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Daily Blah for... Monday, June 24, 2002
Please Remain on the Line, and a Technician Will be With You Shortly
I have no idea how many of you are reading this. I do know a mere 16 people have been able to access the site since yesterday. To these loyal readers I say: well done. The strangest things are happening to my website, and I can't even get in half the time. I'm no expert in such things, but it looks like a name server problem. How do I know? Sometimes when I type in the name, Explorer will try to direct me to "dailyblah.com.net." Hmmm. Someone's asleep at the switch at my hosting service, methinks. Someone's certainly asleep at the phone, as I haven't been able to get through all day. And now I take my revenge: Hey America! Stop using nomonthlyfees.com as a hosting service! It sucks! Heh heh heh. Of course, such a revenge will only work if I manage to get the site online again. And if I do, this is the first thing the technician on the other end of the phone will see. It should be a nice test of how far free speech and commerce can intersect.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, June 23, 2002
What's Going On?
Well, this is very strange. The Blah loads fine half the time on my Windows PC running Explorer, and the other half of the time it sprays unloaded images around the place like an untrained puppy. On my Mac OS 9 machine running Netscape, it works beautifully -- if I type in dailyblah.com. If I type in www.dailyblah.com, my Mac claims the website doesn't exist. (Don't you just hate it when computers are so arrogantly existential?) This is much too tangled a problem for me to sort out on my own. Any of you techie types have an idea?
Do Not Adjust Your Set
Technical difficulties are temporary. A number of readers have complained that the Blah has gone down altogether. Myself, I'm seeing the page without most of the images. Please stand by while I sort this out.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, June 19, 2002
The Rapport on 'Report'
As a committed Philip K. Dick fan, I'm looking forward to Friday's release of the Spielberg spectacular Minority Report almost as much as Thursday night's England-Brazil showdown. And the early buzz is that this is the best translation yet of any Dick story to the screen -- better than Total Recall, better even than Blade Runner. Report is getting a phenomenal 94% fresh rating on Rottentomatoes.com, the only website that matters when it comes to movie reviews. Why? Because it lists and links to all the other movie reviews, decides whether each one constitutes a fresh or a rotten tomato, then adds them all up in a percentage figure. I have found it to be a highly accurate guide to the quality of a film: I'm practically guaranteed a miserable couple of hours if the flick is less than 50% fresh.
Such precognition is never to be entirely relied upon, of course (that being the case in Minority Report's dystopian and timely future Washington D.C., whose residents are arrested for crimes they have not yet committed). Many of the heavyweight reviewers have yet to chime in. And this is Spielberg, after all, who has demonstrated an inclination in recent years to spin gold into sentimental mush: I'm still not sure whether to forgive him for what he did to Kubrick's last pet project, A.I. Tom Cruise, meanwhile, hasn't made a good movie since Magnolia. We'll find out in a few days whether both deserve absolution.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, June 18, 2002
What Part of 'Watch the World Cup' Don't You Understand?
I was never much of a soccer fan when I grew up in England. I'm still not much of a soccer fan. I never follow club football. Nominally I support Liverpool and Newcastle, but couldn't give you more than a handful of current players' names. So it is something of a surprise to find myself adopting the role of soccer missionary, a one-man proselytizing force amongst the only tribe on Earth that hasn't caught this religion. I'm constantly haranguing my American friends: Look! This is something special! Your team has just qualified for the quarter finals of the World Cup, the most-watched sporting event in the world, for the first time ever! Their response, more often than not, is desperately feigned interest. They can accept what I'm saying on an intellectual level. They comprehend the political correctness of it. But they don't feel it. Not like back home where, my father tells me, the flag of St. George is suddenly flying on every street, cities are deserted at match time, and the upcoming match against Brazil -- one of the most anticipated in the country's history -- dominates the national conversation. By contrast, I have not heard anyone around me mention the upcoming US v Germany fixture -- easily the most anticipated in this country's history -- more than once.
Why not, I keep asking myself? What will it take? A societal shift, a general nationwide agreement to go soccer crazy? A hundred million watercooler chats? The minority soccer fans marching on Washington, carrying banners, singing We Shall Overcome? Congressional legislation? A Constitutional Amendment asserting that soccer is the global sport and, as such, is worth taking seriously?
Perhaps. But phase one is my fellow members of the media abandoning certain prejudices that I am amazed to find they still cling to: that soccer is a kid's game, that grown-ups pick up the ball and run headlong into men with large chunks of metal on their bodies, that a game isn't a game unless there's a natural break for beer or the bathroom every five minutes. Some American journalists, like our very own Bill Saporito, understand this very well. Then there are others, like our very own Joel Stein, who ruin the advances made by people like Bill by trotting out the same tired old soccer jokes. I know Joel, and I know he didn't mean half the things he wrote in last week's essay -- he rarely does, he's that kind of gadfly writer who will do anything for a gag, that's just his shtick, he's a nice person in real life -- but most of our readers aren't quite so postmodern. Repeat the prejudice, and you make it easier for people not to tune in and actually catch more than five minutes of the action. Henry Kissenger, a major soccer fan, once compared the game favorably to chess. There are all these wonderful patterns and strategies going on; you just need to invest the time to be able to see them.
Last week I got irked at a San Francisco Chronicle reporter called Peter Hartlaub who wrote a passing remark about "soccer's idiotic 'no-hands' rule." I fired off an e-mail: "A little strong, n'est-ce pas? A little judgemental? A little missing-the-point-ish? It's a sport. You might as well write 'marathon running's idiotic can't-use-a-bicycle rule,' or 'baseball's idiotic the-pitcher-can't-use-a-rocket-launcher rule.' " His response: "Dude, what's your problem? Are you trying to bait me into some kind of flame war so you can put it on your blog? I'm not biting." Shame, really. A flame war was not my intention, but I'd love to get some dialog going, to stir things up, to make reporters reexamine the old prejudices. So come on, guys. You roll your eyes at the mention of the World Cup? You come talk to me. I may not be its most knowledgeable defender or its most eloquent, but someone has to stand up and tell America when it's missing out.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, June 13, 2002
I'll Think of a Headline Later
If procrastination were an Olympic sport -- and no doubt it will be if the IOC ever gets round to considering it -- I'd be a gold medal contender. Example: two weeks ago I bought a tome called the Procrastinator's Handbook, roughly five years after I first saw it. I read about half of the first chapter, put it down, and haven't been able to pick it up since. Tonight I'm supposed to be writing a story for next week's issue, but there's no precise deadline. My editor needs it in the morning, that's all. All my reporting, my research, my interviews are done. I need only motivate myself to write the lead, and all will follow. But do I? No. I make a cup of tea. Answer a few non-urgent e-mails. Look at a science fiction potboiler. Do my laundry. Flick through a few magazines. Watch an old West Wing episode on TiVo. Microwave some glazed chicken risotto. Realize I'm procrastinating. Vaguely recall an excellent J.B. Priestley essay on procrastination, in which he listed a dozen or so things he routinely did to avoid writing. Try looking for it on the Web. Fail to find it, but do glance at his bibliography. It is jaw-droppingly long. Wonder if he wasn't having us on.
That brings us up to the Daily Blah entry procrastination technique. Well, I tell myself, at least I'm writing. And passing on salient and amusing tidbits to thousands of readers, like: did you know the website procrastination.org hasn't been updated since Memorial Day? That an estimated 90% of college students procrastinate? I certainly did. Maybe I'm a big-shot journalist still trapped inside a college student's attention span. Maybe I should just sit down and write this bloody first sentence. That's certainly something to ponder over a cup of tea. Mmmm. Tea.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, June 12, 2002
Walking in the War of the Worlds
When I was back there in journalism school, I spent an idle winter weekend messing around in the radio lab that resulted in a rather unusual mix: Orson Welles' War of the Worlds with Walking in the Air as played by pianist George Winston. The mix file itself was lost soon after, but after listening carefully to the surviving tape, using a program called Sound Forge, I was able to reconstruct it. To hear the meager three-minute result -- and I do hope this works -- click here. As much of a hack job as it is, I think there's something about it that suits the mood of these apocalyptic times.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Hey Everybody, Let's Strip!
One intriguing side-effect of the dirty bomb suspect being in custody is that health experts are filling the airwaves telling us to take off our clothes in the event of an attack.
Daily Blah for... Monday, June 10, 2002
Perchance to Dream
Just watched Richard Linklater's Waking Life a second time, on DVD, which I highly recommend to anyone in posession of gray matter between their ears. The concept (animation plus dreamlife plus philosophy) is pure genius, and the ultimate resolution (which I'm dying to talk about, so just see it, will you?) utterly sublime and wonderfully ambiguous. It is one of the greatest travesties of our time that this did not get an Oscar nod (and that Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius did).
Speaking of dreamlife (and sublime things), the World Cup could not be more exciting right now. I find it wonderful that both my homeland and my adopted homeland have equal points and equal chances of qualifying from their respective groups (each has only to get one more point, and each has only to play a team that is already booked on the plane back home). And to cap it all, the French are on the way out! Serves the country right for voting LePen in large numbers.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, June 09, 2002
Use Your Addiction
One of the requisites for these Personal Technology columns I keep writing is that my e-mail address be published at the end of it. Usually I don't mind; sometimes I'm grateful for the chance to correspond with readers one-on-one (at least, the ones that choose to write coherently in English; how do I reply, for example, to a French-speaking correspondent who began her e-mail thus: "Morney Mrs Kicked Chris TAYLOR"?) But for last week's column on 12 steps to combat e-mail addiction, printing my address just seemed like a bad idea. Not only would this give the very addicts I'd just been trying to reach an excuse to feed their addiction, but I just knew it would open the floodgates. Every reader who felt affected by e-mail addiction was going to want to share the fascinating details of their own condition. I was right. Never have I had so many mails on a single topic. Herewith, a selection of the responses:
"I was in history class the other day, when I heard my teacher say what I thought was 'You've got mail.' of course i was just being crazy, but my right hand automatically reached, as if for a mouse.. the whole class just refosed [sic] to stop laughing at me... I think I may need help..."
"I just wanted to let you know that your informative article has motivated me to quit this obsessive e-mailing. I'll be back in about ten minutes to see if you've answered...."
"If I get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water sometimes I come downstairs to check my email. My husband is stationed aboard a submarine and when he is on patrol it is even worse; the rare emails I get from him cause me to check almost 20 times a day."
"who has a habit? not me. i just checked mine 5 times today."
"I think it is offensive to categorize individuals who spend even an inordinate time on e-mail this way in print. My son jokes about my spending so much time on this computer, but that is off-the-record. To print such a label is to unfairly stigmatize such individuals ... perhaps some years ago, articles were written about the '12 Steps for Telephone Addicts.' "
"I was just about to go on a self-imposed two week moratorium when I read your article in Time. I enjoyed the article so much, I felt compelled to break the moratorium on the first day, and write you this email. So I'd like to suggest Step 13: When you're trying to cut down on email..DON'T..I repeat DON'T..read any email-related articles."
"that idea is soooooooooooo stupid," writes Musiclvr90@aol.com. "Who would want to stop checking there emails because some freaks try to make us stop??" After a few minutes of contemplation, the same correspondent composes a second missive: "By the way, you people suck!!"
Finally, a short and sweetly paradoxical note from Starpal44@aol.com:"i don't like e-mail of any kind."
Daily Blah for... Saturday, June 08, 2002
War Driving Along in my Electromobile / My Laptop Beside Me at the Wheel
After that last entry on Tuesday, I had enormously geeky fun on my first War Drive with my friends Chris and Anne. I haven't felt able to write about it until now because it was for a story in the issue of Time on newsstands Monday. I don't yet seem to be comfortable blogging about scenes that, however small a part they play, are part of a narrative that awaits publication. Anyway, War Driving is the art of going around town plucking public networks out of the air and piggybacking on their Internet connection. Carrying laptops with wireless cards, the passengers see how long they can surf the Web while the driver hunts for appropriate boulevards, the ones where all the geeks live, to cruise down. Even though there's nothing illegal about it -- according to no less a luminary than the FCC chairman -- I felt like the getaway driver in a virtual bank heist in a William Gibson novel. Like I said, enormously geeky fun.
Compounding the futuristic feeling was the fact that this was the inagural spin for my new electic hybrid car, the Prius. Not only is it the only genuine hybrid car on the American market -- using both gas and an electric motor for a better gas mileage and an easier conscience -- but I also found one in purple, and those who know me know how important that last detail is. It was a wrench letting go of my 2000 VW Bug, but it's really no good having a funky style if you're still wholly dependent on oil and despoiling the environment. So there we were, with a dashboard computer screen telling us when we were using gas and when we were using electricity, the iPod playing on a random selection of 2,000 MP3s, and two laptops surfing the web wirelessly using networks that hung in the air around town. "What," I asked my friends, "could be more 21st century than this?"
Anne answered: "Chris is building a firewall."
We all laughed. "I rest my case."
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, June 04, 2002
Break Out the Champagne!
My friend Rita tells me I've made MediaWeek's annual list of the nation's Top 30 technology journalists, coming in at a solid number 15. That's ahead of such luminaries as CNBC anchor Maria Bartoromo, aka the Money Honey; Wall Street Journal columnist and AOL biographer Kara Swisher; and that guy Stephen Levy from -- oh, what's the name of the magazine? Weaknews? Something like that.
Good thing that I had a chance to celebrate this afternoon at the swanky Clift Hotel, which was hosting one of the more epicurian events I've been invited to this year: a Dom Perignon champagne tasting, where the French chef in charge of deciding what is and isn't a vintage led us (and, simultaneously, audiences in Chicago and New York) through four of his finest creations. I've never been much of a wine snob, and my poorly developed palate is barely able to tell a Merlot from a Pinot, so I'll simply confine myself to saying that all four were nice and bubbly. Oh, and that even my barbarian nose was able to detect an aroma of crisp French pastry in the 1985 vintage. Delicious.
Daily Blah for... Monday, June 03, 2002
An Open Letter to India and Pakistan
TO: Prime Minister Vajpayee, New Delhi; General Musharraf, Islamabad
If you two don't stop carrying on this second, I'll knock your heads together. I'm sick of your endless whining. "He started it! He sent terrorists into my part of Kashmir!" "Well, he controls more of Kashmir than he should! Mo-ooom, he's on my side! Da-aad, he's looking at me!" Just don't make me stop this car, or I'll give you something to be sorry about.
Except you're not kids playing around in the back seat, are you? You're grown men playing with nuclear weapons. Obviously, you knuckleheads spent too much time thrilling to the exploits of the superpowers during the Cold War, as if you were reading superhero comics. But you weren't watching close enough. Even if we did neatly sidestep global annihilation -- and we did so more through good luck than diplomatic expertise -- the arms race bankrupted the Soviet state out of existence and lumbered the US with trillion-dollar deficits. Continue down this road, and either you kill tens of millions of your people and screw up the global environment and the global economy, or you drive hundreds of millions of your people further into resentful poverty, so much so that they might start showing up in New Dehli and Islamabad with pitchforks, torches and hanging rope. Great statesmanship, guys.
This is, of course, all about your stupid concepts of honor. Anyone who has ever experienced a barroom brawl in the making understands what is going on here. Kashmir, that tiny chunk of mountain range, that's just the spilled pint of beer, the girl, the pool match, the excuse, the scenery behind your egomaniacal macho posturing. Neither of you want to look like the one that backed down. And so you start vaguely hinting at the very large weapon in your back pocket. This weekend, both of your ambassadors -- who are meant to be the ones calming things down, for crying out loud, check the job description -- effectively said that any time you guys ruled out the use of nukes it was pure oratory, mere propoganda. Your military machines are keeping their options open. And you know how military men love big bombs. For Allah's and Krishna's sake, you imbeciles, stop them. Don't let them put this thing on an unstoppable timetable, like the European generals of World War I, beyond political intervention.
You may be a nationalist loon, Vajpayee -- and Musharraf, you're a dictator with the toppling of a democracy on your conscience -- but you're smarter than this. Read up on the medical implications of nuclear war. Neither of you will be safe. Nor will your families. If the dry text doesn't work, try some pictures of nuclear explosions. And when you're done, just remember: as in all barroom brawls, the one who walks away first will be judged the bigger man.
A British Subject Explains Dept.
Profound apologies to Kathy, a loyal weekly reader who has written three times in search of an answer, or at least an 8x10" glossy. Clearly the woman has the tenaciousness -- and the sarcastic sense of humor -- required by the Daily Blah. Here's her question:
I would highly appreciate it if you could tell us exactly what a "bank holiday" is. You are the only subject of the British Realm that I have any sort of contact with, so educate a poor parochial American. To me it sounds very...generic. Like your parliament got together at the beginning of the year and decided that there would be six holidays that year and then randomly chose the days on which they would fall. Aren't holidays supposed to celebrate something??
Why yes, Kathy, bank holidays do celebrate something. They celebrate the banks being shut. All the money in the country is locked away and forgotten about. Isn't that worth cracking open a six-pack for? Seriously, take a look at this website from Britain's Department of Trade and Industry, which lists the official name for each bank holiday. You'll see they each have a nominal excuse -- New Year, Easter, and so on. "Early May bank holiday" is the new name for May Day, a traditional worldwide worker's holiday which, with its vaguely socialist overtones, has largely been ignored by the US. Perhaps the weakest excuses from a hardworking American's perspective, however, are "spring" and "summer". But if you took a poll, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who does not agree these are Good Things. Shouldn't we all just take a couple of Mondays out of the year to truly appreciate the finer points of spring and summer, preferably in the park with a good book and an ice-cold beverage? In fact, today being Golden Jubilee bank holiday and tomorrow being spring bank holiday, I insist that all readers leave work immediately and go raise a glass to Her Majesty, who, as we all know, is a pretty nice girl.
Coping with E-mail addiction
Another week, another magazine column. This time it's my bang-up-to-date 12-step program for how to stop checking for messages and get your life back. If you think the comparison to compulsive gambling too sensationalist, I can tell you the doctor's full quote is "the brain gets the same hit from checking e-mail as it does from gambling, drugs and alcohol." In other words, since you've got a sufficient amount of reward from it once or twice -- a nice message, an old friend reappeared -- you're going to throw the dice again and again, even if you don't get the same reward every time. Reaching what behavioral psychologists call "extinction" -- the moment your brain realises it's not worth the effort to keep checking (or pulling the one-arm bandit lever, or having another drink) takes an incredible amount of time. We're hard-wired to get hooked on this stuff.
Speaking of obsession: if you're at all interested in the kind of World Cup garment-rending talk I spouted yesterday, you may like to know Time is running a World Cup weblog of its own, with contributions from ten of our most soccer-mad correspondents. You'll notice a slightly retooled version of my England commentary leading the pack. But you, dear Daily Blah reader, always see it here first.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, June 02, 2002
Beckham's Boys Stick to the Script
I know I'm breaking my own no-posting-on-Sunday rule, but sometimes you just have to vent. Those are the times I created Daily Blah for. And this is one of them. I'm mad about England's performance in its World Cup opener, where my country (right and wrong) threw away an early lead to draw 1-1. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that Sweden was probably our easiest opponents. We face Argentina and Nigeria next, God help us. Mostly I'm frustrated by the way England's World Cups always seem to go according to a script. The ending must always arrive in a heartbreakingly arbitrary manner (penalties in 1990 and 1998; the hand of God in 1986, and in 1982, the stupidity of having a second round consisting of leagues: we exited without losing a match). We must always face one of our betes noir, Argentina and Germany. And the opening match must always be a profound disappointment. I still remember the Sun's opinion page after we drew with Ireland 1-1 in the opening match of Italia 90: "Shame fills the heart of every right-thinking Englishman. How could our lads play like that? How could they let us down so badly?" It was funny not only in the face of the Sun's usual hypocritical turnaround four weeks later when we got through to the semifinals ("they couldn't play, sneered the critics ...") but because they could have written it before the match and gone home for an early night. Our lads always let us down at the start. It's almost like we England fans are willing it on ourselves. And, via the incredible pressure the British media puts on the team, perhaps we are. (For the Sun's reaction this time, click here.
Everything about the match seemed to follow previous scripts. England starts strong and score early from a David Beckham set-piece. They slow down towards half-time, sit on the lead and put eight or nine men behind the ball. They start making silly defensive errors, the kind you can't imagine happening if there were only four guys sitting back in the penalty area. One of these errors leads to a goal. Suddenly England are all over the place. There is no England, in fact. The team has gone, replaced by eleven terrified individuals. They look as if they've been plunked in Pamplona right before the charging of the bulls. Only David Seaman, that matador of a goalkeeper, keeps his cool and blocks a seemingly endless stream of strikers who have been given a free pass through the defense. His saves would be entertaining if it wasn't all so painful. It takes the team half an hour to regain its composure and cohesion, but the only shots they can muster are way off target.
I don't know why I bother watching sometimes. The minutes tick by agonizingly, and somehow it doesn't seem to make a difference which lucky England jersey I'm wearing. Besides, the script always says England squeaks through the opening group after pulling itself together in the closing match. It's the next round we'll go down in, or the one after that. The God of football evidently intends my team to suffer in the most drawn-out way possible.
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