Perhaps what is most shocking is that the move barely comes as a surprise.
When I finally climbed out of the vat, it barely came as a surprise that my sense of time was no longer linear.
When Giampiero Ventura decided to exclude Sebastian Giovinco from Italy's squad for the upcoming matches against Liechtenstein and Germany, it barely registered as a surprise.
But there was nothing amusing, and barely any surprise, in Ms. Winehouse's recent, notorious and possibly inadvertent public appearance: on a video released by an English tabloid, The Sun.
When I look back through the archives to a period when nobody had heard of a derivative, New Labour had just been invented and the internet was barely a rumour, the surprise is that so many of the themes are familiar.
With barely a hint of surprise, she did exactly what she was supposed to: she whispered "excuse me," closed the door and made a mental note to come back and make the bed later.
So it was a surprise, barely a day after images of bloodied commuters flooded Russian airwaves, when Mr. Medvedev made a point of publicly discussing poverty and unemployment in the North Caucasus, which he has said are the root causes of violence there.
In a late surprise, barely a month before Tuesday's election, Mr. Schulter announced he wasn't running and would support a longtime aide, Tom O'Donnell.
A starter of calamari, meanwhile, was a surprise, because I could barely taste the squid, lost in an unruly heap of frisée, Serrano ham and piquillo pepper.
