journal features

today we took our baby goldfish to market

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2024.06.22

It was time, once again, to take some baby goldfish to market. I'd say there were between forty and fifty this time, and they were among the largest we'd taken to the store. He gave us ¥50 for twenty-four of the fish, but deemed the rest too small to buy. Both of these came as a surprise, but we have to take what we can, this is a family activity, not a business, and if we don't have somewhere to take the fish then we're stuck with them. Anyway, we came away with ¥1,200 and managed to get out without spending anything. At this point I believe we've delivered somewhere around 225 of the things.

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