journal features

emerging from winter on my bike

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2014.03.08

I rode my bike up to Danforth and Pape to pick up a suit and some shirts. It's been a snowy, cold, and messy winter this year, and whereas in the past two winters I'd cycled even in January, this time it's taken 'til now. It felt great to be liberated from the TTC* and to get moving again. Needless to say the past three months have left me out of shape for such things, but it won't take long.

TTC stands for Toronto Transit Commission, but I think of it more like "Trying To Commute? Take That Car!"

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)