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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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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... Monday, February 03, 2003
In Defense of Space
What a depressing moment this is for anyone with progressive interests in mankind's future. Here we are, the new century barely dawned, and we're slipping backwards. We're losing interest in exploring the space beyond our own tiny world, and we're gaining interest in new reasons to kill other humans. At the same time that serious and powerful men talk of war, other serious and thoughtful men begin to grumble that we should retire the Shuttle forever -- take a ten-year hiatus from space, abandon the International Space Station. It's just a boondoggle anyway; why should we keep risking lives up there anyway? To give the aerospace industry something to do?
No. In the words of Sir Edmund Hillary: because it's there. Space, that is. The great beyond. Earth orbit, and beyond it, the moon. Mars. The asteroid belt, with enough metallic wealth in just one of its rocks to make everyone on this planet richer than Bill Gates. There are so many good reasons to keep going -- poetic and capitalistic reasons. But the biggest reason is what we might become if we just stuck to the face of one planet and stopped having grand dreams: a small, petty, squabbling little race, intent on tearing itself apart. Then one day, once we've fully forgotten about the universe beyond our broken skies, it'll throw at us the same kind of mass destruction that came to visit the dinosaurs.
And that would really make for a depressing moment.
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