journal features

happy father's day

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2020.06.21

One of the first things you forget about when moving to a new country (or even one where you've lived before) is the holiday schedule. Happily, Hallmark exists (or existed, hard to know who's still in business these days) in Japan, so Father's Day is a thing here. I talked to "Opa" first by phone and then by the ubiquitous "Zoom". I didn't hear from my own kids, but that's how it goes when you move away from them. Besides, I'll have them cooped up here in the house for two weeks of quarantine soon enough.

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