journal features

week in, week out

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Halifax, 2004.05.12

Another Wednesday, another French lesson (at six). I'm pretty bad at French.

In my class, I have the weakest grasp on a lot of the fundamentals, I've noticed, but I suspect that my pronunciation is better that of most of my classmates. I'm trying to figure if this somehow relates to my competence at my job, but I can't correlate pronunciation with any aspect of my job, so I shan't bother.

On the way home from French class I tried to get into the shoe store on Young street which is part of the only chain in the city that carries my size (16). They closed just as I arrived, at 8 PM. This city can be frustrating, sometimes, but I guess that comes with living in a city of this size.

After the non-shoe-shopping experience, I stopped at the Mazda dealership to ask whether there was anywhere that I could rent their AJAC "car of the year" award-winning cars. They told me that "Enterprise" has both the Mazda3 and Mazda6. They had one of the new hatchback Mazda6 models there. It looked good. If I ever find myself needing to lease a new car (not sure why this would happen) it would likely be that one, from everything I've read. So maybe I'll go rent one just to find out if they're as good as they seem on paper.

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)