Yesterday I left the apartment to recycle some glass bottles, snagged both feet on a piece of plastic hoop, tripped and hit the ground. Two metal cans actually worked to mute the fall, but still a couple of glass bottles shattered below me, resulting in two sprained wrists and a minimal cut that I've shown X about thirty times for sympathy.

I felt quite good afterwards. Shortly thereafter, I noticed I'd probably been concussed as my faculties weren't in order; I walked as though I were tipsy and I struggled to find words. For a total of 30 minutes thereafter. Once I intellectually had grasped what had happened, I felt I was back to normal. Somewhat.

Now, something that made me flinch a little this morning was seeing Google's autonomously driving car in motion:

Yes, there are passengers in it, so called "trained operators", but it seems they're there to prevent the car from going AWOL. Still, seeing the car in actual motion makes me think of K.I.T.T., Automan and the mf'n Batmobile all rolled up into one. It made me jump more than reading "All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research." off the Google blog regarding all of that.

And I really like Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom", which - so far, 30 pages into the book - seems to me a mixture of the narrator voice from "Desperate Housewives" and the narrator voice from the film "Little Children", albeit more genial:

She was sometimes seen receiving visits from fortyish women who, based on their hairstyles and the bumper stickers on their Subarus, were thought to be old basketball teammates of hers, and there was talk about her drinking again, but this was mostly just a guess, since, for all her friendliness, she had never made an actual close friend in Ramsey Hill.

I can't wait to read it more. It's funny that a book that is almost 600 pages long and weighing in at nearly 2 pounds is called "Freedom".