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Daily Blah for... Saturday, March 30, 2002
The Klan and the Queen Mum
Okay, so I should have posted a "Daily Blah is on vacation" message, but you know how it is -- you bring your laptop along and seriously believe you´ll be able to blog every day you´re away. Heh. Anyway, here I am in sunny Murcia, an ancient town of about 200,000 people in the south of Spain where my sister lives and teaches English. My family has gathered here for Easter, and we just realized it´s our first foreign vacation together in thirteen years. Easter is a serious business here, and every day sees another half-dozen processions by thousands of seriously committed Catholics carrying tableaux of the crucifiction and wearing Ku Klux Klan-like outfits, right up to the pointy face-mask with two eyeholes. The Klan costumes here are more colorful than their American South counterparts -- we´ve had crimson, black, purple, green, you name it -- and the Klansmen often carry candy inside them, piled in large bulges like spare tires around their wastes, to give out to children along the parade route. The kids love it, naturally, but so do the old folks -- influenced, no doubt, by sweet memories of their youth.
Of course, these are medieval ceremonies that predate the Klan by about 500 years (these pointy-headed ones are known as Nazarenes). Just goes to show, the Southern bigots who formed the Klan in the first place had not an original bone in their bodies. They stole the burning cross thing from the Scots, too.
News reaches us tonight of the death of the Queen Mum. It´s an event so long anticipated that when I was working in British newspapers seven years ago, each one had a complete Queen Mother tribute magazine that was periodically updated and ready to print at a moment´s notice. Little did we suspect that two other royals -- Diana and Margaret -- would pop their clogs first. Now Britain´s best-loved great-grandma has joined them, I´m rather relieved to not be in the country. The national mourning mandated and thoroughly dress-rehearsed by the BBC, featuring black ties for all newscasters, endless rounds of tributes and somber music on radio, is bound to be in full effect by now. My parents return to the country on Wednesday, just in time for the state funeral. I don´t envy them.
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 22, 2002
Try? There is No Try. Only Dog.
Speaking of aliens, a source close to a galaxy far, far away sent me this picture from the slave's quarters of a large corporation somewhere in America. "I never noticed it until today," he wrote, "but Marjorie Knoller [new axis of evil inductee and now-convicted murderer in famous San Francisco dog-mauling trial] kinda reminds me of Yoda." And it's true. Look.
NB. The above is a satirical composite protected by the first amendment and a number of Supreme Court decisions. Yoda is the recognized copyright of Lucasfilm (TM). Marjorie Knoller is the recognized copyright of Satan Industries (TM). Said image is not meant to suggest the leader of the Jedi Council would ever breed (or have sex with) attack dogs, nor that he would be criminally negligent when encountering neighbors with said dog in the corridor of his Pacific Heights apartment building. In fact, he'd probably levitate the dog. Or hit it with his stick. Or call on the spirit of Ben Kenobi to spook the beast. And you know what? Diane Whipple would still be alive today. Ah, that we could all live on Dagobah.
Paging Dr. Who
My Journalism school comrade Arik Hesseldahl passed on this stunning piece of spam. I don't know whether to laugh or place a call to whatever city agency it is that has those men with the people-sized nets. Anyway, if any one of you readers is a time traveler and/or alien, please help this poor man. Before the state does. (And boy, is he going to be upset if aliens haven't discovered time travel yet).
If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human, I need your help!
My entire life and health have been altered and messed with. I have suffered
tremendously and am now dying! The type of time travel which I
think is most suited to my situation is having my consciousness
transferred to my younger self using either the carbon copy
replica method, or brain snapshot device. Please explain your
method and how safe it is. I am in great danger and need this
immediately.
If you are in possession of the said technology please send a
(SEPARATE) email to me at: IneedTimeTravel@aol.com
Thanks
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 20, 2002
Where's the Outrage?
Forgive me if I drop my satirical mask for a second, but isn't anyone a little concerned about the fact that one of our continents is falling apart? Why isn't this leading evening newscasts? I watched an NBC news "In Depth" report last night -- "In Depth" meaning it lasts five minutes instead of two. The report, amusingly titled "wacky weather," featured floods in Kentucky and a record warm winter in the north-east. I was waiting for the punchline, the payoff, the analysis of possible reasons why this might be happening. But nothing. Nada. I might as well have been watching the Weather Channel. "In Depth" indeed.
What's going on here? Has global warming become a dirty phrase? Are we in the news media so afraid of being labeled tree huggers that we daren't even give the idea credence? "We're running out of other explanations," said a scientist studying the disintegrating Antarctic ice shelf in today's New York Times piece, buried almost apologetically on a single column page 12. How on Earth did the right wing's approach -- Hear No Global Warming, See No Global Warming, Speak No Global Warming -- win this debate? Aren't conservatives supposed to be conserving things? Isn't Teddy Roosevelt turning in his grave? When will this stop being a left-wing issue? When New York is under water and tropical diseases roam the planet with impunity?
All Singing, All Dancing
I have enjoyed a special relationship with Sony's entertainment robot division since its early days, in that they've always let me play with the latest Aibo models. This new robot, however, costs more than a luxury car. I wonder if they'll let me take him home?
Regardless, it must be a happy day for the guys who started Aibo in the first place. Sony was a little skeptical when the robot dog appeared in their midst, and initially talked about it being a one-off product. Phenomenal sales success proved otherwise. Now we have human-like entertainment robots with natural movements; I have no doubt they'll be a smash too, even at this price. Low-cost mass-market versions will undoubtedly follow, as will more utilitarian 'bots. Wonder if the 20th century will be remembered as a brief interlude in history when most well-to-do people didn't have servants in the home?
Oh, and if a one-size-fits-all solution is just way too vulgar for you, try customizing your robot.
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 18, 2002
The Brand X Boom
Spent the weekend 7,000 ft above sea level in the town of Truckee near Lake Tahoe. My hearing improved drastically -- if perversely -- on the journey back, as we drove down to sea level. Return to find that Brand X, an affectionate term for our younger rival magazine, has effectively declared the dot-com bust over on its front cover. How nice. I'm sure all my out-of-work technology-trained friends will love to hear their unemployment is a fallacy. There's nothing wrong with Steven Levy's prose if you chop it up into parts: yes, there are lots of cool little start-ups noodling away at cool new ideas in Silicon Valley, just as there always are. It's putting these pieces together and declaring a new golden age of technology that smells a little suspect; in particular, handing Steve Wozniak the palm d'or before Wheels of Zeus has even left the runway is laying it on a little thick (just because Woz is working again does not mean there has been a tech rebound. It means he got bored with teaching).
Then there's the strange and somewhat heartless supposition that the dotcom crash was "the best thing that could happen to technology." This would be true if every dotcom that crashed was a gesundheit.com or a boo.com or a BBQ.com. But a lot of good companies got dragged down in the stampede; companies with valid business plans and unique services; Productopia.com, Reel.com, Adcritic.com. Many other good ideas were drowned as we heard the giant sucking sound of VC money heading south. If only Webvan had survived, we would have some interesting competition and innovation in online groceries; now Safeway.com and Albertsons.com stand astride the market like typical old-world companies, developing their services as slowly and expensively ($10 delivery?) as they like. And thousands and thousands of really smart, talented people were thrown out of work. Their contribution to the economy: zilch. Tell me again; how are things looking up in Silicon Valley if most the great engineers and project managers are fighting each other for an assistant manager position at Peet's Coffee? The layoffs still go on; if they didn't, F*ckedcompany would be out of business. Call it premature trendspotting: The incessant urge on the part of news organizations to notice something before everyone else does can sometimes lead to mirages, especially if one is afflicted with true believerism. I have no doubt that the turnaround will come, that the technological winter will end. But we're still in the season of gales and blizzards; it's a bit early for cover stories on the first daffodils buried under the snow. You're going to hurt your authority when the sun finally does shine.
Speaking of the legions of laid-off dotcommers, here is an excellent day-in-the-life flash animation.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 14, 2002
Dead On Time
Seeing as I'm feeling so rotten, it was an appropriate day to try out a bunch of life-expectancy calculators. According to this one, I "should die on Wednesday October 31, 2063 at 7:02:14 PM." It's nice to be so precise. I tried noting the date in my Palm, but that thing only goes as far as December 31 2031. Tchh! Oh well, it should be easy to remember: Halloween in my 90th year, just after the evening news. I bet it'll be those durn trick-or-treaters. By then kids will probably be armed with flamethrowers and flesh-eating maggot-masks in an attempt to scare an increasingly jaded populace. My fully-grown grandchildren will open the door and coo adoringly; I'll get the shock of my life.
At least, I hope I make it that far. The Longevity Game reckons I'll croak at a youthful 76. This site pegs me as a 78-year-old corpse. I do better on the Centenarian Quiz, which gives me until I'm 84.8, a tad above the national male average for my age. Typically, Microsoft gives me the worst result -- 75 -- and even though I've lost 35 lbs in the last year, it wants me to lose another 35. Whatever you say, Bill.
If Ears Had Walls
Ugh. That flu I had last week has mutated over the last five days into a debilitating deafness -- in other words, my eustachian tubes, the bits behind my eardrums, are blocked with fluid. You really wanted to know that, didn't you? Stay with me, because it gets interesting. I should point out that this is karmaic revenge: when my sister was hit with the same problem a month ago, my first reaction was the offhand remark: "ever heard of a Q-tip?" Now I'm paying the price, and I'm quite happy to do so; that was a rotten thing to say (and before you write in, yes, I know you're not supposed to use Q-tips in ears). Nevertheless, I've gone to war with the condition. And the most useful thing I've done was not my trip to the doctor; it was doing research on the Internet. Antibiotics and Allegra are all very well, and I'm sure they'll help me get through this thing in the long run. But you would not believe the things I've discovered. Most of it masquerades as advice to divers and air travelers (who often get afflicted with the same kind of muffling deafness, especially if they dive or fly with a head cold). Divers call it "middle ear squeeze," and there are a number of named maneuvers to get around it.
First off, there's the Valsalva maneuver, which in my uneducated state I called "pinching your nose, closing your mouth and blowing really hard." (How hard is it to come up with a maneuver to put your name to, anyway? That Heimlich idea was pretty simple, too.) I was doing Valsalvas before I knew what they were, but it turns out I was dead wrong. I was blowing too hard, thus closing the end of my tubes. The harder I blew, the tighter they shut. What I should have been doing was a modified Valsalva -- blow gently. Second is the Frenzel maneuver, which, since it was invented by a Luftwaffe pilot who aimed to more effectively dive-bomb the British, I'm a little wary of: "with nose, mouth and throat closed, use the tongue as a piston, driving the mass of the tongue backward." I haven't quite mastered this one yet. How do I close my throat, exactly? Then comes my favorite, the Toynbee maneuver: swallowing with nose pinched and mouth closed. This works inasmuch as every time I do it, I hear something moving. Finally, there are a couple of unnamed maneuvers (can I claim them?): open your jaw and swallow, which is much harder than it sounds, or raise your soft palate. I'd try that if I knew what the hell my soft palate was.
Of course, these are all just weapons in the wider war against Terror, or at least against whatever terror is in posession of my eustachians. I'm off to the top of Mount Tam, where I'll suck some Jolly Ranchers while doing a couple of Toynbees and a Frenzel.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Hysterics and History
So Mac has once again taken issue with a political posting of mine. This time, it's what he calls my "hysterical" reaction to the Pentagon's nuclear review. He prefers not to post his response, so I'll offer a link to this Slate article by Scott Shuger, one of my favorite Slate writers, which Mac says explains it better than he can. Shuger's argument boils down to this: nuclear deterrence works; the last 57 years have proved that. Best to have our deterrence in place in case these guys are developing or acquiring nukes. "If the world is now populated by more powerfully armed enemies of the United States," writes Shuger, "and if they now operate from more facilities that confound our Cold War nuclear structure, then trying to improve on that structure could be stabilizing." In other words, since saber-rattling worked with the Soviets, let's really make it work with the Libyans, the Syrians, the Iranians ...
All of which amounts to an oft-repeated mistake in military strategy: let's fight the next war on the lessons of the last one. In 1914 generals on both sides remembered that cavalry charges and bold troop movements had worked in the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1871, and so they tried them again. That led to the deaths of ten million people. In 1938, French and British politicians remembered that they should have left more time for diplomacy in 1914, and so they tried to appease Hitler at Munich. That led to the deaths of fifty million people. In 1962, American generals were mindful of the lessons of Munich when they saw Kruschev putting missiles into Cuba, and counseled Kennedy to invade the island immediately. We now know the Cuban missiles were already armed, so that action would have led to the deaths of four billion people. Thankfully Kennedy was reading Barbara Tuchman's classic The Guns of August, and wisely saw that the missile crisis bore more resemblence to 1914 than it did to 1938. He stopped short of invasion. You and I exist.
Now the Pentagon is asking us to believe we're in another Cold War situation. If we yell really hard about pointing missiles at Tripoli, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and Pyongyang then deterrence will be in effect. Trouble is, it's kind of hard to have nuclear deterrence with countries that don't yet have a proven nuclear capability. And threatening them makes it more likely that they will. We've just given these nuts the green light to accelerate their bomb programs. We've given the Iranian hardliners, for example, a great argument with which to shout down their moderate rivals. They now have a legitimate excuse to arm themselves: self-defense. It's human nature; if someone threatens you with a sword, you're going to start carrying a sword too. And then we end up with seven potential nuclear enemies instead of two. Five more fingers hovering over the button. How can anyone blithely assume Cold War-style deterrence works in those circumstances?
I remember playing a computer game in the mid-80's called Armageddon Man. It was set in 2032, and the premise was that there were now thirty nations with nuclear weapons. You played a U.N. diplomat who had to watch international political rhetoric, looking for clues that could help you prevent a first strike. It was impossible. The missiles were always flying inside a couple of years, and it usually started with one nation specifically targeting a couple of others. The threatened nations then built up their stockpiles, which caused neighboring countries to build up their stockpiles, and soon the whole nuclear world had itchy button fingers. Now, in 2002, we have seven declared nuclear powers. Two more (Israel and South Africa) are undeclared; Japan almost certainly has capability. That's ten. Imagine if Syria said it was developing the bomb to defend itself from the US; that would likely lead Israel to go public with its own nuclear capability, and God only knows what that would do to the Middle East. Egypt would probably have to go nuclear. So would the Saudis. That's 13. Throw in Libya, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and you've got 17. The world of Armageddon Man is not that far away.
In the messy and mutually suspicious climate of global politics, we have to assume that nuclear proliferation leads to war. Proliferation starts when a nation feels threatened. The Pentagon is proposing to make some of the world's least stable nations feel very threatened indeed. It thinks this is a sane move because it remembers facing down one superpower with mutual assured destruction. That is as dangerous as the generals of 1914 thinking it's 1871 all over again. Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it; but those who only remember recent history -- instead of the totality of human experience on Earth -- are just plain doomed.
By the way, the nuclear countdown clock now stands at seven minutes to midnight; that's the closest we've come to destruction since the end of the Cold War. (Last time I checked, it was at nine minutes to.)
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Egomania, Part 2
A friend at the nonprofit Electronic Freedom Foundation tells me an article of mine, The New Napsters, is quoted in the music industry's lawsuit against Morpheus. Actually, when it was first relayed through a mutual friend, telephone-style, the news came out thus: "Apparently you've been named in a lawsuit." This caused a split-second panic attack while I wondered who I'd libeled now and whether a journalist's salary would allow me a decent attorney. However, the fact that my words have been quoted by music industry lawyers in an attempt to prove their case -- see the footnote at the end of page 6 in this PDF document -- is no less disturbing. First of all, my article -- like at least three others I've written about Morpheus -- was very favorable towards the service, and pointed out that unlike Napster, there is no central server and thus no obvious legal way to shut the service down. Secondly, I'm generally sympathetic towards the EFF and its causes, such as defending Dmitry Sklyarov. And thirdly -- well -- I'm a user, man. I love Morpheus almost as much as I loved Napster. How ironic would it be if it were brought to its knees partly on the basis of something I wrote?
Closer examination suggests that the music industry's lawyers are reaching. The quote they took out of my piece was "the industry needs to listen to consumers: free and easy file-sharing is what they want." This is supposed to prove that Morpheus is being "pugnacious." Yeah, right. More like a simple statement of fact: nothing has become more clear in two years of digital music downloads. When will the record labels listen to this simple message? We don't want poor-quality streaming audio. We don't want $20-a-month licenses to listen to music. We don't want copy-protected files that sit on our hard drive for a limited time only. And we certainly don't want CDs that cost $18. But we will happily pay for MP3s, as long as they're easy to download and we can do anything we damn well want with them. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- if the record labels were to do this and charge something simple like $1 per song, they would make an absolute killing. Hollywood's battle against videotape in the early 80's proved this: there comes a point where you have to stop fighting massively successful new technology. Why not sooner rather than later?
And they'd save all that money they're wasting on paying lawyers to read my article, too.
The Nukes of hazard
Speaking of military intelligence, I'm still having nightmares about the Pentagon's decision to effectively extend Axis of Evil membership to Russia, China, Libya and Syria by henceforth figuring out new ways of dropping nukes on these countries. Who in the name of Dr. Strangelove is in charge of nuclear policy down at the DoD these days, General Buck Turgidson? As with Bush's original Axis of Evil declaration, you're left gasping "which countries? Why, exactly?" Perhaps this is just covering fire so that it won't actually look like such a lunatic move when we eventually invade Iraq. More likely, it is the most cynical and shameless attempt yet by the military-industrial complex to cash in on September 11. A multi-billion dollar boondoggle like missile defense and a trillion-dollar hike in the defense budget, it seems, wasn't enough for the big contracting firms. We must have more enemies! We must build more nukes! Oh, and we must explode them, too: the Pentagon report calls for the resumption of nuclear testing.
Never mind that we just signed a massive disarmament treaty with the Russians.
Never mind that this could upset the delicate balance of the Middle East, given that Syria just gave its tentative approval to the Saudi plan for peace with Israel.
Never mind that we have now infuriated the Chinese for no reason, or that we have an agreement not to target nukes at them.
Never mind that missile defense was supposed to take care of deterrence.
Never mind that we've signed countless treaties preventing us from testing nukes, or that all necessary testing can be done via a computer simulation, or that testing would send the whole world into a frenzy, possibly destabilize the Indian subcontinent and have a hazardous effect on the environment.
What can be done? There is no effective democratic supervization of the Pentagon. Congress is terrified of opposing it in an election year, during the War on Terror, or indeed ever. It makes my heart sink every time legislators vote the Pentagon more funds than it even asked for. Nothing can be done. We're being led back down the nuclear path -- not by some shadowy terrorist, but by even more shadowy fat cats and their four-star friends.
Sigh. Time to break open a fresh pack of mushroom-cloud mental images. Thought I was done with those back in '89.
Spam Junkie
Funny how I can still get correspondence regarding articles that are probably rotting away at the bottom of a thousand doctor's-office magazine piles by now. The curiously-named Femi Ademua sends me the following e-mail regarding a column I wrote nine months ago, Don't swallow the spam:
Hi Chris,
I read your complaint about spam in the TIME
magazine . It makes me wonder why someone avoids
something that provides comic relief.
It is my candid opinion that one needs some fun to
spice up ones life from time to time and a way of
getting this is through junk e-mail .
I'll be pretty glad to have you send some really
intresting spam to me.
Cheers !
Did I read that right? Is this a cruel hoax, or does this person simply not understand that the term "interesting spam" is possibly the most oxymoronic since "military intelligence"? In any case, if you want to take it at face value and are looking for someone to forward your junk to, Femi's address is femiademua@yahoo.com.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 07, 2002
Evil Porn Clowns
A fabulous article on privacy by my friend Dan, featuring my other friends Ouchy the Clown and iKandi, who just last Friday night was trying to pitch me a story on evil porn clowns. What do you think, mainstream America?
Bunch of Grapes
Ack! I'm sick as the proverbial dog. I think I've got one of those 24-hour bubonic plagues. You know, the one where you get pus-filled bubos under your armpits, you start smelling apples, and then your limbs fall off. No, really, I'm okay, thanks to the twin gods of DayQuil and NyQuil. Amazing -- I can be lying there hacking my guts out one second, all sweaty and aching like the lovelorn, emerging from some feverish night-long dream about helping Ghandi through a maze, then I mainline DayQuil and I'm suddenly able to write two articles. I wonder what they put in that stuff? Is it the polyethelene glycol? Or maybe the propylene glycol? Hell, man, just give me glycol. That's obviously the good stuff. Jam it in my veins, that's the ticket.
You know, say what you like about the great divisions of human society -- man and woman, rich and poor, black and white -- there is no greater lack of understanding than between the sick and the not-sick. Oh, sure, we offer our sympathies, sometimes a bunch of grapes, maybe a bowl of soup. But we don't really understand until we're there in the sickbed feeling like death in a microwave. We feel like the world should be offering us some special concessions: a parking spot here and there, maybe, or a promise to not talk quite so loud. Then things improve, the mucus packed in our ears clears like clouds after a storm, walking to the store for some OJ suddenly becomes less of a Herculean task, and we willingly forget. We join the ranks of the not-sick. And if our best friends or family members catch the same bug immediately after, we look at them as if to say: "I understand what you're saying, but I still have no idea how you could possibly be unable to play volleyball."
One suspects it's the same with a country in recession and a country not in recession. So now that Dr. Greenspan has pronounced us fit and well, does that mean we'll be able to throw our broad, healthy shoulders back and laugh heartily once more, offering our best sympathies to Germany and a bunch of grapes to Japan?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 05, 2002
Primary Day
All day they've been traipsing past my window in pitifully small numbers, the voters of San Francisco. I work at home, and while there are many advantages and disadvantages to that (plus: doing interviews in my boxer shorts. Minus: no water-cooler gossip), one thing it affords me every election day is a view of democracy at work. My neighbor across the tiny private street I live on turns her garage, normally filled with BMW motorbikes, into a polling station. This is an unusual thing for me. Back where I come from, polling usually takes place in schools, which get the day off. The poll workers get better shelter and facilities, too. It's pouring with rain and dark as hell tonight, but they're still there with their mini-heaters and picnic tables. And, it has to be said, there would be more voters than this. My neighbor, the one on the other side who works for the Canadian consulate, says it's possibly the lowest turn out in city history. It is, after all, only a primary, and most of the Democratic contests are decided, and there are only a few propositions, none of them very exciting.
I can't vote, being a foreign national, so I sit and spend much of the evening watching Ghandi -- you can flay me for this, but it's the first time I've seen it -- and wonder why it takes a force like oppression to make people care about their liberty. Take away the impression of tyranny and nobody much cares who the district attorney is or whether to vote yes or no on the clean water or safe neighborhood parks act. Yet tyranny and oppression come in different and subtle forms. Look at how Enron bought its way into government and effectively dictated energy policy (or did it? Prove me wrong, Mr. Cheney). The size of the turnouts in this country have stunned me ever since I arrived here six years ago. You simply can't rely on a minority of voters to make the right decision. That slow-walking collection of shivering San Franciscans outside my window is simply not enough to safeguard the true liberty and freedom of all the citizenry.
If it's primary day where you are, for crying out loud, go out and vote. I don't care how wet or cold it is. It's what I'd do if I had the chance. And it's what the Mahatma would have wanted.
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 04, 2002
You are Television Incarnate, Mr. Eisner
Every time I watch Network, number three in my personal all-time top ten movies list (right behind Citizen Kane and Casablanca), it seems to bear more relevance to the mainstream media world around me. This weekend's viewing was no exception. All of a sudden Howard Beale bears a remarkable similarity to Ted Koppel, another once-great anchorman now in danger of becoming a casualty in the ratings war.
The flap over Nightline, which ABC and its owner, Disney, desperately want to replace by tempting David Letterman away from CBS, lays bare all the entertainment-driven instincts that Paddy Chayefsky so effectively satirized and that give this industry a bad name. Television isn't the truth, as Beale said, but Koppel's show is the closest commercial television news has got to it. You can rely on Nightline not to deliver hype or puff pieces or soft focus-grouped stories on health and families. And yet Disney is concerned that Koppel doesn't attract enough 18-34 year olds, the population segment advertizers love because they have lots of disposable income and haven't yet formed loyalties to one brand or another.
Well, guess what, Michael Eisner. I'm an 18-34 year old, and I don't know a single 18-34 year old who isn't concerned about what's going on in the world today and doesn't benefit from knowing more about it. Letterman is all well and cool, but what the hell are you doing thinking of replacing Koppel at a time like this? In case you haven't noticed, we're at war. American G.I.s are dying out there. If I were you, I'd be promoting the hell out of Nightline right now. But hey, Mike, it's your call. If you want to replace Peter Jennings with Donald Duck or your entire news division with Leo DiCaprio, be my guest. Go mad. Which is, perhaps, what Koppel should do. Start ranting like a latter-day prophet against the hypocricies of our times. He'd get a 50 share, easy.
By the way, here's how to contact Disney or ABC news, if you feel like venting Beale-style. I want you to get up out of your chairs! I want you to drive to the Western Union office! I want you to send Disney a telegram! I want them to be wading knee-deep in telegrams!
See your Doctor for Details
Disturbed by the long list of side effects you see on TV drug commercials? Take Perplexa.
Blah on Blah
Imagine my surprise when Emily tells me that Daily Blah has been discovered by the (London) Sunday Times. Out of 947 new sites cropping up on Yahoo in a particular day, they picked their ten favorites, and Daily Blah was among the ten. This is interesting for two reasons. First of all I worked for the Sunday Times for one unhappy week in 1995, right out of college, and the experience was only notable for the fact that the Queen of the Living Dead appeared to be masquerading as my editor. Secondly, the Times' writer Robbie Hudson says "it is fun to track the author’s navel-gazing joy as his young site raced to the top of the weblog chart." A curious statement; I never thought of gazing at someone gazing at their navel as being fun (although the current rash of bestselling memoir writers called David -- that is, Eggers and Sedaris -- would seem to suggest so). If this is the case, then is gazing at someone gazing at someone gazing at their navel twice as fun? How about gazing at someone across the Atlantic gazing at me gazing at my navel, which is evidently what I'm doing now?
If self-obsession is going to get the Blah picked up in national newspapers, however, I'm more than happy to keep it going. Did I mention I was the number one search result when you type "Daily Blah" into Google and Yahoo? Not surprising, you might think. But now -- horror of horrors -- this site has taken the Google crown from me! How could it happen? I'll have to ask my pals Larry and Sergey, the most fun-loving geeks I know (I keep thinking about the time I saw them at Burning Man painted blue and green respectively) and Google's co-founders. All I remember from the Google story I wrote back in 2000 is that sites are rated according to how many other people are linking to them across the web. Which would mean either somone has removed links to me, or this Richard Taunt fellow has taken time off from making tacky PowerPoint pictures to campaign for extra links to his page. Well, I'm not taking it lying down. I ask you, gentle reader, which Blah would you rather see at the top of the Google result? If you want to help restore me to my rightful position, all you have to do is link to me from your website. No site is too small as far as Google is concerned. Every connection counts. (Pssst! Mac! Want to make a cool-looking Daily Blah link button for people to download?)
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