journal features

cycling in the morning

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2013.08.20

I left home before 07:00 this morning, cycling under a red dawn on streets I expected to find a good deal quieter than they in fact turned out to be. The weather is finally getting summery again after a month where it'd dipped into the teens. The red/orange haze in the eastern half of the sky was reflected on the buildings downtown and smeared across the road before me as I went. It was nice.

The reason I set off so early was to write a practice test in advance of the exam I'm facing. I got the results I needed, but still missed a number of questions. Naturally, when re-writing them without a count-down clock bearing down on me, I got all but one of those right. Lousy time pressure!

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)