journal features
movie reviews
photo of the day

back on the bike, and counting cell-phone drivers

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2017.11.01

I counted 6 drivers operating their vehicle with a cellphone in hand as I glided past a line of 37 slow-moving cars. It's a depressingly constant number, hanging around 1:10 to ~1:6. Boo!

(I did see the fellow with the red BMW X6 and the personalized license plate again. He's now batting 6 for 6 without a phone in hand.)

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