journal features

family-chan!

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Nichinan, Miyazaki, 2019.12.20

Today I traveled from Tokyo to Miyazaki, where I met Mari and the kids. I packed everything up in my tiny B&B and dragged my bags through the city's bustling subway system. Juggling as many things as I was, including a heavy backpack, luggage on wheels, a coat, and my suit, something had to give.

I somehow lost the SIM from my Canadian phone, which I'd been carrying in my shirt pocket. I may have lost a fair amount of yen as well, though I'm not as sure. I was carrying the SIM in shirt pocket because I had nowhere secure to put it; they're so fragile! It was out of my phone in the first place because I was using a special short-term rental SIM for Japan.

Nichinan is wonderfully warm compared to Tokyo!

And Mari said that the kids, who squabbled the entire evening, had been on their best behavior when I wasn't around. I'm glad they did that for her, but it seems like something I'll never see if the criteria is that I'm not present?

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