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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.
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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.
Arik
Bill
Dan
Cole
Emily B
Emily G
Helena
Jee
Jewelz
Kaila
Kathryn
Mac
Robin
Slim
Souris
Mr. West
My TIME articles
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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Burning Comics
I've been remiss in describing my Burning Man experience. Suffice to say it was my best year ever -- more art, great people, near perfect weather (I arrived after the only big dust storm) and, most importantly, I drank enough water to stay fully hydrated throughout and not go through any of those (albeit brief) moments of Playa crankiness.
Beyond that, it's always a little tricky to explain what the Black Rock City experience was like. If you weren't there, or if you've never been there and think of it as merely a bunch of hippies partying in the desert, the best thing to do is to check out
this online comic book, created from one Burner's photo collection using the Comic Life program I raved about earlier this year. Skip merrily through the first hundred pages or so of art pics until you get to the Billion Bunny March, which this year met with heated resistance from the Carrot Liberation Front. A rumble in Center Camp between bunny and carrot ensued. Black Rock Animal Control had to step in and take the bunnies away. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes my heart sing about Burning Man: semi-spontaneous absurdity, a rich satire on society performed for no other reason than for the fun of it.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 20, 2005
King of Rain
It's not supposed to rain in Southern California. It's certainly not supposed to thunder and lightning all night long.
I'm here in Huntington Beach for the DemoFall conference, and I didn't pack a jacket, much less an umbrella. Apparently we're experiencing a hangover from a hurricane that hit the coast of Mexico. Funny -- everywhere I've been, or planned to be in North America outside San Francisco this year, has experienced a major storm or hurricane. It happened in Baja. It happened in Scottsdale, Arizona. It happened in DC. And I was planning to go to Nawlins at the end of October (now that I know my hotel is still standing, I may still do so). I have therefore come to the conclusion that I am a rain god, and will shortly be irrigating the Mojave.
Sigh ... at least I got some good beachside rollerblading time in before the storm began. And there was a lovely rainbow at sunset, as the sky began to spit. I thought rainbows were supposed to follow storms? So much for Biblical fundamentalism.
Daily Blah for... Friday, September 16, 2005
The Child in Charge
Future historians -- a group of people I think about a lot, and would really like to meet someday -- will wonder why we weren't all guffawing our behinds off today. They'll look at the note the President was caught writing at the UN, asking Condi if he could go to the bathroom, and insist it must have gotten the biggest laughs at that institution since Kruschev decided to bang his shoe on the desk. Then they'll study Bush's New Orleans speech and note, as some eagle-eyed bloggers did, that he had his shirt buttoned up the wrong way. How could we fail to be rolling in the aisles?
The answer is, O future historians with the benefit of hindsight, that it's just too damn scary to live in a free world led by a man who can't even make an executive decision to pee or do his shirt up properly on the most important night of his life. Especially when disaster seems to stalk his presidency. If the third one turns out to be the avian flu epidemic we're utterly unprepared for, and if Bush is as bewildered and slow off the mark as he was on 9/11 and during Katrina's first week, the death toll could make those other two events little more than historical footnotes.
I really, really hope I'm around to meet those future historians.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 15, 2005
Turing Test for Telemarketers
How to deal with the encroaching menace of telemarketers? You can sign up for the do-not-call list, but that doesn't seem to halt their progress. You can hang up on them, but that's not very community-spirited -- they'll just go off and call some other poor sap. No, the thing to do is to suck up as much of their time as possible without actually engaging them on the phone yourself. Friends of Daily Blah have reported instances where they responded to the telemarketer's opening sally with a helpful "just a minute, I'll go get them", then simply leaving the phone off the hook while they go back to whatever they were doing. Which is great for an anecdote, but not too effective in the long run -- you'll tie up the phone line, and they'll get wise within a matter of minutes.
What we all need, dear readers, is the Telecrapper 2000 Telemarketer Interception System. You connect your PC to your phone, tell this ingenious piece of free software which Caller ID numbers to intercept, and the Telecrapper engages them with random snippets of conversation whenever it detects silence on the other end. (Here are some great examples.) The telemarketer, who doesn't realize he's the subject of a reverse Turing Test, is baffled, but presses gamely on -- after all, crazy people are more likely to make random spur-of-the-moment purchases.
Just think -- if enough of us set up the Telecrapper, we could shut down the entire telemarketing industry. It simply wouldn't be worth the wasted man-hours, or the cost of hiring phone drones smart enough to figure out when they were talking to a machine.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Looters and Shooters
It's easy, in the emotional aftermath of an event like Katrina, to sound like a tough-on-crime conservative. Horrific tales of looting have prompted even some of the most civilized of my friends to declare: "they should just shoot them all." No, I argue back, they shouldn't. Not just for the sake of the rule of law, but for the safety of innocents. Simply put, adrenaline does bad things to people with a gun in their hands in scary situations. Malcolm Gladwell made this point very well in Blink, with reference to the Rodney King beating and the Amadou Diallo shooting. When your heart rate spikes above a certain level and the fight-or-flight hormone kicks in, your head is buzzing so much you can't even hear properly, let alone make an informed instant decision about a suspected criminal -- no matter how many years of law enforcement experience you've had.
Another appropriate case study, provided by a historian in Sunday's Chronicle, is what happened in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Mayor Eugene Shmitz signed an order declaring that looters should be shot on sight by military and volunteer forces. And of the nine men we know were shot over the next few days, six -- six! -- were not looters. They included a Red Cross worker, a playground superintendent, a UC Cadet, a police officer and a man carrying a chicken.
Did Shmitz' order save more lives than it cost? We'll never know. Did it put the enforcers in dangerously split-second situations that they regretted for the rest of their lives? No doubt. Should we, 99 years later, having watched any number of movies with Mexican stand-offs, know better? Absolutely. Do guns kill people? No -- panic, a thumping heart, adrenaline and ammunition kills people.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, September 08, 2005
How to Make a Reality Distortion Field
Here's a post I submitted to the Business 2.0 blog:
Today's launch of the iTunes phone and iPod Nano may have disappointed many who were expecting greater things from Apple (like an Apple-branded Podphone or a VidPod). But there is no such thing as disappointment at an Apple media event. From the moment you get the coy email invite to the moment you file out accompanied by triumphal pop standards, every second is carefully crafted to make you feel like you're witnessing the greatest technology launch in history. What happened today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco was a pitch-perfect example.
Hundreds of journalists, bloggers, Apple employees and assorted boosters were duly summoned with a message that contained no more details than the tantalizing statement: "1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything. Here we go again." Here we go again indeed. We dutifully registered, then filed into the auditorium lit almost entirely by a giant glowing Apple logo. A fifteen-minute wait followed, just long enough for the buzz to build and for everyone to notice that former Vice President and Apple board member Al Gore was glad-handing everyone in the front row. Then the lights dimmed, cheers went up, and we all turned expectantly towards the giant Apple for the arrival of the Glorious Leader.
Steve Jobs was long ago accused of possessing a "reality distortion field" inside which you were lulled into sharing his enthusiasm for every one of his "insanely great" products. Jobs' personality may have mellowed with age, but his reality distortion field has grown larger, and acquired a titanium shell. Here's how he does it:
1. Start off very low-key. Introduce favorite celeb friends in the audience (Gore doesn't rate a mention today, but Yo-Yo Ma does).
2. Move quickly through a series of increasingly important announcements. Conspiratorially share tidbits of new data (number of iTunes users, never before revealed: 10 million), ensuring we feel grateful for them. Announce product upgrade: iTunes 5.
3. Dazzle with celeb endorsements. J.K. Rowling has put all Harry Potter audiobooks exclusively on iTunes (and you can get an iPod engraved with the Hogwarts school crest). Madonna has put all her albums exclusively on iTunes, too. "How does she feel about that?" asks Jobs. "Well, let's call her!" A ripple of excitement goes through the crowd as Jobs initiates a cozy video iChat with the Material Girl, live in London.
4. The first new product announcement, downplayed a little: "you've probably already heard about this." Which is true - the Motorola iTunes phone has not been Apple's best-kept secret. It's basically a hundred-song iPod shuffle built into a phone. But by the time we've heard from Motorola and Cingular executives and watched four "sneak peeks" at TV ads for the new phone, all of which is cheered wildly by the employees, our resistance has been beaten down. Some journalists start applauding along with them. Amazing what a room full of peer pressure can do.
5. A teaser for the really big product announcement: Jobs tells us he's killing the iPod mini. A chilled silence descends as he lets the full impact sink in: the world's bestselling digital music player, and they're going to stop making it? Is he insane? What could possibly justify such a move? A final tease: on the jumbo screen, a close-up of Jobs' jeans. "Ever wondered," he says, pointing at his change pocket, "what this pocket is for?" Not change, evidently. Levi Strauss had no idea, but he was actually making an iPod Nano pocket.
6. The money shot. Jobs produces a Nano from his jeans, and the reaction could not have been greater at the foot of Mount Sinai if Moses had yanked two stone tablets out of his robe. Product reviewers in the audience know their greatest task today will be explaining just how small the device is with reference to an ordinary household object, but Jobs has them covered. "It's thinner than a number 2 pencil," he says. On screen, just in case we missed it, an animation of a pencil eclipsing the Nano plays three times. Jobs compares the Nano's size to that of competitors' products, giving us the exact percentage difference each time. In the digital player world, size really does matter.
7. The final celeb endorsement. Just when some of the skeptics among us are thinking "that's the big announcement - a smaller, slimmer Flash-based mini?" Jobs offers a diversion in the form of Kanye West, probably the hottest recording artist in the world right now. West raps his way through a couple of hits as if he's at the MTV music awards. The audience gamely taps its toes. Gore looks like he's listening to a Senate speech. Perhaps he's wondering what Tipper will make of West's highly explicit lyrics.
We were invited to test the phone and the Nano on our way out, and that was that. We all shuffled out of the presence of the technology era's ultimate showman, too dazzled to be disappointed. After all, there's plenty of time --- and trade shows -- left this year for bigger and better Apple product announcements. Is Motorola's iTunes phone an early prototype for a bigger and better Podphone? Will the VidPod ever make an appearance? Here we go again.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Al and Kanye
The most surreal moment from this morning's launch of the iPod Nano:
Kanye West on stage performing full, explicit language versions of "All Falls Down" and "Gold Digger" while Al Gore sits in the front row with his hand to his chin like he's musing over a complex Senate speech. What would Tipper think?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, September 06, 2005
The Obligatory Katrina Entry
There are already gigabytes of blogs written about the horror of Katrina, the tragedy of New Orleans and the tone-deaf, mollasses-slow official response; at this stage, there's little I can add. But I do have to wonder: why do these major natural disasters happen when I go incommunicado? (See Blahs passim about the tsunami). It's enough to make me not want to leave civilization again.
It was Wednesday at Burning Man when I found out. My friend Lessley arrived and announced "guys, bad news: New Orleans is pretty much destroyed." The fact that the first words that came to mind when she said that were "suitcase nuke" should tell you everything you need to know about the direction this country has taken in the last four years. Even a good liberal like me, who's been railing against terror hype since September 12 2001 and pointing out that the powerful are taking us for another ride on the fear rollercoaster, couldn't help but assume it was a terrorist act. No wonder FEMA has been reduced to a forgotten appendix inside the Homeland Security giant. We've forgotten that our planet has devoted more resources to trying to kill us than any lunatic Saudi could ever muster.
My second response was a pang of worry for my three dear friends in the Big Easy: Stephanie (who was about to get married), Ashley and Cole. Thankfully, all three are alive, though at least one has lost her house completely. It is, she says, a good time to practice Buddhist non-attachment. She's absolutely right, of course. I can only hope that if a thirty-foot wave were to come and pulverize all my stuff, my response would be that mature.
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