Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Bike-to-Work Week - Day Three

I continue to have bad luck finding all of the thousands of cyclists commuting to work this week. Somehow, I did not see any of them this morning.

Occam's razor (which you should not use to shave your legs -- not nearly as good as the Schick Intuition) demands that, when multiple competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, one must select the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It sounds even better in Latin, but -- as a recovering Catholic -- I cannot speak Latin. It is a slippery slope from there to attending mass every morning, plus stations of the cross on Friday and confession on Saturday. This would obviously cut into my riding time. Besides, incense makes me sneeze.

Anyway, back to Billy Occam. By applying this principle, I can only come to one conclusion regarding why I have not been pannier-to-pannier with my fellow bike commuters this week:

The Romulans have begun building bicycles.

You see, although in Star Trek movies we often see Klingons with cloaking devices, it was actually the Romulans who invented them. Captain Kirk cunningly stole the device from them, while Mr. Spock seduced the Romulan captain (a female -- Star Trek was not that cutting edge then). Scotty then wired it in, they beamed Spock back to the Enterprise, and -- poof! -- they disappeared.

If you think about it, this was only inevitable. What is Star Trek without "Trek?" And who makes Lance Armstrong's bicycles? Elves. And elves have pointy ears, just like Mr. Spock and the Romulans (although Mr. Spock is a little taller ... unless we're talking Lord of the Rings elves, who are skinny but of standard height ... although I wonder why there are no fat elves in Lord of the Rings).

This logic is perfectly applicable, since it is cyclic. And we are talking cycling here, right?

Tomorrow I'm going to weave a lot on the way in. I fully expect to bump into a bike with a cloaking device, or for the rider on that bike to yell out "Hold your line, idiot!"

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