twenty-seven years and one million words
I inflicted the guys from the ol' IT gang from my days at Trimark on the girlfriend, tonight. She was returning from a strange few days in Ottawa, and arrived at the Frog and Firkin in N. York - where the guys and I have been meeting for over a month - dead tired but ready for some drinks and gab.She and Ching seemed to hit it off. "Cool chick, bro," where his words.
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