journal features

goodbye, little aquarium

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2017.01.06

Friends have taken the smaller of our aquariums - I know it's in good hands with a smart young lad. When we were carrying the many parts (and jugs of water) up to the system's new home, a neighbor told the new eight-year-old owner, "I'm going to get you some fish!" To which the boy responded, "Actually, it's best if we wait for five weeks before adding anything else. That way the aquarium can stabilize. Also, it's a small aquarium so it can't support too many more fish."

Which was the perfect answer.

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