News Flash: European Wine Authorities take Historic Step of Making Wine Labels Less Confusing

To those of you who are completely uninterested in wine, this will seem like a small thing. But for the wine geeks of the world, it’s a great step towards making it easier to predict the qualities and quality of the wine inside the bottle based on the label outside the bottle. There’s still a long way to go, but this helps… Full Article »

Tony the Tiger. The Pillsbury Doughboy. Sonny for Coco Puffs. Trix the Rabbit. I might not remember what I did for Halloween last year, but I will always remember these product characters because they are imbedded into my subconscious. Is this just a coincidence? Am I a product of too much TV watching? Perhaps. But, it turns out that these characters were specifically created to be this sticky – in a positive way. Who doesn’t like the Pillsbury Doughboy?
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My uncle Bob was recently diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Prior to this diagnosis, Bob was a vibrant, healthy, athletic father of two and devoted husband. He’s run marathons and exercises regularly, and is a very healthy eater. The last time I saw him was a month before his 60th birthday, a couple of weeks before he started to feel confused and not well, at his son’s Evan’s wedding in New York. He appeared to be his normal self, outgoing and funny and telling classic “Bobisms,” which are really corny jokes—and he was beaming with pride and joy. You would never have thought in a million years that within a month he and his wife would move their lives to New York from Fort Lauderdale to be near top cancer specialists, and their two sons. We are all hopeful. Full Article »

In a recent New York Times article about new social networking site ParentsConnect, started by Nickelodeon, the site was surprisingly not compared to MySpace. It seems like every new social networking site (apparently the newest Internet buzzword. Remember community, portals, content, etc.?) is compared to the giant. Nor was it compared to its more obvious rivals, iVillage (a Catalyst client) or BabyCenter. Full Article »

I hope I’m not literally the last one to notice this…although I’m clearly not the first. Apparently, Volvo has updated their logo, as of about a year ago, to a new design meant to represent, according to a Volvo communications specialist, “strength.” Hmmm, maybe so.

To me, this new logo more clearly represents “dude.”