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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.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, November 30, 2006
I feel a new slogan coming on: the only blog written by word-of-mouth
Many of you may be wondering whatever happened to my plan to write a novel by voice recognition software. Well, you're listening to it.
That's right. Daily Blah is now being composed by word-of-mouth. For one entry only, unless this blasted thing starts working better.
You see? It responds to threats. I say "unless this blasted thing stops working better" after 15 wrong words or so. I get angry. I get genuinely angry at how little the software lives up to its promise. And lo and behold, it suddenly seems to understand the tone of voice. This, I surmise, is an honesty machine.
Only the things I am supposed to write, that seem clear and forceful, words that are supposed to be there, emerge from the other end of this microphone. It is, you might say, an exact replica (in the real world) of my inner censor.
This makes it a hideous device to write a novel with. A novel requires searching sentences, sentences that don't quite make it, that spring from the mind half-formed, half-baked. And yes, sometimes stillborn.
I am however having second thoughts on the overall worthiness of this software. An honesty device might be a pretty good thing to write a blog through. It might not produce a blog with much literary merit. It would be a blog very much in my own voice. A blog very appropriately titled Daily Blah.
Problems with Dragon NaturallySpeaking persist. I have been unable to write 50,000 words in a month. Part of the problem is that I'm laughing all the time. For instance, when I just tried to write "in a month", the software wrote "in her mouth". I was rolling on the floor for several minutes at this.
But the largest part of the problem is the deadening effect it has on creativity to have to have your left brain so focused on whether its language is being understood. You see, even now I am writing clunky sentences like the one above, which, like the rest of this blog, I refuse to edit by hand. Actually I spoke that last sentence slightly differently, in the past tense. Dragon NaturallySpeaking heard the present tense. I prefer the present tense. This would be a good device to write a letter, and the letter-like essays I call my blogs. I'll try it for now, and let you judge the result.
So what fate befell the novel? It languishes still. I got much further using the excellent Google docs and spreadsheets, and simply typing a stream of consciousness description of my day and my inner thoughts, Mrs. Dalloway style. There- Dragon NaturallySpeaking redeemed itself by understanding Mrs. Dalloway on the first try. My own Mrs. Dunaway got to a very respectable 25,000 words before fate intruded space in the form of my girlfriend, who flew all the way from New York to surprise me for my birthday. It worked. I've never been so surprised, no so unable to keep my resolve stuck on any noble efforts of my own. Nor have I ever had a happier birthday.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Start Writing Purple For Me Now
It's beginning to look a lot like my birthday. And should anyone be interested, I was recently pointed to a site called The Purple Store, where many of my obsessively purple needs are met.
From whence comes my deep abiding love for all things twixt red and blue, you say? From the Gogol Bordello song, Start Wearing Purple For Me Now? From the Jenny Joseph poem? No, from somewhere in the depths of my college days, when I started writing in purple ink in purple notebooks, and found I couldn't stop. There's something so soothingly authoritative about cursive script scrawled in imperial purple. Whoever came up with the derogatory phrase "purple prose" to describe overly florid fiction owes this particular part of the spectrum an apology.
Ah. Well,according to Wikipedia, it was Horace, as in one of those Roman geezers so venerable as to not need a last name, a practice not revived until the arrival of Cher. Horace was critiquing a pupil's poem, I assume: "Your opening shows great promise, and yet flashy purple patches." That is, of the kind that Rome's wannabe hipsters had sewn into their robes to create the appearance of wealth.
But hang on a minute. Purple patches sewn on robes? That would have so obviously fake that I find it hard to imagine they weren't worn with a sense of irony. Nor is it easy to imagine that some of the most florid examples of purple prose in literature -- such as the one everyone knows, the "it was a dark and stormy night" opening of Baron Lyton's novel -- were not written a little bit knowingly. It is time to reclaim the phrase "purple prose" -- therefore I declare my birthday, November 22, to be Purple Prose Day. On that day, I call on every Daily Blah reader to write something they would have written anyway -- an email to a functionary, a letter to a bank manager, a note to the milkman -- in a deliberately over-the-top style, with as many unnecessary syllables and adjectives as you can manage. Take that, Horace!
Daily Blah for... Sunday, November 12, 2006
Skinned Mice for Nazi Cats
Looking for that perfect Christmas gift for your cat? Nothing says "I get your species" like the bookmarks and a small fire rug made from the skin of dead mice you will find on this German website.
Have the Germans learned nothing from Art Spiegelman's Maus? Do they not realize, in the context of that book, how this looks? Perhaps the mouse skin web store belongs to a neo-Nazi group that is taking Maus -- and another disturbing website, Cats That Look Like Hitler, a little too literally.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, November 09, 2006
The RSS Feed Works. Now Quit Bugging Me.
Alright, everyone who's been waiting to subscribe to Daily Blah in their RSS readers. You think you can get around the sporadic nature of my posting? You're finally right. Yes, after years -- literally, years -- of my complaining that creating an RSS feed for this site was a Herculean task, that the template was held together with bits of string and scotch tape and thus could somehow not withstand the pressure of a .xml file, I finally figured it out. The blasted .xml just needed to be inside the Daily Blah folder on my FTP server. Gawd. Why couldn't any of the web geniuses I asked to take a look at my template figure that one out? Grumble.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Newsflash: Democracy Works
Ah, what a relief tonight is. The tension of twelve years of Republican rule is draining away. My shoulders feel lighter.
The House has gone Democratic. Writing such a sentence is, for me, rather like saying "the moon has gone purple" or "the Pacific has decided to relocate to a small cottage in the Dordogne." The House has not been controled by Democrats, you see, the whole time I've lived in America. The old folks do speak of the days when it was once that way, but all I've known is this parliament of utter idiocy, a chamber of Rush Limbaugh look-alikes who believe earth science is a myth, the UN is a tool of Satan, and other such only-in-the-heartland inanities. These are the people who impeached Clinton for his sexcapades but rushed to help W upend the Bill of Rights, who went home and fired a gun into a watermelon to "prove" the Clintons killed Vince Foster but refused to read the Patriot Act or stick up for the Geneva Convention. These were oily men -- and they were very much men, to a man -- who decimated public television, gerrymandered Texas, made political capital out of a woman with no brain, and covered up for a lascivious paedophile.
It was they who filled the national agenda, who controled the news cycles, who decided which topics were worthy of our legislative attention. They were permitted to think themselves the best and the brightest, beyond reproach. If American life has felt a lot like Alice Through the Looking Glass this past decade--and it has--that has been thanks in no small part to the rapacious, ugly, wilfully ignorant GOP House.
And now, at the press of several million buttons, look what we have. A House with a comfortable Democratic majority. The first female Speaker in history, and a San Franciscan to boot. Imagine it: Nancy Pelosi is soon to be third in line for the presidency. One can only hope for those two gentlemen ahead of her to choke on pretzels or ingest large amounts of cardiac-arresting lard sometime early in January. But that won't even be neccessary. Pelosi will have done her job if the sky doesn't fall. So many Americans have been led by their leaders to associate Democrats with terrorism that they will be forced to rethink their world views the moment it becomes clear that the new speaker does not intend to present Osama Bin Laden with the Congressional Medal of Honor.
For the first time since 9/11, the pendulum has swung back. I was really worried for a few years there that it never would again. Delay's gerrymandering was intended to give the GOP a lock on the House for a generation. The Dems seemed to be doing the best they could to help him every two years, playing a constant tug of war with the jaws of victory for the prize of defeat. Most troubling of all was the potential for mass-hacking of voting machines, of some emergency election-flipping virus lurking in the hard drives of these paperless devices manufacturered by GOP contributors. Did we even live in a democracy any more? Until last night, it was a fair question. Now for the first time in the voting machine era we have significant proof of a legitimate election: the fall of the ruling party. As I write, the Dems look set to take the Senate too, with vote counts in Montana and Virginia falling their way. An entire Democratic Congress to drag America out of the looking glass and into the 21st century? That really is a beautiful purple moon.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, November 04, 2006
It Was a Dark, and, Um, Stormy Night: Novel-Writing by Word of Mouth
It's November, which means, of course, that National Novel Writing Month is upon us. I've never done a NaNoWriMo, as it's known, because the thought of writing 50,000 words in a month on top of my day job seems like more deadline-driven lunacy than even the greatest Gonzo journalist can handle. But this year I find it impossible to resist. That's because I have a review copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, a brand new piece of critically-acclaimed speech recognition software, and the dumb-ass idea that I should write an entire novel without my fingers ever touching the keyboard. I've got myself convinced that it'll be far, far easier when I can hear the rythmn of the language, that I'm somehow placing myself in the vanguard of a grand, million-year-old tradition of storytelling. The words will just flow out of me as if I were a shaman telling stories to his grandchildren. I shall of course keep you updated on how that goes.
I finally got around to installing the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software yesterday, with a Blu Snowball USB mic -- my favorite kind, it's exactly what Ed Murrow would have used had he been using a USB mic -- plugged into my home Dell desktop. To set the software up, I had to choose from a list of reading options, which is how I ended up reading the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland to my computer, as if it required a bedtime story.
Then came the tutorial, and my first task: to speakwrite the words "Harriet, I heard you are starting a new job in San Francisco. Congratulations! Can we have lunch before you leave?" I brushed aside the geographical and chronological issues posed by such a statement -- surely I'd be lunching with her after she arrived in San Francisco? -- and obeyed the instructions. What came up on the screen was something disturbingly confessional:
Harriet, I hurt U.S. starting a job in San Francisco.
I laughed uproariously for five minutes, and wondered if the program was designed by Bill O'Reilly. Yes, I thought. By taking a job in San Francisco, I had hurt America.
Clearly, Alice in Wonderland had not been enough. If I spoke in an American accent, the program understood me about 85 percent of the time; giving it my natural (if California-tainted) English brought that down to about 65 percent, and I started to fear the program was sending me a message: stop hurting America. Talk like us.
So I tried giving the program a second sample of my voice by reading the next option, Kennedy's inaugural address. This seemed to work a lot better, even though I found myself accidentally straying into a Massachussets accent. The computer now recognized about 95 percent of what I was saying -- no matter how fast I was saying it -- in my normal accent.
I set about speakwriting the novel off the top of my head, and helping the computer to learn the other five percent. NaturallySpeaking is very good at this. For instance, it was repeatedly hearing my "can't" as "count." So all I had to say was "select 'count'", and it gave me a list of alternatives. A quick "select 'can't'", and I was prompted to say both words so it was crystal clear how they sounded.
Pretty soon I had the confidence that no matter how fast the words left my mouth, this net would catch them. In fifteen minutes, I had a thousand words written. It was almost too easy. Now, I'm not saying they were a thousand very good words. But that's the whole point of NaNoWriMo. Just write fast, and hang the quality.
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