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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.
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
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"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
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Daily Blah for... Monday, October 28, 2002
Mistakes at High Speed
My beach reading this year: You Shall Know Our Velocity, the novel by staggering genius Dave Eggers. A tale of twentysomething ennui that you might file in in the Easton Ellis and Coupland section of the library, but with enough twists to keep it amusingly original: the twentysomethings in question are trying to lose $80,000 they've received but don't believe they deserve, along with guilt over the death of their friend, in a variety of the world's most out-of-the-way countries. They're constantly mistaken, of course, but honest and forthright, not nihilistic and detached.
The most original thing about the book -- and I've drank just enough beer with Eggers to know he is obsessed with this -- is the printing and binding. For one thing, the narrative starts on the cover and continues on the inside cover with no break, no breath, no space for a signature-hungry title page. Otherwise the book looks very nineteenth-century, which leaves you nicely unprepared for the pictures of scribbled notepaper and such that jump out of the text without warning. Eggers has done this one on his own, printing a limited edition of 50,000, hunting down the perfect printer (which he found in Iceland), selling it through his website, and generally shunning the Barnes and Noble world so forcefully that you can almost taste his fat-walleted fear at how well his first book went down there.
But large publishing houses, for all their scary monolithic multinationalness, do take the time to thoroughly copy edit. Velocity is replete with mistakes. The most glaring of which is the loss of half a sentence that renders a picture unexplained, but there are lots of little ones that McSweeney's hasn't taken the time to acknowledge (which is not like the detail-obsessed Eggers). There are literals (road by where he means rode by) and hanging commas at the end of quotes. Maybe this is just my anal side coming out, but if I run into such things once I've invested myself in a book, I have to fight a very strong urge to put the thing down there and then. Each mistake seems to suck the authority of the author out of his work through a very wide straw.
Dave. Dude. You normally fret about this stuff. What happened?
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