journal features

the week that wasn't

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2018.11.19

November in Toronto, when you can say, "Thank god we carried the sofa down all those stairs before it started snowing".... On Sunday I spent the day studying for an exam I wrote Monday. Then the rest of the week was a blur of very long days, with Thursday sofa-before-the-snow day. Only to be capped with a half-day in bed with a migraine on Friday, then nearly a normal work day again. Then Saturday was corporate tax day (one of n).

Hard to remember that I had the summer off, to be honest.

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