journal features

exiled from japan

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Nanaimo, 2006.01.18

I am in visa exile, ejected from Japan and staying at my mum's place in Nanaimo.

It's a long, crazy story, but the details are here. Suffice it to say that I'm focusing on creating my own visa application and am staying positive. Helping with the 'staying positive' is that there's a really good Japanese restaurant a stone's throw from here.

Amazingly, I've been able to continue working for the client in the evenings.

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