journal features

chairman michael's modest walk

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Fukuoka, 2024.09.29

I headed across the downtown area of Fukuoka to see if I could fins a collared t-shirt in my size, as one of the shirts I brought with me is disintegrating rapidly. I failed, because the retailers were loaded with hoodies and denim jackets. It's still over 30º every day and I admire their optimism. I decided to go for a ferry ride to the islands that form the outer harbor. I would spend the next several hours doing that, first riding to the island and then walking back about 5.4km to a train station. One train exchange and I was back at Hakata, from which I walked back. I looked it up and it seems I'd walked about 5.4km on the city side, all in. Symmetry!

the ferry ride

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