Bike fall #4

I've noticed that this blog chronicles all falls on my bike since moving to Munich. So I have to keep it up. I left work Monday in a good mood. After I got my bike I realized I forgot my gloves inside. Not a good idea in freezing Munich! So I rode around to the front of the building, just to step inside and get them. WHAM! Suddenly I was on the ground, slamming chest-first on the pavement, my bike skittering away into the street. Luckily no cars were coming. A passerby got my bike and another helped me up. Very embarrassing. I sat for a while rocking back and forth to work off the pain in my knee. A crowd gathered around me, telling me to get up. I said I was okay and just needed to sit a moment more. Everybody left but one guy stayed to lecture me for a long time about being careful, how it's dark, how you should get right up after you fall, etc. I didn't have the bandwidth to listen to him, I was just too confused as to how it happened so quickly.

So hopefully that is the (only) fall for this year!

Oh, the front plastic fender of the bike is a causality. Sigh. There goes 30 euros.

I loved this comment from Steven Johnson's discussion about Lost:

Steven said:

"Lost" has the unique opportunity of proving you can build a narrative of mesmerizing implausibility that ultimately turns out to be entirely plausible simply by changing one elemental rule of the universe--and then not telling your audience about the rule change until the third act.

Then the commenter, TDAWWG, said:

Err, that's called a deus ex machina and is generally considered one of the worst storytelling faults, the quackiest canard, if you will, in the arsenal of terrible narrative humbuggery. It's not literally Father Zeus dropping out of the clouds to make everything all right at the end, but it's a similar kind of unfair trick, a fake plausibility: even worse when it's used, not out of desperation in ending an unwieldy plot, but from the beginning, as a ticking narratological time-bomb that will explode to the delight of the credulous.

Dunno, Twin Peaks proved there was a vital market for "one-damn-thing-after-another" storytelling, false portentiousness, etc.: why is Lost so special? Really, I'm curious, despite the snark....

Haha! I like Lost, but he makes a good point.