journal features

wandering the streets of Kawasaki

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kawasaki, 2020.04.16

Tonight I hit the road because I realized I'm gaining a lot of weight. I headed up the hill, through some very swank addresses indeed and then crossed the long level top of the hill. At one point I noticed a foot path and found myself skirting the edge of the hill between a line of fences that marked the edge of the properties part way down, and the hedgerow that marked the properties just back from the edge. I could see quite a way to the north, but I also had local buildings to look at. At a certain point I stopped to take photos of a rugged set of concrete steps on the south side of the ridge, then turned around and went down a road descending the north side. This being Tokyo, I presume the entire hill is man-made. One sign is the extremely narrow ridge. Another is the river that's been diverted beneath the "hill".

Back down on the plain, I went all the way around the hill's east side then back along the road that passes it to the south. Another 3km trek route successfully blazed.

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