stunt_muppet

While that description makes it sound very boring, The Tipping Point is actually a fascinating read, analyzing just what circumstances determine whether or not an idea, product, fashion, or behavior becomes “epidemic”. It uses such diverse examples as the popularity of Hush Puppy shoes in the 1990s and the sharp decline in the New York crime rate to illustrate its point.

 

The Tipping Point looks at how we behave, how we relate to each other, and how we are influenced by other people and our environment, and I found that the book presented a lot of ideas that surprised me. It was, in a way, quite troubling to realize how few people are truly responsible for the transmission of ideas, as well as to know that the power to change lay primarily in the hands of those specially gifted few; all the proverbial “ordinary person” could do was manipulate the few in order to effect epidemic change. But, the more I thought about Gladwell’s ideas, the less disturbing that prospect seemed, because it still allowed for ground-level action by almost anyone. As one might expect, it’s all in who you know, who you talk to, and who you persuade – but the targets of those persuasions are different than whom you might expect. Also initially frightening was how intimately susceptible we are to our environment, and how what we consider the very core of someone’s personality is in fact in flux depending on environment and the unconscious influences of others; by the end of the book, this seems not only apparent but intuitive. The book is persuasive, clear, easy to read, and, most importantly, it applies its theories to the real world, making its argument much easier to understand.

 

So, in conclusion, recommended, even if you’re not a psychology/math nerd like me.

 

The Parker Pyne short stories were…enjoyable, yes, because it’s Agatha Christie and Agatha Christie does lovely things with words. And she’s at her most droll and amused here, at a sort of distance from her characters and everything they do (which I’ve seen in the Poirot novels to an extent, but not quite as much with the Miss Marple novels). The stories also progressively get longer and more complex, to keep from belaboring the premise – which is good, because while the premise was intriguing (Mr. Pyne is not a detective but a person who makes it his business to make others happy), too many variations on it would have quickly made the series one-note.

 

However, I found that the Parker Pyne stories trafficked so heavily in the uncomfortable gender politics of the era that reading them became, at times, downright unpleasant. Women and men who are dissatisfied with their marriages, or who suspect their spouses are having an affair, are advised to pose as having an affair themselves, because a woman/man will not want a spouse who they think is “easily won”. The women in these stories, naturally, end up going back to their hapless spouses satisfied; while the men do as well, on occasion, they also end up chasing after the girls hired to make their wives jealous, even though they began the story absolutely devoted to their spouses. I can’t really fault Christie for playing into the expectations of gender relations of the time, but the way Pyne and his male clients talked about women occasionally made me squirm, even if I suspected it was meant as satire.

- I love Monk. I really, really do. I also love Psych. I know I don’t talk about them very much, but, if we’re going with the fandoms-as-relationships metaphor, those two are the steadies. They’ve always been there, they’re the reason I started watching TV on a schedule at all, and I keep on coming back to them because I just never get angry at them the way I do with some other shows. I’d say ‘don’t ever change’, but that’s just the thing – they have. And I still love them.

 

- Also, I think Stargate Atlantis might be tempting me. I’ve caught a few episodes here and there while waiting for Doctor Who to start on Sci-Fi Channel, but I saw “The Seed” on rerun and really, really liked it. Besides, Jewel Staite is in it, and she played one of my favorite characters on Firefly, and I invariably become more interested in a series if an actor I already like is in it.

 

I’m finding that, on casual perusal of SGA LJ fandom, however, I already seem to be out of synch with it. My favorite character thus far is Ronon; I see nothing much between Sheppard and McKay (and it took me all of ten minutes to start shipping Carson/McKay, so I don’t think this is me being a bad slasher); I don’t particularly dislike Woolsey. Am I going to have to start writing stuff to satisfy my own petulant fannish whims like I do with Doctor Who anyway? Because I really don’t need another fandom to write for right now.

 

Also, wtf. When did I get this much into TV science fiction?

 

- My crack DW opinion of the day: ALAN TUDYK FOR ELEVEN. Yes, even though he’s American. He does a good British accent, guys! It worked for me in A Knight’s Tale and Death at a Funeral! And he could be a fretting and anxious but secretly hardcore Doctor like Two and Five! We haven’t had one of those in a while! Also he would be ginger.

 

Really, I just want Alan Tudyk to have his own show. I love him unreasonably. I’m trying to do that thing where I will someone into getting their own show with the powers of my mind alone, but it doesn’t seem to be working (it worked for Jeffrey Donovan, shut up), so I’ll take him as Eleven. Or maybe as Thirteen, so I can still have Nighy!Eleven and Lumley!Twelve.