Evading The Tipping Point

Saturday is a good day around these parts: I have an Ikea rocking chair, a large container of coffee, and an entire North American continent that still thinks it's Friday and is posting to their blogs accordingly. Tim Cavanaugh is a smartass, Ted Rall is begging for money to launch a frivolous lawsuit, five clones of Karl Malden are picking the Oscars again, and you apparently aren't allowed to have people arrested as a joke. All's well with the world.

As if everything else wasn't enough, the irritatingly-talented Malcolm Gladwell now has a blog. I've been avoiding his books in the vain hope that there's something about his style that won't carry over from New Yorker pieces to a longer form, but I'm gratified to see he's a fan of the hard salary cap.

(I did this with Jonathan Franzen, too, the avoiding. The critical reception for The Corrections was so goddamn effusive I refused to go near the thing for two years. When I did eventually crack it open, I found myself sitting on the subway muttering curses under my breath. Fuck! This is actually really good! I am not particularly proud of this.)

(Am I ripping off the "explosions" format? Sort of, but if you could patent the idea of the post-full-o'-links, that'd put paid to ninety percent of the world's blogs. Not that that would be a bad thing.)