation warranted, I realized, so I went into my head and heard a little boy crying like he’d lost everything in the world.

Twenty or so years back my thoughts drifted to a park or something of the sort… it was a really hot day, and I was munching on some ice cream, when I heard that little boy crying his heart out. He must’ve been all of three years old. He’d dropped his ice cream in the dirt, and he really had lost everything in the world as far as he was concerned right at that moment. And his father was there, giving him a really hard time, yelling at him for not taking more care, and leading him back to their car, and I muttered to myself, “Why doesn’t his dad just buy him another one?”

I put the old truck back into its parking place and went into the store, where I bought him another one. He stopped crying and he’s felt a lot better ever since. And me… I don’t know that I’ve ever had better ice cream.

InfoWorld Magazine, in their TechWatch section, takes humorous issue with the same sort of gobbledygook despised by David Scott (see a recent post of mine). Read author Matt Hines’ article about security analyst Nick Selby’s“BullsIT Awards”, Poking Fun at Tech PR:

Our friends in the PR community can probably say the same thing about some of the stories we in the IT media produce on our side of the business, but, it is intensely fun from time-to-time to examine some of the worst examples of marketing lingo that get hurled at us on a regular basis.

I loved Selby’s reference to Lisa Simpson of The Simpsons: “This reminds me of Lisa Simpson visiting Australia and, on seeing on a cinema a sign reading, ‘Yahoo Serious Festival,’ she said, ‘I know those words, but that sign makes no sense.'”