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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, October 18, 2002
The Tyranny of Stuff
Let me just clarify my comments yesterday, because I don't want to sound like a spoiled little rich kid. Yeah, when I started getting this kind of rubbish mailed to me, I thought it was pretty cool too. But soon it became routine, and I started to feel bad for the UPS and FedEx guys who keep jogging up and down my narrow, sloping side street just to bring me large packages full of NBA sweat. And then I got really irritated by the packaging itself -- all that useless cardboard and inexplicably inflated plastic bags and the most inanely irritating thing of all, polystyrene peanuts. Who invented those things? Who instilled them with a magnetic attraction to your clothing and to nice clean floors? Do they come pre-filled with static electricity? Does someone sit at the packing factory with a pile of tumble-dried laundry, carefully rubbing each peanut against a freshly-charged wool sweater?
But mostly, my problem is with the sheer volume. Note that I work at home; it's not like I can just leave the crap outside my office and have the cleaning staff take care of it. The packaging piles up faster than I can break it down and separate it into its recycling components. (As a good environmentalist, I am congenitally incapable of just trashing it.) Pretty soon I start feeling like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice: there are too many brooms and way too much water for this amateur magician. And they just keep coming. The sound of packing paper sliding against my letterbox -- lo, even now as I write it sounds! -- makes all the muscles in the back of my neck tense up. The pleasure of ripping open a package has lost most of its charm. It's a King Midas kind of situation: be careful what you wish for.
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