A page from Malcolm Gladwell’s moleskine:

I haven’t slept for days. No idea when I last ate. My mind is on fire. Synthesizing all that data has turned my head into a furnace. Seriously, my ears feel hot. Correction: my hair is on fire. I must have nodded off on the stove again. It looks like my snap decision to work in the kitchen today was one of those snap decisions with adverse effects. Which only confirms my thesis: Sometimes the decisions made in the blink of an eye have positive outcomes, though, in certain cases, the outcome is negative. That’s the “50/50 Effect.”

Or consider it this way:

My great great-grandfather Clemens came to this country as an indentured servant in 1773, employed as a grease monger on the estate of a prominent Rhode Island shipbuilder. Rude Highlander that he was, and Rhode Island winters being what they were, he acquired a habit of loitering in his lord’s kitchen and warming the underside of his kilt on the wood-burning stove. Kitchen loitering became a tradition in my family, passed down through the generations.

Pair that with the fear of scissors that my mother instilled in me at a young age, a residue from the Great Scissors Uprising in Western Pennsylvania — as it turns out, all sons of Western Pennsylvanian mothers who grew up during the Great Scissors Uprising have wild unshorn hair. Then factor in the nearly 10,000 hours I have spent at the end of a manic streak dozing off in strange places.

Seen in that light, it wasn’t my guarana-fueled gut decision to put my notes in the oven and set my laptop on the griddle this morning that turned my hair into a flaming orb. It was the combination of unique opportunities, historical circumstance and habitual behavior that enabled me to make that seemingly idiosyncratic decision. That’s the “Other Stuff Besides You Matters Hypothesis,” which is all the rage these days in certain circles of corporate marketing — I mean, social psychology.

But how can we explain the meteoric rise of the Floofkin theory?

In 1944, philosopher and accordionist Gabe Floofkin escaped Nazi-occupied Poland only to fall into the hands of the Russians. Under suspicion of espionage, he was sent to the gulag. There, under conditions of extreme deprivation and routine buggery, Floofkin developed his theory of burnished matter. Lacking writing materials, he commissioned a thief to tattoo it on his body with a rusty screwdriver. Two weeks later, Flookfin died from tetanus.

But his legacy would live on.

Mysteriously, his frozen body wound up on a Vladivostok cargo ship bound for Brazil, fell off en route and, after months at sea, washed ashore on Venice Beach. The next morning, a lifeguard named Eugene Krik, originally from Odessa, discovered Floofkin’s theory inked across his chest in lewdly stylized Cyrillic. It read: “You can’t polish a turd.”

Within weeks, the Floofkin theory went viral. What started as amusing shower banter at the lifeguard hut quickly achieved critical mass and exceeded the tipping point, the point at which ideas become diseases and it is necessary to use the language of epidemiology to understand cultural change. From its Los Angeles epicenter, the Floofkin theory swiftly infected California, ravaged the Midwest and gave shingles to the entire eastern seaboard.

Children in Cheyenne, grandmothers in Fort Meyers and news anchors on CNN all conclusively endorsed the Floofkin theory. As a result, turd-polishing plummeted. That’s a perfect example of the “Sometimes Ideas Spread Fast Effect.”

But the story doesn’t end there. As always, market research statistics have some really fascinating insights into how the world works — ones that just might overturn the Floofkin theory. The advertising industry has long disputed the Floofkin theory and has thrown a lot of money at the social science departments of major research universities to disprove it. Researchers at Yale have recently found that if you put a turd in a box and polish the box, 57 percent of consumers will consider the turd itself to be polished.

Which leads me to my latest thesis: You really can polish a turd. Except that you can’t. But sometimes you can if you put that turd in a box, polish the box and find some people who will believe that the polished box with a turd in it is, in fact, a polished turd.

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