journal features

traffic, bloody traffic

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2010.11.23

I'm struggling with the train system in Toronto. Tokyo's transit looks better all the time by comparison.

I'm very grateful that there's a train system at all. That's certainly not a given in North America. But tonight for instance it took me two hours to get home from downtown. There just aren't enough trains! And the swipe-card system that allows you to pay is barely functional: yesterday I missed two trains while the staff tried (and failed) to puzzle out what was wrong with my card. Again this morning I had to check in at Union Station to reverse an overpayment.

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