Books!

Also, I nearly forgot, I finished The Last Templar. It earned added bonus points for avoiding common Templar Knight conspiracy theories (they're guarding the holy grail, which is a cup, a la Indiana Jones; they're guarding Jesus's bloodline, a la The Da Vinci Code). It's possible that the storyline this particular book goes with will be familiar to you, but as I'm not a Templar scholar, it was new and enjoyable to me. It also hit one of my particular religious kinks. The ending was somewhat less than satisfying, but they had written themselves into a corner such that I'm not sure I would have found any of the roads back out fully satisfying. All in all, still thoroughly enjoyable.

And I started The Tipping Point. I'm only 50 pages in, but I think I may have to pass on this one, or move to skimming rather than actually reading. It's not bad, but I'm unconvinced that it offers a particularly new/useful strategy. Then again, I'm probably just not the right audience. Gladwell's argument is that we should look at many/most/all trends as epidemics, and use the tools of thinking of things as contagious and spreading along social lines to understand (and ultimately predict) trends. The language of epidemics is, of course, something with which I'm already familiar, and so far all the stories he's trotted out are also things I already know. I think the epidemic paradigm is a useful way of contextualizing some of these things, I'm not convinced it's any better at predicting 'tipping points' than anything else.

Father's Day

Lastly, because I know you've all been waiting with bated breath, another silver lining to the hellish weekend of moving is that I found a poster from the Dalai Lama's visit last year that I had been saving. So I went out and got it framed and sent that to my Dad. Perfect.