journal features

chasing the garbage truck

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2018.08.28

Both of my grandfathers were known to chase down the garbage truck and get something precious back that their wives had thrown away. Today I found myself tearing open a garbage bag to retrieve something my wife had tossed. Thankfully, the bag was clear and the thing I wanted was easy to find, and the garbage had been sorted, so there were no foodstuffs or other slop in the back.

And what did I want retrieved? It was a small plastic divider that fits into my tackle box to divide its rows into discrete boxes. I'd been re-purposing for uses such as scraping things.

I suppose I've carried on a proud tradition. Well not

proud

, per se.

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