Excitement!

Mostly in yielding to Jeff's prodding, I have decided to post another enlightening and exciting blog. But I'm warning you, you'll be much better off scouring facebook and YouTube for all the pics and videos depicting wild and lascivious tomfoolery that undoubtedly are being posted this instant by thousands of college kids, just hours after they've returned from SPRING BREAK!

Such as these.

HAHAHA! You've just been SPRING ROLLED!

Ok that was fairly lame, but seriously, I just checked facebook and have already been notified by the new non-stop news feed that hundreds of spring break pics from lots of idiots have been posted mere hours after their status feeds let me know they were home safely from Cancun, Daytona, Acapulco, Morocco, Djibouti, etc.

Certainly their weeks have been more exciting than mine. The past few days for me have consisted mostly of trying to use the Commonwealth of Virginia's tax Web site, which is one of the worst sites of any kind in navigation/functionality I've ever visited, and fighting with my printer, which I'm sure is possessed by some kid of Poltergeist.

More enjoyably, I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which actually is very good. Up to this point, I've resisted reading anything by the afro-wearing diminutive journalist-turned-pop sociologist. Mostly, I must admit, because I have been afraid it might make me consider myself unorignal. You see, he is much of what I'd like to be, doing much of what I like to imagine myself doing. For years, I have been sitting back and offering armchair psycho-social analysis of people, cultural phenomena and current events, my views being mostly formed from knowledge other people (like researchers) attained and passed down to me directly or indirectly, filtered through my own creative and observing lens. A lot of what I do as part of a PR team and what I did as a reporter is take lots of information going in lots of different directions and try to synthesize it into a larger, connected, overall picture.

That is precisely what Gladwell does (extremely well) in Blink, his target being the human subconscious mind. He tells stories as far ranging as the NY Getty Museum's science-vs.-intuition battle in determining whether or not their great Kouros Statue was a fake to a psychological researcher who intuitively knows the psycho-social interaction that is vital to successful marriages so well that he can predict whether or not a couple will divorce withing 10 years with 95 percent accuracy after listening to just a few seconds of tape of them talking, to the tale of Amadou Diallo, the man whose unprovoked killing by four NY cops spurred debates over proper police training and racial profiling and even a song by The Boss himself.

Gladwell expands the idea to include a War Games fiasco conducted by the U.S. Government in the early 2000s, how subtle changes in product packaging can drastically affect their sales, the 1990s Pepsi Challenge and even the real reason why the number of women in professional symphony orchestras has increased from 5 percent to nearly 50 over the last decade or so.

It's a quick and fascinating read, and I'm afraid I'm now hooked. I'll probably wait for the Tipping Point until Sarah K. is done with it, so I'll probably move next to Outliers.

In other reading, I'm finding my latest attempt to get through Catch-22 similarly snagged as in previous ones. I'm about halfway through, the furthest I've ever made it, but having at the start found Heller's whimsical wordplay pleasant, it is now grating and repetitive. The passages are too windy and winding, and there's not enough action. A little like this post, I suppose.