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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... Friday, April 29, 2005
One Small Sneeze For Man
Dammit, I'm going to have to take Claratin to the moon. My dust allergies have hampered me for about as long as I've had dreams of a future lunar expedition, so it was really disheartening to read this Wired News piece on how big of a problem dust is on the surface of the moon -- and how an Apollo 17 astronaut had a severe allergic reaction. He doesn't tell us what it was like to sneeze inside an astronaut helmet, and I don't blame him. That's the kind of image you really want to burn out of your memory. Knowing my luck, next they'll discover cats hiding in moon craters. (There, I fulfilled my Friday catblogging duties ...)
The Verdict: Mostly Harmless?
At last, after armies of fanboys and the hip-oise condemned early screenings of the movie for failing to live up to the Douglas Adams legacy, real movie critics -- who don't give a damn about how faithful it is to the book or the radio series -- are starting to weigh in. And so today we have a positive review for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the New York Times. This is very encouraging, as I will be forced to see it before long and was preparing myself for a disappointment the size of a planet. Granted, I am very attached to the original TV show, and I'm not sure I will ever feel good about Mos Def as Ford Prefect or Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox. But here's the thing about Hitchhiker's -- it was always evolving. That was the idea. "I see it as an homage to David Deutsch's 'many universes' theory," Adams told me in the one interview I was lucky enough to do with him before his death. The book, the radio series, the TV show, they all go off in different plot directions. The dialogue changes, expands, contracts. The humor evolves. Dogmatic adherence to a single text dissolves. And the fact that you don't necessarily need a Babel Fish to enjoy all the different versions -- yes, even the Disney version -- in their own way ... well, let's just say there's hope for the third most intelligent species on this planet yet.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 28, 2005
I love how people are calling it the Google satellite now
Hey, kids! Want to know just how much crap the US Air Force has bombed out of America's emptiest parts? Google satellite afficionados with too much time on their hands can point you in the right direction.
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 22, 2005
Free Music
Not like you really need any more MP3s, but here are the top 200 freebie downloads on Amazon.com. Enjoy.
Tale of the Tiger
My preview of the new Apple OS, Tiger, is up online. Apple let me sit down with Tiger for an hour or so, under monitored conditions -- they're very wary about giving any press a look before next week, when it comes out. Still, I'm absolutely in love with Tiger and can't wait to install it. So long, irritating inability to find things.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 14, 2005
Genetic Genealogy
National Geographic has got a fantastic scheme going wherein you send them a swab of DNA and they tell you the route your ancestors took out of Africa. All for a measly $100. I'll certainly give it a whirl, and I'll let you know the results. Is this the start of genome genealogy, I wonder? Is the family tree hunter in the public records office an endangered species?
Comics Made Easy
I absolutely adore this program, Comic Life. It makes creating comics from your photo library -- indeed, from any image source -- ridiculously easy. I downloaded the free trial, booted it up, and it had already located my iPhoto library. I dragged a couple of photos from my childhood onto the page, slapped on some captions and word balloons, and had created a comic strip within five minutes. Look for a sample to be posted here shortly.
Where It's At (two iPods and a microphone)
A German hardware company called Numark is working on a device I've long lusted after in my imagination: an iPod DJ mixer with space for two devices. Alas, it's nowhere near ready, but expect to see me scratching the trackwheel at a club near you around 2007 (the same year India gets to the moon).
Buy Me To The Moon
In other real estate news, researchers have pinned down the ideal spot for a moon base -- in constant sunshine, and a short moon rover drive away from a good source of ice. Unparalleled views of Earth and 45 miles of living space make this historic asteroid crater a hot location -- well, hot for the moon (minus 85 degrees Farenheit). With India, China and Europe all planning lunar jaunts in the next decade, buy now and beat the crowds!
Back to Black Rock
The new Burning Man Map is up, and marks a radical departure in town planning for the temporary city of Black Rock. Instead of having the theme camps clustered around the center circle, they've been relocated along the main avenues -- meaning there won't be such a elbow-bashing rush for the prime real-estate next to theme camps, because prime real estate is now pretty much everywhere. If only high-price San Francisco could reorganize itself along the same lines.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 10, 2005
The Llama Song
Here, month before your cubiclemates get it, is the latest stupid Internet music video: The Llama Song. Daily Blah confidently predicts that you will shoot yourself sometime in late July, shortly after the fifty-seventh time you hear this played somewhere in your office.
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 08, 2005
Today's Blah
And another idea I had was to simply write one blog per day, summarizing the major news as I see it, and throwing ellipses around as liberally as the great Herb Caen. So here goes: The Pope weighed the possibility of quitting in 2000, according to his will -- but in a bit of tortured logic from the infallible one, decided that surviving his assassination attempt in 1981 meant the choice was no longer his ... Bush's poll numbers continue to plummet like an obese skydiver with a faulty ripcord ... Tom DeLay throws another spitball of fury at the Federal judiciary, which ought to help smooth things over when he's hauled up in court himself ... Not content with the success of the PSP, Sony has been granted a patent to beam games directly into your brain ... Not content with regulating feeding tubes, Florida legislators move to regulate online dating ... A British grandmother whose secret ingredient for soups and casseroles was cannabis has been spared a jail sentence ... A duck has built a nest at the entrance to the Treasury Department and is now receiving protection from Treasury's own Secret Service, long feared as a sign of a coming financial apocalypse -- when the dollar collapses, we'll all be building our nests out of mulch ... as for $2 bills, you might as well use them to line your nest -- a Best Buy customer was arrested for using them to pay his bill ...
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Page One (Again)
Every two months or so, I hit upon a brilliant new idea for what to do with this albatross of a blog – which often seems purposeless, a machine I set in motion that I have no idea how to stop, with no reason for its existence other than its existence. The ideas tend to be short-lived (Daily Blah as a chronicle of UK-US relations, anyone?) and the Blah settles back into that vague mish-mash of spontaneous news commentary and Christmas-card-letter life updates we all know and love. But a couple of days ago, my housemate and dear friend Emily sparked a brilliant idea when she picked up a Tom Robbins book I'd just bought (this house is an Aladdin's cave of books I've either just bought or have been meaning to read), read the first page, and instantly declared that it was "not as good" as his previous works, being "too contrived." Such snap judgment always makes me laugh, and I declared I'd love to see a book review website where the reviewer only ever read the first page of each title and extrapolated from there. "For the short of time, by the short of time" would be the tagline.
A couple of months ago I devoured Nick Hornby's latest work, The Polysyllabic Spree, a collection of columns from the San Francisco-based literary magazine The Believer. Hornby lists, with refreshing and thoroughly readable honesty, the books he's bought in the last month alongside a much shorter list, the books he's actually read. It's only a small step from The Polysyllabic Spree to a review organ that proudly wears its lack of depth as a virtue. I wouldn't even need to buy the books – it's not like I need an excuse, but the first page of practically everything is available as an extract on Amazon. I haven't decided whether it makes more sense to do such reviews in a paragraph, or bang on about the first page for longer than the length of the first page. But darlings, think of the infamy! The knowing postmodern wink at an ever-more digested culture! The Amazon sell-through program possibilities!
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 05, 2005
Out Of Body Experience
Google Maps just added satellite imagery from Keyhole software, and I'm transfixed. I've loved Google Maps ever since its inception -- at first I assumed it was just going to be a cheap knock-off of Mapquest, but it's amazing the difference a bit of 3-D shading makes. Having giant pointers loom above the city, marking your start point and destination, makes all the difference for someone like me, whose life revolves around going to random places on the spur of the moment -- and who cannot hold more than one direction in his head for the life of him. Tell me how to get somewhere and I'll nod politely and vacantly. Show me a blue line on a map, tickle my sense of spatial awareness, and in my head I'm already there. This, perhaps, is the answer to the age-old mystery of why men don't like to ask for directions. We simply can't remember them.
I've seen the Keyhole satellite stuff before, having done a story on Earthviewer long before the company was snapped up by the ever-hungry Google. But Larry and Sergey's boffins have done an excellent job of integrating and streaming the pictures faster than I've ever seen before. I love scrolling around the map, following the 101 up into golden Marin and down through its hellish journey across the peninsula. The familiar seen from an unfamiliar angle; isn't that how poets enliven the view of the world? (At least, that's what Robin Williams told me while standing on a desk in Dead Poet's Society). Regardless, there is something profound about viewing your route via satellite before driving it, imposing a whole new layer of riotous color and heaven-bound order on our quotidian commutes. You enhance your spatial awareness. You have an out-of-body experience. And miraculously, you're still sober enough to drive.
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 04, 2005
Call it 'Sporadic Blah'
You are such a patient readership. Thanks for waiting. Here's another one of those updates: I spent much of the last two weeks showing my sister around San Francisco. We went to the Robo Games at SF State and watched robots beat the crap out of each other. Threw a fabulous brunch party on Easter Sunday that ended up more of a brunch-dinner, which I suppose you'd call "brinner." If you had such a shindig at Christmas, would it be Yule Brinner? [Sound of tumbleweed blowing through ghost town] I would like to apologize unreservedly to my overly patient readers for the preceding pun and any pain it may have caused.
I interviewed Gavin Newsom for the third time, and drank more of his Kool-Aid. I'm increasingly convinced that this man is the only Democrat in America with any backbone, and that his hero-worship of RFK is not just for show. Nor is it an entirely inappropriate comparison. Oh! And I saw "Wizard People, Dear Reader." It's a screamingly funny monologue that, if you're quick-witted, you can find, download, burn to CD, and play as an alternate soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. The narrator, one drawls out his twisted, profane version of the Potter legend in a tone that sounds something like William S Burroughs, had Burroughs been born in Queens and snorted way too much coke. I don't know whether the combined forces of Warner and Rowling are on the warpath here, or whether they're laughing as hard as I was, but it would really be in their financial interest to let the poor guy be. After all, you have to go rent or buy the Potter movie to have the full Wizard Reader experience -- and I thought wild horses would not drag me back to that film again.
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