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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... Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Adbusters Nails It
Out on a walking tour of Noe Valley, my new and still somewhat unfamiliar neighborhood, I was delighted to find the locals have seen fit to patronize one of those wonderful hole-in-the-wall magazine stores; the kind with just about worthwhile global periodical on sale within its cramped confines. Even though I'm the last person who needs more magazines, I felt the urge to show my support, and one of the titles I picked up was Adbusters.
Now I'd heard of Adbusters, primarily in connection with the cheeky-yet-serious commercial parodies at Adbusters.org and the post-Thanksgiving cultural meme Buy Nothing Day. But I'd never seen anything about a magazine before. Which makes sense, in a brain-taxingly perverse sort of way. How could an organization called Adbusters reach its target audience (ie. globally-minded, overly-earnest liberals like myself)? Only through word of mouth, and accidental discoveries in magazine stores. For Adbusters' editors, its pace of growth must be maddeningly slow.
Hence what I'm doing now: my bit to spread word-of-mouth. So let me ask you this: when was the last time you opened a glossy magazine and not had to leaf through pages of ads to get to the first article? When did you last see articles that looked as visually appealing as the ads? I've become depressingly accustomed to the mental struggle to ignore sumptuous full-page photographs of strangely alluring models with vacant eyes. It's like I need some kind of TiVo in my head. Fast-forward to the good stuff! Ignore the fluff! Adbusters was so refreshing in its nothing-but-content approach, I almost cried with relief. This is possible.
And the content itself? Yes, it has an agenda. Yes, sometimes it beats you over the head with that agenda. Sometimes it veers too far into visual cliche (Western model carrying baby juxtaposed with African famine victim carrying baby: my, have we seen that somewhere before?). But it all becomes worth it the moment you find a paragraph like the following, set against a towering, terrifying close-up of a lipstick, which just nails something I've felt like telling America for the past two years:
The risk that you will die from a terrorist attack is, on average, bundled in with such hazards as bee stings and lightning. There would need to be an attack with the magnitude of September 11 every second month just to keep up with the murder rate, and more than monthly to compare with auto accident fatalities ... In June, America suffered its worst single month of tornadoes on record -- a widely predicted outcome of global climate change. Some people feel a sense of urgency about these ongoing crises; we know these people as "paranoids." Then there are those who promote a perpetual fear of the invisible, unpredictable and largely unstoppable threat of terrorism. Those are the people that we call "patriots."
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