journal features

a death at SARS-stock

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2003.08.18

There's a rumor going 'round that SARS-stock may not have been the care-free event everyone made it out to be. Apparently someone coasted across the entry gates in the final stages of a heroin overdose just as the gates opened.

The organizers apparently said, "It happened off site, it doesn't count!" and whisked the whole thing under the carpet. Someone I was speaking to knew one of the medics at the site, and they said it was the only actual medical emergency all day.

Still, a death by OD is a hell of a way to start your day (for a paramedic)!

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