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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:
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Daily Blah for... Sunday, August 11, 2002
Sleepy in Seattle
Our plans shifted somewhat, and Dan, Kathleen and I found ourselves spending Sunday on the other side of the border, hiking it a hundred miles south of Vancouver earlier than anticipated. We're here at the suburban Seattle home of Kathleen's best friend and maid of honor (did I mention those two crazy kids are getting married?), Mikelann.
It wasn't that we weren't enjoying Vancouver. We loved the city -- did I mention the beauty of man-made lights in the mountains all around the north side of the city, which in the dark cloak of night look like some sort of heaven, hanging there in Jackson Pollock patterns in the sky? It was that our initial attempts to make contact with a Burning Man veterans, a global community of which the three of us are part, did not meet with much success. Probably our fault -- we left it late in the day to meet up, to fulfill the obligations of "just drop by anytime", and got stuck in the traffic and roadblocks attending a three-country fireworks contest downtown after dark. But what we found, after a brief and disturbing drive through the grim, heroin-addled underbelly of Hastings street to the suburbs on the eastern side, was a Marie Celeste house.
The lights were on, the door was open and a shower was running somewhere. Nobody answered our calls but two large dogs, who had an enjoyable barking session and stood on the front stoop daring us to venture further. Dan, who is not at all fazed by large dogs, did so, and announced that there was probably someone in the shower. Kathleen stood level with the dogs, holding our ground. I stood paralyzed halfway up the front steps, trying to remember whether you were or were not supposed to make eye contact with large dogs that are in a defending-territory mood.
As if on cue, the dogs stopped and wandered back inside, wagging tails, flush with the excitement of it all. There followed an awkward interview with a newly-showered woman in a towel, in which it was established that the person we had contacted, Patrick, was not at the residence. No further information was volunteered, but presumably she knew who we were talking about. At least, she didn't say "who's Patrick?" The situation was probably as weird for her as for us.
A little shaken up by the barking and the sense of intrusion, Dan and Kathleen and I repaired to Commercial Street for tequila, tapas and a herkin' big piece of New York steak. We discussed their wedding and my role in it (being an attendant, and hosting the after-party). We could have gone to the next location offered by the local community, where a party was apparently in full swing. But it was late, and we were all rather tempted to head across the border to the comfort of Mikelann's. We are, in other words, getting old. A long night of partying would no doubt have been fun, but we would have paid a heavy price in losing most of Sunday. Why not spend a full day in Seattle before my flight back to San Francisco on Monday morning? Why not beat the rush and long lines at the border that were bound to come at the end of a weekend? Two-and-a-half hours on the road was all it would take.
Heh.
At about 6am, in the misty Washington morning, I was jogged awake just as we were pulling up at Mikelann's door. The border crossing had taken longer than we'd expected -- so long that we were able to watch a good portion of my Survivor DVD in the car in the queue. What is it, guys, are we looking extra-hard for terrorists tonight? And ever since the border, the poor Westfalia had been trying to alert us to something by blinking a red light, unfailingly, four minutes after we'd stopped the last time. We stopped and checked the oil and stopped and changed the oil and stopped and opened up the engine and looked for tubes that were doing things they oughtn't. But nothing seemed to satisfy that blinking red light, the automobile equivalent of a baby crying. And we were like frazzled parents sitting at the crib. We let the poor thing limp along at 45mph, watched the rising temperature gauge like a baby thermometer, debated earnestly whether we were pushing it too far. It had turned out to be quite a night of adventure after all.
Should we have stayed in Vancouver? Would it have been even harder to push the Westy on that trip during the daytime? Was the point of it all that we ended up having a well-earned, slap-up breakfast of salmon omeletes and mocha milkshakes at Seattle's amazing Mae's Cafe? Who knows. But I try not to regret missed parties. Sometimes the road more or less traveled makes all the difference.
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