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Daily Blah for... Friday, March 31, 2006
Fuel Fool
I already told you how much I love Boots' caffeine strips, which dissolve on your tongue for an instant wake-up hit. Now comes the Buzzaire Metered Dose Caffeine Inhaler, which promises to deliver even faster, even stronger caffeine doses directly via the lungs -- and freshen your breath with peppermint oil at the same time. I want one! Sigh. Shame it's an early April Fool's.
Speaking of which, I just got one of those bogus Paypal emails -- you know the one, notification of limited account access, please click on the link and enter your details so we can rob you blind, blah blah blah. The email arrived today, but the date on which my account was supposedly compromised is ... April 1, 2006. Do you think the Paypal fraudsters are having a once-a-year joke, at the expense of making their scam a little less believable? Even if they are the parasitical scum of the Earth, it would be nice to know they had a sense of humor.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 30, 2006
Future Boy Blasts Off
I love my title--Future Editor--but it does seem to cause a fair bit of confusion. One of the sources of that confusion is the fact that we already had, prior to my arrival and the creation of my title, an online column called Future Boy. "Oh, so you're the new Future Boy?" PR people would ask me last August. No, I'd have to explain, the very capable Erick Schonfeld is still writing that.
But now Erick is passing off the Future Boy gig to concentrate on the Business 2.0 blog. That means Future Editor and Future Boy are merging into one entity, which kind of feels like Batman and Robin got caught in some hideous Fly-like matter transfer beam. Here's my first Future Boy column -- surprisingly enough, it's on the subject of space tourism. Look for the next one in a couple of weeks, which will be about ... something other than space.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Brolly Daze
As of today, it is officially the rainiest March in San Francisco history. We've had 23 days of occasional hail and half-hearted drizzle -- way more British-style than the average S.F. rainy season downpour -- and six scattered dry days. I have finally stopped courting sartorial disaster by wearing suede or velvet to work and not bringing an umbrella, as I did for the first couple of days this week (in my defense, it was sunny and clear when I left the house).
Indeed, the umbrella has once again become an appendage, as it was during many months of the year in the UK. I've re-learned the many ways one can walk with a brolly. There's the city gent march (tap the ground, then point it out smartly in front of you, and repeat), the casual over-the-shoulder, and the Charlie Chaplin twirl (which is all in the wrist).
Is this all, I wonder in a half-informed Pooh bear kind of way, some kind of global warming weather exchange? Now that the Gulfstream is dying, shortly to change Britain's climate forever, is San Francisco suddenly taking over as the world capital of drizzly wet dampness?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Playing at Journalism
"Is this the iPhone?" asks the Mac OS Rumors website breathlessly. Er, no. It's a mock-up of what the iPhone might look like, produced especially for the cover of Business 2.0 over a year ago. But don't tell that to Mac OS Rumors; they appear to be quite happy thinking this came from "sources" deep inside Apple. "It's nice to be able to present strong confirmation on a rumor," says the anonymous rumor writer. "That is a rare commodity in this business." Isn't it, though? Bless their pretend journalist hearts.
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 27, 2006
iSaw
Living right by the Presidio has its benefits: waking up to birdsong; great views of the trees; easy access to nature; a 15-minute walk to the beach. The biggest downside, I thought when I moved in, was the vast eyesore at the Presidio entrance a block away from me, the former Public Health Service Hospital. An architectural monstrosity that was probably quite daring when it was built in 1931, the PHSH has been utterly abandoned since 1988 -- and has of course acquired a patina of shattered windows and graffiti tags. As incongruous as it is in this well-to-do neighborhood, it still gives me a shudder when I see it at night.
But take a look at this set of photos on Flickr. The inside has been transformed by trespassing graffiti taggers into a vast work of gritty urban art. You don't get much of a clue from the front, which is all skulls and the giant tag "Good as dead". Look harder at one of the front towers and you'll see the tiny and very disturbing tag: "I sleep here with a hatchet."
But round the side was my first clue that something more artistic was going on here: a window filled with four repeating prints of Anne Frank, looking for all the world like a lost Andy Warhol. And now it seems the inside is something of an accidental art installation, or a historical record, or a hangout spot for the utterly hip, or all of the above. The culture-loving LA friend who sent me the Flickr photo set really wants to see the place for herself next time she comes to visit -- which would, as things stand, involve some highly illegal trespassing.
So maybe instead of fencing it off, the city should start selling tickets. The city doesn't think so yet; its current plan is to demolish the building and build condos in its place. I was against that anyway because of the years of noisy construction work it would involve; now I've seen this photo set, I'm doubly against it. Would future generations shake their heads sadly if we demolished this place? Personally, I'm not prepared to take the risk.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, March 26, 2006
Dog Day Inside Man
To see Spike Lee's latest joint, the big-budget bank heist flick Inside Man (watch the trailer), on the strength of a friend's enthusiasm and this gushing review in the WaPo, which described it as a new Dog Day Afternoon. That was, of course, red meat to any card-carrying owner of Dog Day Afternoon. There's nothing quite like settling in for a couple of hours of intense tension as bank robber and hostage negotiator play a game of psychological chess.
So does Denzel Washington + Clive Owen = Al Pacino? Well, kind of. Owen is scarily smooth as the robber who knows everything, never looses his temper, and deftly dehumanizes his hostages. Washington is equally smooth as the highly professional Kojak-hatted negotiator. It's like they're trying to out-smooth each other. We're worlds away from Pacino's accidental hostage-taker, exploding into hot Italian flashes of rage, not knowing what to do next, and screaming "Attica!" at the police. No one in Inside Man is an amateur. No one doesn't know what to do next. Everyone conducts themselves with admirable professional aplomb. You don't believe the graft charges wanly thrown at Washington's character early in the script, not for a second.
It's the first sign of script trouble. At its core, this is an amazingly original story about a hostage situation that dismantles itself so completely, the police are left without a suspect, a motive or a weapon, and are left to muse whether a crime has even been committed. Brilliant. I'd pay good money to see that part of the movie again. Unfortunately, there's a lot of extraneous nonsense about the elderly WASPy bank owner, Christopher Plummer, being a war profiteer who secretly traded with the Nazis. The chief purpose of this twist seems to be to introduce Jodi Foster's character, and the chief purpose of Jodi Foster's character is to act so smooth as to make Washington and Owen look like piles of broken glass. Suddenly there's a third player in the psychological chess game, and it becomes a movie about everyone playing everyone else.
Too much, too much, too much. Why does big budget always equate to too much script, too many characters, too many audio-visual calories? Movies like this offer American-sized portions, but you don't get to just consume the good bits and take the rest home in a doggy bag. You have to consume all of it, and the paradoxical result is you forget most of it after the credits roll (sorry, Spike). The films that really stick with you are more spare, more psychological -- in other words, more Dog Day Afternoon.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, March 25, 2006
"Obviously A Major Malfunction"
It was all going so well. We saw the rocket clearing the tower, and a brief shot from the rocket's perspective. Then the webcast cut out. "Must be about ten billion fanboys tuning in," I said to Brad Stone, my former opposite number at Newsweek and one of the half-dozen space geeks I was having IM chats with at launch time. (Brad in turn was emailing back and forth with Elon Musk himself, who was sitting on the island, about to watch the rocket launch -- this culmination of many years and millions of his dollars -- and had nothing better to do than check his email).
We started celebrating, albeit cautiously. "Let the private space age begin!" I said. We started trawling the web for confirmation that Falcon 1 had actually launched and was hurtling its way into orbit. "MSNBC thinks the launch was success," said my friend Felix, sending me this link. I clicked on it, and found the headline "SpaceX launches -- and loses -- first rocket."
"Oh crap," I said, and sent everyone else the link. Brad wondered how I got it, since it apparently wasn't linked to from MSNBC's homepage. "A glitch, or a clever hoax?" I said. "I will cling to the last shred of hope ..."
Felix, meanwhile, apparently hadn't heard me. "Yup, I see confirmation [of the launch] here," he said, and posted this link. "Falcon 1 destroyed shortly after liftoff," it read.
What the hell? Were we getting our news in parallel universes? If so, I envied him his. The last thing I wanted was another sinking feeling like I got post-Challenger and Columbia -- another reminder that our cruel and jealous mother Earth does not want us to flee the nest, even as we appear to be doing our damndest to kill her.
But that old sinking feeling is what I've got. A major malfunction had indeed happened, and in a few days, weeks, or months, we'll know why. SpaceX will try again -- thank God they're not NASA, or they'd shut down all operations for a decade. And my space geek generation and I will once again gather round our laptops, a little older and a lot more wary. But how many more times will it take? How long will it take, how old will we be, when we finally get the spacefaring civilization we were promised as kids?
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 24, 2006
Space Boy Geeks Out
This is, without any clear contender, the most exciting time of my week. I'm sitting with my laptop while the rain batters the windows, watching a live webcast of Elon Musk's rocket launching. If it takes off, this is really the beginning of the private space age ... two minutes and counting ... I've got the audio patched into the stereo with my favorite space music playing in the background, and nothing goes better with the sight of a rocket about to launch ... 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ...
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 23, 2006
I Say, Shiny Spaceports!
Is it just me, or are the space business ideas coming thick and fast since we did the Space cover? It's probably just me. But still, you can't look at these plans for a Singapore Spaceport and not think: we're really not in the 20th century any more, Toto. We're in what the mid-20th century imagined the 21st century could be. All we need now are square-jawed pilots wearing tin-foil spacesuits. Seriously, where are the square-jawed pilots wearing tin-foil spacesuits?
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 22, 2006
The Lego Google Server
Aren't you glad to be living in a time when the finest minds at the coolest company in the world built their first working product out of Legos? Doesn't that rekindle some of the flame of naive optimism we lost in 2000, and has yet to reassert itself in this new boomlet?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Two Quotes for Obscure Writers to Toil By
I take it for a rule that the greatest works were those of the most modest purpose. Ambition may not stand at the beginning; it must not come before the work but must grow with it; the work will itself be greater than the blithely astonished artist dreamed; it must be bound up with the work and not with the ego of the artist. There is nothing falser than abstract and premature ambition, the self-centered pride independent of the work, the pallid ambition of ego.
Thomas Mann, on reading Don Quixote
The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book -- it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, gramatical arrogance, obscene deluxe editions. Fame is a form -- perhaps the worst form -- of incomprehension.
Borges
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 20, 2006
My New Desktop Wallpaper
My my, North American Internet. Haven't you grown? Look at you, 134,855 routers and counting! Last time I saw you printed out like this, you were only this big. Doesn't time fly?
Daily Blah for... Sunday, March 19, 2006
Look, Ma, No Hands
Two lovely hands-free labor-saving demonstrations came out of the CeBit trade show in Hannover. There's the typewriter controlled by thought -- we've been expecting this one for a while, given that the ability to read brain patterns when you're thinking of a certain letter was demonstrated back in 1999, but it's nice to see it finally come out in prototype form -- especially when you use keyboards as much as I do and are worried that twinges in your arm could be signs of RSI. Imagine writing a novel by thought alone!
Then there's the virtual dressing room that takes your measurements, pops a virtual you on its screen, and lets you try on new clothes without all the fuss of taking off your old ones. Again, this is good news for me, as I find department store changing rooms one of the most uncomfortable places on Earth and will, like a lot of men left to their own devices, most often buy clothes based purely on the intuition that they might fit.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, March 18, 2006
X is for Machina
Not all that's good in comics comes from the pen of Alan Moore. I've rarely been so enraptured by any series as I am by Ex Machina, which is the graphic tale of Mitchell Hundred, a a former superhero (named the Great Machine, after Jefferson's metaphor for society) who hangs up his cape and becomes Mayor of New York. After saving one of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 -- he still beats himself up for not arriving in time to stop the first plane -- he's a shoo-in for election, even as an independent.
So while one part of the series focuses on flashbacks, Federal intrigue and the growing alien weirdness that gave the Machine his powers in the first place, another luxuriates in the day-to-day machinations of any political office, inspired by situations real-life mayors have found themselve in.
In the first book, we see Hundred deal with the outrage caused by a racially offensive picture in the Brooklyn Art Museum (the gallery that gave us the elephant-dung madonna). In the second -- thank you, Gavin Newsom -- he tackles gay marriage. I devoured both instantly, hungrily, and however soon Brian Vaughan comes out with a third collection, it's not soon enough for me.
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 17, 2006
A Is For Alan
I can't wait to see the movie version of V for Vendetta, despite the fact that the creator of the chilling dystopian comic book behind it -- Alan Moore, my favorite author in any medium -- has publically disowned the film.
I love Moore to death and I will go to the ends of the Earth to read anything he ever writes. In this case, however, I think he's being (understandably) a prima donna about his work. In this interview just published on the ComicCon website, he outlines his grievances -- a lot of perceived snubs and slights on the part of DC and Warner Brothers. The producer of the movie mistakenly thought Moore had approved the script, and said so in an interview. It sounds like he was in earnest, and he later apologized. But for Moore, who never leaves Northampton, this has become the basis for a grudge against the entire Hollywood system. His peeve with the movie itself is that where he intended the book to be a battle between anarchism and fascism, the movie is more a metaphor for liberals rebelling against neoconservatives. I understand the distinction, Alan, but so what? Given the times we live in, you can hardly blame the Wachowski brothers for moving the political goalposts. Every work of art is a product of its times, and it's not 1981 any more. I wouldn't be surprised if the Wachowskis were trying to influence and incense the apolitical members of their audiences, would you? It's certainly what I'd do, handed a project like this.
Besides, we desperately need a good movie based on a work by Alan Moore, and the sparkling reviews of V suggest we may finally have it. When I'm trying to explain who he is to people at cocktail parties who don't know comics, I first bring up Watchmen and Promethea as his finest works, then, when I get nothing but blank stares, I say "From Hell -- which they made into a really bad Johnny Depp movie, did you see that? And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which they made into a really bad Sean Connery movie; did you see that?" At this point I get rather pitying looks, looks that say "well, the movie was based on a comic book, what do you expect?" Smashing that stereotype would be exactly the kind of anarchism we need.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 16, 2006
Day of the Roomba
"I heart my Roomba," read an electronic ad on the top of a taxi that pulled up beside me as I got my car out of the garage this evening. I had to laugh, because I'd read two stories in the last 24 hours about people who heart their Roombas -- popular robotic vacuum cleaners, for anyone visiting from the 19th century -- quite literally to death. The first was Dan's excellent piece of reportage from a conference in Austin, where Roomba hackers Phil Torrone and Limor Fried got drunk and decided it would be an excellent idea to play a real-life game of Frogger -- the popular arcade pastime where a frog tries to cross the road, for anyone visiting from the 18th century -- by dressing up a Roomba in a frog costume, putting it on a busy road, and trying to get it to the other side using Bluetooth. Hilarity, and a squished vacuum cleaner, ensued.
Then I read Annalee Newitz's Techsploitation column in the Bay Guardian -- quite the best she's ever done, to my mind -- about a Roomba cockfight. The poor machines had been pimped up with a pair of scissors and made to attack each other while grown men bet on the outcome -- another insane event instigated by Torrone. Just be glad he's directing all this destructive energy towards robots. I'm sure frogs and roosters everywhere are relieved.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 15, 2006
How to Be on TV
No rest for the wicked: my first full day back at work, and I'm on CNBC talking about Google vs. the DOJ. They had me on a month ago, talking to the Money Honey about my four Google scenarios; I suppose I passed that test and have now graduated to full-blown Google pundit.
Nothing to these TV appearances; I used to do them all the time for Time. Most of them, you're sitting in a tiny room with a camera, one person, and an unbelievably cheap-looking backdrop of San Francisco. You've got the show coming in your ear, but the only thing you can see on the TV monitor in front of you is yourself. You have to be careful to avoid the Narcissus trap, or you'll look and sound really dumb. Instead, gaze hazily at the camera lens until it goes blurry and you're not really seeing it, you're in the recesses of your mind; you're relaxed, zen, and in touch with all the pertinent points.
Talk at twice your normal volume, in the serious and didactic tones of on-air correspondents and pundits since time immemorial. Don't really think about what you're saying; listen to the rhythm of it, and make sure that rhythm is brisk and cheerful. It's okay to pause briefly as long as you're in the middle of a sentence. And for God's sake, don't ever say "um." Dead air sounds better than "um."
Someone at CNN.com saw my CNBC appearance and got me to write a column on the same topic. I had to think hard to recall what I'd actually said. You can see the result here.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 14, 2006
New Musical Memes
As ever, I return from my UK trip laden with new musical memes. Not just homegrown bands like Kaiser Chiefs, the Editors, Maximo Park, Athlete, the Killers, Snow Patrol and Razorlight, but US stuff that I inexplicably haven't run into over here. Steven was terribly disappointed that I'd never heard Liam Lynch's hilarious United States of Whatever, which was apparently a big hit in the UK three years ago -- revealing a lot about what Brits make of Yanks in the process, I think.
(I'd never heard US of W, but the saddest thing, I later discovered, was that it was on my iPod anyway. It seems I got the entire Liam Lynch album from a friend in November 2004. This is another disturbing reminder of just how large iPods are getting these days, and how pearls can easily be lost in their cavernous interiors.)
And I'm extremely disappointed that I had to go all the way to Camden to discover the sheer unadulterated musical genius of George W. Bush singing an uptempo version of "White Lines," courtesy of a supremely clever remixer named Rx at thepartyparty.com. Now seriously, how did I miss this? Y'all are slacking.
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 13, 2006
Got Gum?
Of course, being away from the US for two and a half weeks, having just re-acclimatised myself to the way Britain looks and sounds and smells and tastes, this means that everything appears strangely American when I come back. This process started rather earlier than I expected -- at the gate for my plane at Heathrow, in fact. I got there with about an hour to spare (very unusual for me, but my hosts insisted on me booking a very early taxi), sat down, cracked open my book, looked around, and discovered to my horror I was in some kind of Wrigley family dreamworld.
Every passenger, it seemed, was chewing gum: the granny with the botox and tan and fussy hair who got on first class, her extended brood who flew coach, the otherwise attractive redhead on the coach opposite me, all chomping manically away like Violet Beauregarde. The only mouths not clacking belonged to myself and the BA flight attendants. Never mind stiff upper lips; we Brits distinguished ourselves by our stiff lower jaws. I actually caught myself thinking this thought: "does everyone in America chew gum, and I just forgot?"
I first visited the US in 1992, and found out that its inhabitants were, for the most part, warm, welcoming, friendly, thoughtful, cheerful, experimental and optimistic. Later that summer, I worked my one and only crappy service job, serving tea and coffee to the tourists at a motorway services on the A1. Here I found out that American tourists were, for the most part, loud (their volume setting seemed to be several levels above the British norm), fussy, condescending, badly-dressed, insular, insecure, unwilling to try new things, and generally the most obnoxious and out-of-place of all our visitors.
This dichotomy between the American and the American abroad has puzzled me ever since. Why does the general wonderfulness of the people around me now not translate?
Is it a Jekyll and Hyde kind of situation, where paranoia and xenophobia take over, or is it more to do with changing the context they're seen in? And why, since only 20 percent of Americans have passports, is it not the best 20 percent -- quite the opposite, in fact?
Daily Blah for... Sunday, March 12, 2006
More London Memories
Going to see the new motion-sensor animatronic T-rex at the Natural History Museum. If you run past him, he gives a blood-curdling roar; if you stand still in front of him, he'll groan quietly, disapprovingly, a bit like Marge. This was by far the most believable non-CGI dinosaur I've ever seen; the kids in the place were transfixed, bordering on terrified, while my friend Steven and I started discussing -- as nonchalantly as we could -- what you would do if you actually ran into one of these buggers in the wild. We agreed that grabbing its tail, climbing its back and trying to stab it in the eye would probably be the best bet.
Enjoying a kangaroo burger at Outback, the Australian pub/nightclub chain that appears to be taking over London.
Buying a pair of purple Doc Martens, for a mere sixty quid, in Camden's covered market. And then putting my feet through hell breaking them in.
Visiting the just-opened Cartoon museum in Bloomsbury.
Going to see a rock-and-roll accordion band in a cheery pub in Deptford on Saturday night. The whole pub was up and dancing, swaying their pints in the air and, since there wasn't a lot of space, crashing drunkenly into the sound system. "Now, since it's very nearly Sunday," said the accordion player solemnly towards the end, "we'd like to play something that honors the Sabbath." He then broke into the opening chords of "Paranoid." If you haven't heard Black Sabbath on an accordion, let me tell you, you haven't lived.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, March 11, 2006
Second Souls
It is now nearly a decade since I arrived in the US as an eager journalist of 22 tender years. Quite a landmark that is, the first American decade. Some people who are further into their international adventures than I say there is a general rule: five years is the point at which you cease to be an immigrant. By that time, as I soon found out, you are settled into the rhythms of the new country, and things will have changed so much back home -- especially in the accelerated cultures of the modern west -- that you could never truly catch up if you were to return. A part of you would always be the person you were in that other place.
"To have another language is to have a second soul," said the medieval emperor Charlemagne. Charlie didn't know much about emigration, so I'm sure he won't mind my impertinence if I update his point: to live in a second country, no matter the language, is to be growing a second soul.
If the language is the same, or roughly the same, it can take you quite a while longer to get this. But the fact is you are still growing, learning more and more about the world and the way it works -- especially if you're in your 20s, as I was. The answers you're going to start to form about the big questions in life are going to be different; sometimes obviously so, other times subtly so. You see different things, so you see things differently. Dunne wasn't quite right; a man can be an island, but the island itself is never immune to the weather patterns of the surrounding mainland.
I lived for four years in New York and, as of this month, have lived in San Francisco for six years: two cities with a laundry list of distinct attitude differences. That means I have, in effect, a four-year-old New Yorker soul and a six-year-old (as of this month) San Francis-soul existing alongside the 22-year-old Brit. The metaphor seems apt: the kids, especially the six year-old, are naively enthusiastic about life. They see the endless fun and wonder of it all, and are consequently prone to ADD.
The 22-year-old Brit is a bit of a realist, a quiet cynic, and the world's best devil's advocate. When I'm in the US, the four-year-old and the six-year-old feel comfortable and happy enough to pop up in the conscious mind and start an enjoyable internal debate, like characters in a novel (indeed, they are characters in my ongoing novel). Over here, it feels like they have been told they should be seen and not heard, and for some reason they actually behave like obedient children. The devil's advocate, the cynic, finds himself alone. In a way, it's like coming out of cryogenic freezing once or twice a year. Which would be a similar experience to coming home to the UK; it would lead to hefty draughts of nostalgia, sprinkled with future shock, and would probably require lots of cups of restorative tea.
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 10, 2006
The Gaff Gaffe
Taxi driver at King's Cross: "Where you going then, mate? I 'eard 'Camden,' then I just 'eard 'blah blah blah.'"
Me (taken aback by the potential impertinence, but polite as ever): "Royal College Street, please. You know the bit where it becomes Kentish Town Road?"
The cabbie goes quiet for a bit, no doubt flicking through the pages of the A-Z in his head. This innate knowledge of London's byzantine street system is what they call The Knowledge, and every driver of a black taxi is supposed to have it.
Taxi driver: "Oh yeah. That's where that sauna gaff is, innit?"
A number of things go through my head at this moment. First of all, I am delighted by the word "gaff", which I haven't heard in years. It's cockney for home, house, business, establishment; basically, anywhere you can get a cup of char (tea). One strand of thought goes off in search of the word's historical origins. It's got all the hallmarks of original Anglo-Saxon -- the four-letter construction, that hard Germanic 'g'. I wonder if straw huts and stone castles were once both called 'gaffs', and what delightfully leveling Saxon impertinence that would be.
Secondly, I think of the 'sauna gaff' itself. It's a self-proclaimed "sauna and massage parlour" called Touch of Class, although the 'l' on the sign has rubbed off so much over the years that Emily calls it 'Touch of Cee Ass.' Given that it's the only establishment of its kind I've seen in Camden -- this is not exactly the red-light district of North London we're talking about -- it's somewhat revealing that the cabbie should mention this landmark rather than, say, the Old Eagle pub, or (a very cockney thing, this) the Pie, Mash and Eels shop. I try not to think about whether my cab fare will contribute towards my driver having a Touch of Cee Ass tonight.
My thoughts thus distracted, I let slip what I'm constantly on guard against when back in my homeland: an Americanism. "Yeah," I reply. "It's on the same block." On the same block! Oh, what must the cabbie be thinking of me now. "Is 'e American? Is 'e puttin' on that toffee-nosed accent? 'E must be 'avin' a larf." But what, I wonder, was I supposed to say? "Yeah, it's on the same street?" No, Royal College Street extends for miles; that can't be helpful. "Yeah, it's near that intersection?" Surely 'intersection' is even more American. Maybe 'block' is one of those words that will have to seep into English English, because we Brits have no equivalent for it. Indeed, when I tell this story to Mark, one of the most cockney people I know, he confirms that he's used it once or twice. Still, I oughtn't make a habit of it just yet.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 09, 2006
Birthday Blah-gram
It's March 9th, which means it's time to take a brief break from snarky commentary and instead wish a very happy 60th birthday to a loyal and recently retired Daily Blah reader. Here's to the next 60, Padre/Pop/Pater/Father/Dad (delete as appropriate).
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Playing Away
The frenzy of interest that accompanied last week's release of the new England away jersey is one of those peculiarly English things, not covered in any tourist guide book, that Americans would find it terribly difficult to understand. First of all, you would have to explain what an England away jersey is. And when you did so -- well, you see, it's the second-choice soccer strip, for when England, who normally play in white tops, encounter another team that wear white, like, say, Germany, and lose a coin-toss -- it's even harder to understand the fuss. You could try talking about 1966, as I have often tried, about Geoff Hurst and the Russian linesman and Jules Rimet still gleaming, about how we beat Germany in those long-sleeved red away jerseys, but the general result is a lot of glazed eyes, much in the same way I go blank when Americans talk about the Miracle on Ice.
And then, if this hypothetical American were to walk down an English high street and see that sports shops were offering all your money back on the jersey if England win the World Cup this summer, I suspect his incomprehension would reach fever pitch. Isn't that incredibly risky for their business? What if England does win? And while every Englishman knows what the answer should be -- that's really not very likely, especially not on German soil, the team will fall apart or lose in some incredibly unfair way in the quarter or semi-finals -- we're too supportive, too idealistic, to actually say it.
I got my away jersey, of course, with my name and number 10 -- Michael Owen's number -- on the back.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Things the UK Needs to Export More Of
1. The Kaiser Chiefs.
Whereas the biggest new British band most Americans have heard of is the Arctic Monkeys, the Kaiser Chiefs' first album, Employment, is what's really got the smart set bouncing around. I haven't been able to get "I Predict A Riot" out of my head since I arrived. Not only does it sound like the song the Jam were trying to write, but the lyrics are worthy of the Smiths at their best:
I tried to get in my taxi
A man in a tracksuit attacked me
He said that he saw it before me
Wants to get things a bit gory
Girls run around with no clothes on
To borrow a pound for a condom
If it wasn't for chip fat, they'd be frozen
2. Caffeine Strips
You know those Listerene breath mint strips? Boots does a version that basically gives you a cup of coffee's worth of caffeine in a single hit. Stick one on your tongue, it melts, and you get an instantaneous buzz. My father has often said that the first person to combine coffee and toothpaste would be a millionaire; well, this is pretty much it. I discovered these wondrous things on my last trip over, and started slipping them to fellow Business 2.0-ites; a lot of the reason the Space issue looks so good can be attributed to these Worker's Little Helpers. This time, I bought the Durham branch of Boots out of every caffeine strip in stock. I only hope there's no limit on how much I can take back into the US.
3. TV Comedy
You liked the Office? You liked Extras? You have no idea how much other good stuff you're missing out on: Look Around You, anything by Peter Kay, Shameless, Help, The Mighty Boosh, Nathan Barley, Broken News -- the most pitch-perfect satire on the 24-hour news business I've ever seen -- and that's just the sitcoms. I have the best time sitting down with a pot of tea and a DVD full of Quite Interesting with Stephen Fry, which offers possibly the best combination of erudition and humor ever found in a panel game. You need shock therapy to reverse the effects of dumbing down, this is it. Why have I not seen a single one of these shows on BBC America? What is it, Beeb bosses, you don't think the Yanks are smart enough for the good stuff?
Daily Blah for... Monday, March 06, 2006
Things the UK Could Do With More Of
1. Wifi. There has been an explosion of coffee shops in British high streets, as I've mentioned, but where is the delicious speedy free Internet to lure in the laptop crowd and keep them there, downing more and more pricey lattes? I've only seen it in a couple of places in my last four trips here, and both were pubs. And a pub seems to me the last place you'd want to take out your precious laptop, for fear of some boozy idiot spilling his pint all over your keyboard. Of course, so desperate for it was I that I paid for it anyway, and took the risk. In fact, so desperate for wifi am I -- and so much talking like Yoda I am -- that I bought and installed a router in my sister's house, and suffered through a lengthy 0800 freephone call to India to iron out the kinks. It's still hard to get Blogger to work, which is why my daily posts have become a bit tardy. Sorry, loyal readers.
2. Free gift-wrapping services. This seems to me one of the greatest boons of shopping in any halfway decent American store, that they will more likely than not be happy to take whatever gift you just bought and wrap it for you, ribbon and bow included. What a splendid idea this is, especially for wrapping morons like me who, when left to their own devices, tend to make their Christmas presents look like explosions in a paper factory. Just think of how many more gifts would be bought -- how many of them would be larger and pricier, too -- and all for very little expenditure in wrapping paper and staff training.
3. Melatonin. It needs to be legal here, for the benefit of us jet-lagged international travellers. I can't be relied upon to remember to bring it every trip (though thankfully I did this time). Why is it illegal, anyway? It's a chemical that is naturally produced in the brain, in greater quantities in children, even. In the US, melatonin is sold in health food stores. Did the powerful Horlicks lobby fear its lock on sleepytime liquids would be shattered?
4. Grocery bagging. I've lost count of the number of times I've looked longingly at the checkout girl at Tesco's or Sainsburys, wishing she would ask "paper or plastic?" and then proceed to dispatch my hefty load of must-have British products -- Ribena, chocolate digestives, custard creams, bourbon biscuits, flavored crisps, Assam and Yorkshire Gold tea, Heinz spaghetti, and anything made by Cadbury's -- into my container of choice. Instead, she just looks at me with a bored expression that says "you going to put that stuff in a bag, or what?" And reader, I am even more useless at bagging groceries than I am at present-wrapping. I know the basic principles -- you're supposed to put the heavy items on the bottom -- but something always goes horribly wrong, the tower of inverse heaviness I'm building teeters and collapses, and the pressure I'm feeling from the next shopper in line, whose stuff is already being scanned, is immense. My mind goes blank and I end up throwing spaghetti tins on top of crisp packets in a desperate scramble to get out of there.
5. Degrees. Celsius or farenheit, I'll take either.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, March 05, 2006
Virtual Water
Another advantage to the Brits: Environmental consciousness here is nationwide, not limited to a few thoughtful outposts like San Francisco. This is a country where the leader of the Conservatives, the most right-wing party, is trying to curry favor with the electorate by asking the local council if he can attach solar panels and a wind turbine to the roof of his North London home. Since arrival I've been amazed by Planet Earth, the latest David Attenborough series on the BBC, shocked by a report on Amazonian deforestation, which continues apace, very shocked by the problem of cod overfishing and its deleterious effects on fish and chip shops, and thoroughly shocked by an article in the Guardian on virtual water.
For those that, like me a few days ago, have no idea what this means, virtual water is all the fresh H2O we're taking out of rivers and reservoirs around the world that is not being put back, by us or by nature. We're talking trillions of gallons a year that goes to watering crops, then from crops to farm animals, and, ultimately, into that ever-expanding, ever-hungry group of organisms, human beings. The result is that once mighty rivers like the Rio Grande have been reduced to a trickle, and here in the UK, reservoirs have dipped so low that some parts of the country have begun installing water meters and digging in for a summertime drought.
This knowledge has suddenly and stomach-sinkingly changed my perspective on the way the world is changing in my lifetime, in much the same way that Katrina seems to have convinced many Americans of the existence of global warming and its disastrous potential to affect us, not just generations hence. We are sponges, and most of us don't even know it. We are sucking up fresh water, and it ends up in the wobbling bellies of Burger King patrons. It's utterly unsustainable, a water apocalypse, and it's at times like these that ignorance seems preferable.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, March 04, 2006
Text To Dr. Who
And then there are the times when the eccentricities of my homeland, not to mention a few areas where it leads the world in technology, shine through. Take, for example, text to voice. British Telecom has had for some time now a service where you can send an SMS message (texting is, of course, ubiquitous here) to someone's landline, where it will be read out in an automated voice. Now Tom Baker, the nation's (and my) favorite Dr. Who, narrator of Little Britain, and the man with the most mellifluous voice in the world, has stepped in to become that voice. He spent 66 hours over 11 days recording every possible phoneme in the English language. The upshot being that you can now, for the negligible price of a text, send anyone in the land a message read by Dr. Who. This being Britain, as Baker himself is fully aware, many of those messages will be exceedingly naughty, as Tombakersays.com has set out to prove. What a delightfully silly country this is.
Daily Blah for... Friday, March 03, 2006
The Americanization of Clapham
I have, on past return visits to the UK, been concerned -- no, that's too strong a word, saddened -- by the increasing American-ness of just about everything. Every year, there were more baseball caps, SWAT T-shirts, fast-food chains and Starbucks in evidence on high streets. Every year, television content seemed a little more dumbed-down. I wouldn't have minded if my countrymen had heartily embraced American style with the full flush of fashion, but this just seemed like a pale imitation, a half-hearted colonization. A Big Mac over here, for example, tastes like cardboard; the American version, as I found out on my first trip to New York in 1992, is gourmet by comparison.
So I came braced for the same sadness this time around, and have been pleasantly suprised to find the era of pale American imitation seems to have bottomed out -- and that where the transatlantic culture is making inroads, it is doing so selectively and heartily. This week Rich and I visited Bodean's BBQ in Clapham Common -- yes, Clapham, South London central, home of the man on the Clapham Omnibus (the British equivalent of "will it play in Peoria?" is "what does the man on the Clapham Omnibus think?"). We went warily, expecting a pale imitation of the kind of 1950's diner that never existed in the 1950's. But no -- the ambience was pitch-perfect dark American bar, the TVs were chock full of March Madness, and the hefty slab of ribs I received tasted like real ribs, not cardboard. The only difference was that I was expected to slather on my own BBQ sauce from a bottle. Hardly authentic, but hardly unwelcome from a health standpoint. I'm not big on sauces.
Only one slight hiccup: the beer mats advertized Anchor Steam, a San Francisco brew, but Anchor Steam was not available. The waitress explained that they had been found and thrown on tables carelessly to add to the authentic American charm, rather in the same way that the Japanese like to choose random English words for their T-shirts.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, March 02, 2006
London Dreamworld
Advertising in the UK is extraordinarily powerful. I've gotten chills from a poster on the Tube -- it was posing as a concert poster for a beautiful hip-hop star called Vanessa, with a small sticker apparently affixed to it reading 'Cancelled -- because Vanessa was killed crossing the road, age 11. Don't die before you've lived.' And today I bought a disposable sonic vibrating toothbrush merely because I was alerted to the existence of this cool new consumer gadget by a (not particularly clever, but far from offensive) TV ad. If this product had been launched in the States, the TV ad would probably have insulted my intelligence in some way, and set my mind against buying said toothbrush.
Advertising is treated as a kind of vast cultural mirror here, and standards of creativity are enforced by the Great British public. The end result is that walking through tunnels in the Tube for fifteen minutes can tell you a heck of a lot about the cultural temperature of the country, especially since so many posters derive from London's leading cultural institutions. I love being bombarded with endlessly clever ideas, like the one for the British Museum that posed as a yoga ad, advising practitioners to visit an Indian sculpture that's been sitting in lotus pose for 200 years rather than some girl at the local gym who got bored of teaching aerobics.
In my perfect world, the only place advertising will be encouraged to exist is in the underground public transit. Standards will be enforced by the Consumer's Critic Council, art nouveau aesthetics will prevail, and all ads, no matter what for, will contribute to the sense that you've descended into society's collective dreamworld.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Blast Off!
At last, the space cover is out. This, it can now be revealed, is what I was beavering away on throughout January; in fact, the idea was my baby ever since I arrived at Business 2.0. Take a look at the package online if you wish, but nothing compares to seeing it in the magazine itself -- which I am currently handing out to friends in London at the rate of roughly three per day. It is easily the best-looking cover we've ever done (not that I'm biased or anything). Plus I've got a bet going on how many we're going to sell at newsstands, and a lot of cider is riding on the outcome. So pick up ten copies today -- and, as a special bonus, get to see a picture of me looking ridiculous with space helmet and silver shirt in the editor's letter.
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