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the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2016.10.20

I don't get a lot of feedback on this journal/website project of mine any more. The thousands of daily visits fell to hundreds and now it's even fewer. But a colleague told me he liked the recent write-up about trout and bruised ribs, so that was hopeful.

Three good things that happened today:

  1. While a door to a particular future has closed, another may have opened. It's a good trade.
  2. The wind was at my back cycling to work, today.
  3. Spent a day doing my thing with some auditors, and realized how far I've come in this strange specialty.
Three reasons to be thankful:

  1. I'm decidedly doing better with the migraines of late. Fewer in number, less severe, and of less duration. Woohoo!
  2. I might get in a bit of fishing on Saturday.
  3. Looks like we're going to the zoo with some friends on Sunday.

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)