journal features

home again, home again

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2009.07.20

So we're home again. Two flights, three long drives, and two non-trivial train trips in four days. It's a bit much, with an 18-month-old child, but we'll never be here again so why not.

Naturally we wound up sleeping away most of the day.

I notice that I'm getting better at deciding which camera gear to take. This time it was:

-one film SLR body

-three lenses (20mm, 50mm, 85mm)

-my folder full of filters

-a handful of film

-a very small flash

I managed to use almost everything that I brought, and brought almost everything that I would have used (with the possible exception of my small table-top Joby tripod). I shot several rolls of film, and found myself making one old mistake that I've been making with increasing frequency in this sleep-deprived era: not setting the exposure mode back to automatic after using the flash. Rrrrr!

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