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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
RSS feed coming soon!
Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
"The Blah is becoming a daily destination for me." - Richard Marsh, Playwright
"I like it, and I don't." - Fiona Hogg, Teacher
"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
Friends, Bloggers, Countrymen ... lend your ears to these people. I come not to bury them, but praise them.
Arik
Bill
Dan
Cole
Emily B
Emily G
Helena
Jee
Jewelz
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Robin
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Mr. West
My TIME articles
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Daily Blah for... Friday, December 14, 2001
Today's hot news from the UK. Note that Newcastle is about ten miles from my hometown. And that I have never taken a taxi in Newcastle, nor am I sure I want to now.
LONDON, Dec 14 (Reuters) - One in four Britons has had
sex in the car park after the office Christmas party,
according to a survey released on Friday, which said
more than 80 percent of British people admitted to
enjoying saucy in-car activity.
Women in Cheshire, northwest England, have sex in cars
most often, with 20 percent saying they do it once a
month or as often as possible, said the survey by MSN
Carview, the international network of automotive
websites on Microsoft’s MSN portal.
Meanwhile, 22 percent of women in Newcastle upon Tyne,
northeast England, said they had had sex in the back
of a taxi, MSN Carview said in a statement.
Ah, I do miss the sensitive and subtle headlines of Britain's Daily Mirror.
Okay, I know the premise of Blogs is that the writer is supposed to be passing cool links along (I also know readers come for the links and stay for the personal stuff). So I trawled through my bookmark list, and here's some of the lesser-known stuff. Enjoy. Or if you don't, don't come crying to me.
Daze of Our Lives -- Just what you always wanted. A daily humorous Victorian postcard.
Slow Wave -- Jesse Reklaw, one of my favorite cartoonists, draws nothing but people's dreams.
Sly Pup's slipup of the day -- a daily diet of bloopers. Good for an occasional laugh, or at least a few seconds' goofing off.
Uchronia -- I am hopelessly addicted to alternate history novels. Not because I think they're particularly well written -- Harry Turtledove is no Shakespeare -- but because I love regular history and I get chills down my spine at the thought of what might have been. Uchronia is the ultimate alternate history list; it condenses the premise of each novel into a few sentences. Ain't nothing but chills.
Got a long night ahead of me. I need to get this Blog column written, finish a file for one of our business writers in New York, do my expense report and finish up my latest chapter of fiction. Tomorrow night I leave for three days in New York, followed by a week and a half back in my home country, England, for Christmas. Then I return and go directly to Baja California for New Year's, without passing Go or collecting $200. In other words, I need to pack two suitcases tomorrow: one for New York and the UK, the other to give to friends who will take it to Baja for me (I'll follow at the end of the month in a rental car). I also need to book that rental car. Going on vacation always seems to be a taxing time for me. Give me a tough writing assignment and I'm in my element, but trying to remember to cancel the papers before I leave home? Watch me go to pieces.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, December 13, 2001
Today the Pentagon released its much-ballyhooed bin Laden videotape in which the supposed criminal mastermind shows his culpability for the September 11 bombings. It is almost beyond belief that, after being so careful for so long not to claim direct responsibility, he would brag about it in front of the first idiot wielding a video camera. It's like one of those movies in which the villain can't avoid explaining his entire plot to the hero thirty seconds before he carries it out. All we need now is for some secret agent to come charging into Tora Bora and sock UBL on the chin just as he's about to press the unfeasibly large red button on a remote control linked to his latest master weapon.
Seriously, I find the video something of a relief. There had always been that nagging suspicion that we didn't have enough evidence to convince skeptical nations of the UBL connection. Now all doubt has been erased, the court of world opinion can finally hand down its judgement.
Success! I forgot that you actually have to enter the link text (the word memepool) as well as the link itself (http://www.memepool.com). Well, it's been a long time since I had my HTML class in journalism school. It's also been a long time since I worked at Time.com and had to put in these href wotsits every day. Thank God for Blogger; I'd go insane working with HTML all the time.
Ah, I knew it wasn't going to be so easy. That link below to memepool.com isn't showing up. What now? I try fixing it with my rudimentary knowledge of html. No dice.
I feel a Personal Technology column coming on. It seems Time has not yet covered the burgeoning field of Blogs. Yet more and more these things are cropping up on the periphery of my life, mostly through friends who are addicted to the things both because they provide the best links, like memepool -- do yourself a favor and check it out if you haven't done so already. And also because these amateurish daily journals provide precisely the kind of what-are-they-thinking titillation that made Bridget Jones and reality TV such a success. You see, this article is practically writing itself.
Anyway, because a major part of the column is going to be how to create your own Blog, I thought I'd turn dailyblah.com -- a website name I bought over a year ago and hadn't figured out what to use for -- into my own personal Blog, thanks to the too-easy-for-words setup at Blogger.com. Thanks, guys. And thanks Emily for suggesting the Blogs piece in the first place. What, you didn't think I actually had my own ideas, did you?
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