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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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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.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
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... Friday, July 26, 2002
What It's All For: A Conversation with the World
Pam's comment the other day -- the one about wanting to see more photos and personal details before making an "emotional attachment" to my blog -- provoked a surprising crisis of confidence in your humble correspondent. I mean, it has always been Daily Blah house rules -- or as near as I have to 'em -- that I respond, semi-spontaneously, to whatever readers specifically ask of me. So regardless of whether her statement was serious or a jest, I felt obliged, duty-bound, to respond: "Alright, so you want to see some more of the real me? Here it is." And I started to put together a blog entry titled "Me and My Asparagus." It consisted of two pictures I'd recently taken with the Nikon Coolpix 4500, a camera I'm currently reviewing. One was of myself at Indian Rock, an East Bay viewpoint, last weekend, the sky behind me bathed in this typical tropical blue. The other was of my dinner two or three nights earlier, a dinner arranged so colorfully -- lime-green asparagus on an Indian Rock of tricolor pasta, all spread out on handpainted purple ceramic -- that I couldn't resist taking a snap of it. I'd scribble some witty comment about how before I came to California I never imagined I'd ever find myself eating such an extremely healthy vegetable, and there'd be my entry.
And yet I couldn't bring myself to post it. The blog entry sat there in my "drafts" folder on Blogger for days while I began to ponder the meaning of my aversion. I asked myself what was the matter, and I replied: what, am I some performing animatronic? They stick a quarter in the slot, say what they want, and out it comes? (You'll have to excuse me; I can be a grouchy misanthrope sometimes. I don't know why I put up with me).
See, the real problem is I don't have much of a coherent vision of what I'm doing here. I'm just sort of winging it from day to day, like a lot of lesser-talented blog writers. Talented blog writers -- I define the term as those who seem to have mastered the form enough to be prolific on a punishing daily schedule for something that is universally an unpaid hobby -- seem to have a lot of steam to blow off, a lot of venom to spout. (Perhaps that is the effect, or perhaps the cause, of so many of them being politically conservative). I try to make it a point to blow off some steam on one topic or another each day, but most days I don't have a lot of steam to blow.
I mean, I'm fundamentally satisfied with the world immediately outside my window -- the beautiful fogtown, and the endless sunshine and slight breeze of that whole heavenly bay I saw from the top of Indian Rock. As for the world beyond that, well ... I have an intimate knowledge of it, that's part of my job. But there are so many seemingly intractable problems right now that I wouldn't know where to start. I can get upset about something I read in the paper in my truly misanthropic, pre-coffee state, but by the time I sit down to write -- a stream-of-consciousness hour every day, you see, is as near to house rules as I have -- a zen-like acceptance of the whole human comedy, of Bush's idiocy and Wall Street's collapse and the Pentagon's posturing, hovers over me. So I wonder what to do, apart from get to the computer before I have coffee (I promise you, the result would not be pretty). Try to insert the anger I felt hours earlier into a fresh, sanguine analysis of the facts? Answer all those asinine technology questions I get every day (please, God, anything but that)? Appeal to the lowest common denominator, like at least one widely-read blog I can think of?Try something a little more personal? Or something a little more surreal that will still amuse, and possibly offend, but not alienate?
It's hard. Blogging is an entirely new medium, in its formative stages, tough to define. Yet there are some basic intuitive principles: the blogger, especially the oft-read blogger, is having a conversation with the world. Informality is the order of the day. In fact, it feels more like a conversation taking place in a crowded pub than anywhere else. Hundreds and hundreds of people, each with a tall glass of beer, are sitting at this enormous round earthy wooden table, the kind that just begs to be conversed around. There is a momentary lull in the banter, and all of a sudden everyone around the table -- including friends from New York, from London, friends and family from the North-East of England, and friendly strangers from Alaska to Zimbabwe -- is looking at me to provide the next topic. What would anyone do in that situation? Watch their mind go blank and fumble for a joke, a party trick, anything, all the while painfully conscious of how difficult it is to find interesting common ground in a group as diverse as that. Either that or work the table like a Vegas lounge lizard/West coast CEO: "Bill, good to see ya. Kate, baby, how ya been? Did you loose weight?"
It's a better metaphor than it might seem. The large wooden table is the network node you're sitting at right now, and it begs to be conversed around. The tall glass of beer is whatever pleasure you're taking out of this right now. Goofing off work? Surfing for fun and intellectual profit? Connecting with the world one last time before bed? And boy, is it noisy in here. So many tables! So many conversations! So many distractions! If I don't hook you right away, you'll take your glass and start mingling, without the slightest feeling of guilt on either side. I don't mind; I can't see you get up from the table anyway.
But I think I'm up to the challenge. I have the chutzpah to imagine (and ultimately, all blog writers must believe this) that I'm a pretty interesting guy to have a conversation with, especially in the medium my career is built around: the written word. I'm realistic enough about human interaction to accept that my conversation might stink some of the time. And hell, I seem to have built up something of a crowd around this table. Let's see if we can't have a little bit of fun here and if I can't become an even better conversationalist/blogger in the process. Or, to put it another way:
and
Look at me with all that asparagus, turning into a Californian health junkie.
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