journal features

nose hill is cold and beautiful in the early morning

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Calgary, 2002.04.13

I went out this morning at 5 AM with Charlie to Nose Hill to take some pics of the city during sunrise. It was amazing up there. Cold and windy, but amazing nonetheless. After that, we went to the bird sanctuary downtown, then eventually to Fish Creek as well. On the return trip we stopped in at Arnon's place (Arnon called while we were in Fish Creek, having just returned from Singapore) and met him and his lovely wife Tara.

Then it was home again for me, to meet my eldest sibling Anthony for the first time. He and his wife tammy came 'round in the mid-afternoon. What a busy day.

Another first; I decided that my short could use another button at the bottom, and sewed and cut my first-ever button-hole. What a chore. took me two hours!

A final first; I helped Dad with transferring some of his wine from one set of jugs to another. The purpose was to filter it by running it through a small pump with some special filters for the job. He and Renate have figured that each glass of their wine (and it's decent stuff) costs around $3.50.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)