journal features

coffee, sweet coffee

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Sydney, 2000.08.28

Well, today it all fell apart. I managed to go both days on the weekend without a drop of coffee, but today a headache started building at around 11:00 AM, and it kept getting stronger. Since I was up to my eyeballs in work upon which the others were depending, I couldn't just split, so I went out on the street and got myself some tablets like the Tylenol #1 we get back home, and an Espresso, which I followed with a Soya flat white. That fixed me right up. So much for four days of coffee-free progress.

I'm glad that espresso has less caffeine than drip-coffee, but I've clearly been drinking too much.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton