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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, May 02, 2003
Holiday Reading
I'm way too much of a bookworm to be happy with just one or two tomes on vacation. It's all I can do to stop myself stuffing a suitcase full of novels and hefty nonfiction. Not that I'm a particularly voracious reader -- I just love dipping in and out of a wide selection of books, a chapter here, a chapter there. I'm promiscuous rather than prolific.
This time, however -- and this could be another sign of me getting old -- I have been very, very happy with just two books. The first is Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. This is a kind of compendium of travel philosophy, but anyone who knows Botton's style -- he wrote How Proust Can Change Your Life and the Consolations of Philosophy -- knows it's much more than that. The author is a past master at putting grand ideas together in a very unassuming style: nutritious, honest, immediate, heartfelt, funny, full of those amazing small details in life we recognize but repeatedly miss, and free of big words. I love the line from Botton's trip to Barbados where, after being unable to stop his mind chattering away about its worries on a tropical beach, he realizes "I had inadvertently brought myself." And the chapter on Ruskin is, as P. says, worth the price of entry all by itself.
The second book is Iain Pears' Instance of the Fingerpost. It's a historical and highly literate thriller set in the murky world of 1660's Oxford. A single murder is seen through four different and very biased eyes, Rashomon style, and in the course of things we get a glimpse of a proud and scared society half-trying to haul itself out of the muck of superstition. Remind you of anywhere?
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