journal features

cycling weekend

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2010.01.12

We spent the weekend on our bikes.

On Saturday we went up to Shibuya to feed the fish in the home aquarium of our friends. We then made three shopping stops along the way back, and had a meal. In total, about two hours on the bikes and some seventeen kilometres. Then on Sunday we took the bikes to a ferry port and rode across to Odaiba. From there we cycled back all the way around the Port of Tokyo, a journey of about 15 kilometres. In all, no great distances, and on the holiday Monday we only ran some errands.

The weather cooperated completely, with crisp sun on Saturday and Sunday. On the island of Daiba there were families flying kites and throwing balls around with their small children. The ride home was done under increasingly windy skies as the coming overcast that plagued us on Monday and today started to build up. But it was more or less as good as we could expect for early January!

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)