journal features

another goodbye

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2003.12.10

Another day in December, another huddle with a friend before I take off for Halifax. This time 'round it was Geoff Hamilton.

We met for "pan-Asian" cousine at a decent/cheap place downtown after I put in notice with my new building management that I'd be leaving at the end of the month.

Amusingly, I also came to a conclusion in the matter of the electronic organizer I'd buy. I decided to go with a $30 non-electronic paper "Day-planner". Apparently you can spend ungodly amounts of money on the paper ones, if you like, but I decided that the $400 that the electronic unit that best served my purposes was far beyond what I wanted to spend.

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)