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the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Fukuoka, 2024.06.04

Last time I was in the city, I found a pho place named the same as the town in southern Kyushu where Mari's parents live. Tonight I went back for another round.

I still haven't had a clear view of the place, because they sit my directly next to the door, but I don't really need to see it. They have an online menu in Japanese and Vietnamese and I get by with photos. I've sometimes thought that if I had to survive on just three cuisines, Vietnamese would be one. (Along with Mexican and Turkish.)

The spirit in the office seems good. Tuesdays and Thursdays, everyone is expected in the office and with visitors from other areas of the company in Tokyo along for the ride this time, it was fairly bustling. 😎

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)