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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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My TIME articles
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Daily Blah for... Saturday, October 29, 2005
When's in a Name?
Quite possibly the coolest piece of web software ever is The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager. Type in a name, and a graph shoots up before your eyes displaying how popular that name has been (according to the US Social Security records of the top 1000 names for newborns) decade on decade. It's a little exciting, a little disturbing (the majority of names I know are past their prime) and always fascinating. There's something highly compelling about the visual marriage of chronology and names.
"Christopher," which is my full and proper moniker, was relatively unknown until the 1930s; it peaked in the 1970s and 80s, but at least it was the number two most popular name in each decade. (I don't know whether to cheer that or bemoan my two almost-victories. Isn't it better to win one decade than come second in two?) At the name's height, 15,000 in every million babies were named Christopher, or one and a half babies in every hundred.
There was a brief mania in the 1960s for naming a child simply "Chris," but the name only reached number 60 and declined sharply in the 1970s. In the 1980s, a small subset of people (rank number 596) started naming girls Christopher, but thankfully the trend sank without trace in the following decade.
Strangest of all the facts connected to my name is that, way back in the 1880s when records began, there were a lot of boys named "Christ." Well, not a lot, but it was ranked 420, so higher than average. But the practice completely dies away over the following 50 years, until there are no new Christs in the 1930s -- which is just when Christopher took off. Coincidence? Is it possible that had I been born a hundred years earlier, I would have been Christ Taylor? Are there any Christs left in America, and if not, who was the last Christ, and has anyone written a poignant historical novel with that title yet?
What's funny is that while we would blanche at the idea of saddling a child with that name, we're now relatively used to the first name "Jesus." It was ranked 70th of all boys' names last year and has been growing ever since the 1960s, thanks no doubt to the sure-and-steady boom in the Hispanic population. But back in the 1880s, it was less popular than Christ. Go figure.
Daily Blah for... Friday, October 28, 2005
The Cheneygate Paradox
The word "Cheneygate" is causing a fuss over at Wikipedia. Someone posted a definition of it, claiming it was a word "given by some commentators on United States politics" to the Plame, Miller and Rove fiascos. Now I've heard Plamegate, Millergate and Rovegate, but I haven't yet heard Cheneygate. I think we need more of a smoking gun for there to be a Cheneygate, as much as I oppose the current administration and as much as the Libby indictment gladdened my heart. We just haven't got enough dirt on Big Time yet. And "some commentators" is so generic a term as to be meaningless.
Wikipedia agreed with the semantic point. Posting a definition for a nonexistant term, the keepers of the encyclopedia said, was grounds for deletion. Unhappily, this was the right thing to do. But it didn't stop a huge debate erupting about whether deletion was merited.
And as news of the debate leaked out, an interesting thing happened -- interesting, at least, to people like me who rub their hands with glee whenever a brand new baby paradox is born in the world. Whereas one of the early debaters said Cheneygate was only getting 112 Google hits, the number increased today to 485. (I just checked again, a paragraph later, and it's up to 488. Well, whatever the number is, it'll be one more once I've published this.)
The word Cheneygate, in other words, is slowly being born.
It's becoming legitimate purely because of the debate about it being legitimate. (There's a parable here for the way some branches of the media treat subjects like Intelligent Design and global warming denial.) I would now argue that it deserves a place on Wikipedia.
The definition needs changing, however. How about "Cheneygate is a name given to the subject under debate in a discussion about whether there should be a definition of a term called 'Cheneygate' on Wikipedia."
Good idea. I think I'll go insert that now.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, October 27, 2005
Million Dollar Ideas: Personal Tax™
A semi-regular series of "Wouldn't it be great if someone made a business out of ..." concepts.
3. Personal Tax™
Modern consumerism is entirely predicated on the notion that we, the people, prefer to spend our disposable cash on enjoying ourselves and having fine things. This is true only half of the time. The other half, we spend our pocket money on improving ourselves. And what we are discovering time and time again is this: no matter how many ab crunching machines, self-help books or yoga classes we pay for, buying stuff does not automatically improve us. We don't use the machine, read the book or go to the class unless we have the willpower to do so. And if we had willpower, we wouldn't need that stuff anyway. We'd do sit-ups and go for long walks and stretch and meditate for hours and think and talk about our lives until we were at complete peace with ourselves.
Willpower is what we need, not things. Sooner or later, we all figure that out. So how can consumerism get in on the willpower assistance business?
Easy. We are already trained to use our money as our personal scoring system. As much as we might try to deny it, our lizard brains have connected money with survival. We generally react with horror at the thought of having less money and are rewarded with pleasure at the thought of having more. In short, money is the most powerful motivating force the world has ever seen. So instead of fighting that ineluctable fact of modern life, why not work with it?
Picture this: a Paypal-like online system that deducts a pre-planned amount from your bank account every time you do something you don't want yourself to do but find it hard to avoid doing—eating fast food, getting drunk, failing to go for that run. The pre-planned amount would be deducted every week unless you and every person you trusted and empowered as a Fair Witness to your life went to the website, entered their personal PIN number, and answered your own predetermined questions on your behavior. Fair Witness Groups in every neighborhood would be encouraged. Just the thought of having to go and prove to your Fair Witness Group that you'd lost five pounds in the last month, or loose $500, would be enough to motivate most people into working out every day.
Depending on how harsh you want to be on yourself, the money would either be lost forever (given to charity) or put in escrow for a decade (your kid's college fund). Personal Tax™, naturally, would take an imperceptably small cut -- 0.05% or so -- of every transaction. As a company, it would also rule the huge secondary market in getting you set up with the system, helping you write the questions, and hooking up Fair Witness Groups. All you would need to improve your life, then, would be the tiniest burst of willpower (and possibly Dutch courage) to sign up for the thing in the first place.
The tagline writes itself: Personal Tax™. Put your money where your mouth is.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 25, 2005
I'm Five, My Dad's Bruce Lee
Everyone should take five minutes out of their day to watch this video. The JCB song is one of the most delightful things I've heard all year (for Americans: a JCB is a big yellow digger truck thingy), and the animation fits it perfectly. It says more about parent-child relationships, and recalls more of the long-buried experience of being five years old, than a thousand therapy sessions. Have a box of Kleenex handy.
The Chickens Are Falling!
Sitting on my desk is a bobble-headed doll of Chicken Little, a tchotchke sent by Disney to promote its upcoming Christmas movie. Next to it, laid out like a mosaic, are half a dozen magazines that just happen to be open to articles on avian flu.
Darlings, the ironies are just legion.
There's the one Disney would probably prefer we consider -- that we're all Chicken Littles at the moment, running around screaming about a metaphorical sky falling (or, more literally, that a terrible pandemic will drop on wings from the sky).
But I prefer to savor the schadenfreude. Here's Disney hoping for a big holiday hit to save its moribund animation division, kicking into gear a marketing campaign that has been meticulously planned for years, ordering up thousands of these bobble-headed bird dolls from factories in China.
And what happens? All of a sudden, bird becomes a dirty word. Chicken becomes even dirtier. Chickens from Asia are practically obscene. It's the worst possible timing for the marketers at Disney, and the fear is spread so far and so worldwide there's nothing their campaign can do to combat it, not even with a blank checkbook. Who the hell wants to see a cute movie about chickens right now? It's as if bad batches of Wensleydale had started killing off seniors with food poisoning right before the release of Wallace and Gromit.
Or, to take another disastrous example from recent history, it's as if Microsoft launched a campaign for Windows XP right after 9/11 that featured happy people flying through the air. Which, of course, they did. The timing was so dreadful that Microsoft decided there and then never to launch another operating system.
I'm kidding, of course, but that would explain the dire delay in releasing Windows Vista -- the early marketing photo for which looks unfortunately like it was shot on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Why don't they just rename it Windows H5N1? Tagline: It'll Slay You!
Daily Blah for... Thursday, October 06, 2005
The Dog Ate My Blah
I have a friend who says one of the main things he likes about reading Daily Blah is seeing what excuse I'll come up with this time for not having written in, say, two weeks.
I have another friend who, when she was a little girl, used to hide behind the piano at home just so she could experience the delight of being found by the grown-ups. "Hiding behind the piano" has become our metaphor for the passive desire to have people come to you. To be in demand. To be found.
I sometimes wonder whether this frequent Blah absenteeism of mine is a bit of subconscious hiding behind the piano. Because I do secretly like it when friends and strangers write in demanding to know where the hell it's gone. It reminds me of the presence of an audience, which is something I think all writers are constantly insecure about. It is, after all, a horribly lonely profession. If tomorrow we all became performance artists, really terrible performance artists who got booed off the stage, we'd walk back to the wings with smiles on our faces: "they noticed!"
Granted, this is all very bad behavior for a journalist. Could you imagine your local newspaper refusing to print until enough irate readers wrote in demanding to know why their doorsteps were empty? But the Blah is, I suppose, the one place where I have license to behave badly. I can run around in here, gleefully not writing, frustrating the bejesus out of my loyal readership, and no editor is going to come along and tick me off. (I haven't even made the whole business easier with an RSS feed yet -- something about my template, which was jury-rigged over many years and is currently held together with duct-tape and string, doesn't seem to like the RSS code.)
Anyway, the next time it happens, you know which large key-based household instrument to find me behind.
How's that for a non-excuse excuse?
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