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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
Oh My God, the RSS Feed Actually Works!
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.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
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.
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Daily Blah for... Monday, February 28, 2005
Lines on the tearing down of Christo's Central Park Art Project
So, Farewell Then, The Gates.
There were 7,503 of you,
each about as tall as two Michael Jordans.
You were saffron, the same color as the police
warning sign thingies blocking traffic on park roads.
And when you blew softly in the bitter wind
It felt uncomfortably like looking up a giant's skirt.
Still, we had lots of laughs throwing snowballs
over you, and messing with noodles
of orange foam which Bill brought.
Bill says he got his art on
7,503 times. Orange had become
the new black. Someone stuck
a line of Cheetos in the snow
next to you around 103rd St.
And my, ain't there a lotta
people in the Park for February.
You were free, and shuttlebuses
around you cost $20 a ride.
Yes, you were our (21-)million dollar baby
and not at all a vanity project.
"Look, there he is! there's Christo!"
That is what someone
next to me screamed as your
daddy and mommy were
driven past us
in a black limo.
(Apologies to E.J. Thribb)
Daily Blah for... Friday, February 25, 2005
iPod=Prozac?
A Washington Post columnist says iPods are the new antidepressants: "You have the ability to precisely program your aural environment, and thus program your mood. 'I do see it as a way to self-medicate,' said Scott Johnson, a professor of psychology at New York University who studies cognition and perception."
Well, for sure. Just as music has always been used as an emotion-enhancer. Just as I pick and choose my playlists based on my mood in any given moment. The writer thinks that since we have our fingers directly on our entire music collection for the first time in history, we are therefore self-medicating with unprecedented success and frequency. Fair enough.
But how much of this is self-medicating, and how much creativity-stimulating? If you're listening in shuffle mode, I'd say it's the latter. Everyone I know who owns an iPod has many wonderful example of synchronicity: a song that makes them think of someone they haven't called in ages whom they then proceed to call; two or more songs following each other that seem to be conducting a dialogue. Inspirations like that. So maybe we're not just responding to our moods' needs. Maybe we're creating them, too.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 24, 2005
HST: No Blogfather
The Raw Story's D.A. Blyer offers some pretty compelling reasons why bloggers should not go claiming the late, great Doctor Gonzo as their progenitor. For one thing, Hunter saw himself as a direct descendent of the Beats, and that meant putting in some hard literary work: "Thompson realized that Kerouac’s ability to write spontaneously with such breathtaking results emerged only after the On the Road author spent years immersing himself in the most challenging world literature of the 19th and early 20th century, while also spending countless nights scribbling his thoughts onto paper, then burning it in the morning (not posting it on a public bulletin board for the world to see)."
Ouch! Take that, self-important pyjama-wearing blowhards! Maybe you should try writing some of your entries down beforehand and burning the worst ones. The blogosphere will certainly be no worse off. Nor will the public's perception of it. And we might all be able to get to the good stuff a little faster.
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 21, 2005
First, Kill All The Lawyers? Good Luck.
There are now 1,084,504 of the bastards practicing in the US, 200,000 in California alone, according to the latest count.. At this rate, we're going to have to pay the firing squads overtime for a couple of years to finish the job.
In all seriousness, the problem is not simply that we have too many lawyers. The problem, as one expert says in the story, is that we are "overlawyered and underrepresented."
Parting Shots
The very last column Hunter wrote -- Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray -- ran just last week on ESPN.com. The good Doctor seems in fine fettle, calling Murray at three in the morning to suggest the two of them start a new sport where the aim is to shoot your opponent's golf ball out of the air. He says he's already been playing it on his Colorado estate with his friend, the local Sherrif. It's easy to imagine someone at the outset of such a novel and engrossing pursuit would be flush with the pride of invention; you wouldn't picture them proceeding to take their own life with one of the tools of the game.
I was taken by his use of this Herman Melville quote: "Genius round the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." Today that circle of true genius is united in shock and grief.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, February 20, 2005
Gonzo to the Grave
That esteemed Doctor of Journalism, dean of all of us who aspire to capture the bad craziness of this beautiful country in prose, and one of my close personal heroes, Hunter S Thompson, shot himself in the head tonight. He was 67. No further details have been released. Maybe he didn't want to die in a hospital bed. Maybe he was a big Hemmingway fan. Maybe he couldn't stand the Doonesbury rip-off any longer (and what will happen to Uncle Duke now?) Maybe he wanted to cling to life just long enough to see W. admit to smoking dope (and in such a crowningly hypocritical way -- "do as I say, kids, not as I did" -- that no one could appreciate it like Hunter). "I've seen it all now," he may well have said. "Only one thing left to experience. I wonder if there will be time to taste the cordite?"
Regardless of his reasoning -- unpredictable and self-reliant to the end -- it is done now. Let us all hoist giant bottles of tequila in his honor tonight.
George W Bush, Media Critic
A mostly overlooked detail from the flurry of media attention over the New York Times' bombshell Bush tapes expose: "While he talked of certain reporters as 'pro-Bush' and commented favorably on some publications (U.S. News & World Report is 'halfway decent,' but Time magazine is 'awful'), he vented frequently about what he considered the liberal bias and invasiveness of the news media in general."
I could say something like, exsqueeze me? U.S. Snooze is halfway decent? But I'll just comfort myself with the knowledge that the same man who believed WMD would be found in Iraq and believed Saddam responsible for 9/11 also believed my magazine to be awful. In fact, we ought to run such a choice quote as a blurb on the cover, the same way Gary Trudeau does for the front of Doonesbury collections.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, February 19, 2005
Kiss That Head
Bush likes bald scalps. Is there a connection to the Jeff Gannon scandal here?
Daily Blah for... Friday, February 18, 2005
No, I Haven't Died ...
... I've just been extraordinarily busy this last week. Attended the DEMO Conference in Phoenix; went to see Frank Lloyd Wright's home and Biosphere 2 while I was in the neighborhood. Spent a full day at design firm IDEO yesterday. Now I'm off to New York for the weekend to see the new Christo project in Central Park, The Gates (have resolved, in foolhardy manner, to walk all 23 miles of it). Maybe you'll get a blog from me there, but honestly, I wouldn't expect anything before Monday. Later.
Daily Blah for... Friday, February 11, 2005
Wikipedians and the Geek Set
My new homepage, in at number one with a bullet: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. That plus the Google bar ensures I've got multiple types of search engine at my fingertips. That it replaced a Google page, Google News, as my homepage is something of an irony, since it was my googling for encyclopedia-type pages that turned me on to Wikipedia.
Plus it's a free, open-source encyclopedia anyone can help research. Currently, Wikipedians are actively researching 472,077 entries. The history of open source would lead us to believe this number will increase exponentially and that each article will become more and more solid as more and more people in the know improve upon the truth level of the previous effort.
Soon Wikipedia will become the most researched encyclopedia in the world, if it isn't already. No, of course that won't by itself make it the best encyclopedia, but the open source, community-written idea will at least make it the most interesting for the geek set. And the geek set, if you haven't noticed, is the one that's quietly changing the world in the background, in the shadows, all the time. One of us. One of us.
UPDATE: Mere hours after I wrote that, Google announced it would host the Wikipedia project on its servers.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Sci-Fi: The No-Cash Zone
I've been bashing away at a novel for some years now -- call it science fiction, if you're the pigeon-holing type -- and have churned out new beginning after new beginning with all the revisionism of a pathological perfectionist. It's a labor of love, I tell my friends and would-be readers who want to beat me up every time I tell them I've gone back to the start. If I have only one novel in me, I want to get it right, and besides, I have a pretty good career already and I'm not doing this for the money. Good thing too: according to this survey of sci-fi writers, the average advance for a first-time novel comes out at a piddling $5,000. Even seasoned pros get an average of $12,500 a book; barely enough to keep them in correction fluid.
Get Smart
The Smart Car is coming to California, and I'm seriously tempted. The biggest selling point for me: you can actually park it perpendicular to the curb. Imagine! No more parallel parking! Grabbing all those spots the other drivers can't fit into! They say you're a true San Franciscan when you cry at the sight of a good parking spot; the Smart will give The City more reason to weep tears of joy.
If You Like Pina Coladas ...
Remember that classic piece of 70's cheese, Escape (the Pina Colada Song)? The tale it told, if you've had the song surgically erased from your brain, was of a man disillusioned with his wife who found love through a personal ad, only to discover that his new paramour was his wife. Well, it just happened for real -- in Jordan, of all places, via the Internet. Except the couple confessed a shared passion for Islam instead of pina coladas, and presumably a distaste for heathens and infidels rather than health food and yoga.
The unmasking didn't go so well, either, according to the AFP: "Upon seeing Sanaa-alias-Jamila, Bakr-alias-Adnan turned white and screamed at the top of his lungs: 'You are divorced, divorced, divorced' -- the traditional manner of officially ending a marriage in Islam."
Well, it makes a change from "ah, it's you."
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Hypocrisy: Nobody Does It Better ...
I love this quote from GOP consultant Dan Schnur on Howard Dean's ascendancy to the DNC chairmanship: "This is a mistake. It's always a mistake for either party to allow its most ideological members to drive their decision-making.''
After all that has happened in his party, could Schnur have possibly been saying that with a straight face? Or maybe, just maybe, this is a rare peek behind the curtain of conservative strategy: talk the talk, and walk enough of the walk to get your base fired up, but don't really believe it yourself. Keep a cool strategic head. All that guff about a gay marriage amendment is a smokescreen behind which you can carry out all manner of tax cutting and Iraq invading. And Dean's handicap is that he actually believes what he's talking about; his passion is genuine. Is that it?
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 07, 2005
Of Sleep and Shrinkage
Well, this is exactly what I wanted to read while jet-lagged and preparing to pop melatonin at midnight in order to reset my circadian rhythm (body clock to the rest of us). UC Berkeley saysdoses of the sleep hormone have been caught shrinking the testes of birds. Granted, I'm not in possession of such avian appendages, but it's enough to make any red-blooded male think twice before taking the stuff. Perhaps British pharmacists -- who have for many years been mysteriously unable to stock melatonin, much to the chagrin of travelers like me -- had the right idea all along.
Back, But Not Ready For Action
Home again. Soft bed nice after ten hours on plane. Short sentences. Jet lag. Must stay awake or it gets worse.
Week in England like workout for the emotions. Family, dear friends, the achingly familiar environment. Newborn second cousin gripping my little finger. Everything over there delightful in so small a dose -- even slate-grey sky, conventional cynicism, Chelsea on top of league. Suitcase stuffed with memories extracted from loft. Heart full to overflowing. Ears echoing with melancholy London melody of David Gray's Babylon. Mind musing on well-worn, more-true-than-ever T.S. Eliot quote:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
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