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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... Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Attack of the Malfunctioning Wardrobes
The week after 9/11, the Onion ran one of its most compellingly truthful stories ever. Above a Photoshopped collage of the collapsed towers and Britney Spears with a python around her neck ran the headline: “A heartbroken nation longs to care about stupid sh*t again.” Well, it’s been a long, hard two-and-a-half years, but the nation finally got its wish on Sunday thanks to a hardworking temporary Superbowl employee named Janet (Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty). I didn’t see it myself, but apparently football fans who sat and guffawed through beer ads featuring flatulent horses and crotch-biting dogs were shocked to their bones by a one-second shot of a partially-obscured breast. And an administration that dithered for weeks over whether to investigate its own Weapons of Mass Destruction hype has pounced like a rabid Las Vegas tiger to probe another kind of WMD: Woeful Mammary Display.
And now it seems the breast in question has officially become the most replayed moment in TiVo history. I don’t know whether to cheer all this free exposure -- if you’ll pardon the term -- for my beloved TiVo, or bemoan the fact that there are so many TiVo owners with so much desire to see random acts of slight nudity. We’re having a hard enough time getting the masses to accept and understand TiVo as it is without painting its owners as geeky hard-up soft porn-seekers.
Oh, and has everyone forgotten the real Superbowl outrage: that CBS refused to air MoveOn.org’s innocuous “issue” ad featuring children working hard to pay off the President’s deficit? How very convenient. Karl Rove must be drinking a silent toast to Janet (Miss Jackson to him).
I know not the slightest thing about Justin Timberlake, meanwhile, but I do admire his chutzpah in describing the incident as a “wardrobe malfunction.” As brazen spin about something that millions of people saw you do on live television (red-handed, so to speak), it ranks up there with Diego Maradona’s famous comment on his game-winning handball for Argentina in the 1986 World Cup: “it was the head of Maradona and the hand of God.” Perhaps Timberlake should have followed suit and claimed those were the deity’s digits doing the ripping, just to really infuriate middle America. They’d be burning his effigy in Birmingham right about now.
In any case, the phrase is now seeping into the American lexicon, and I fully expect it to see it being used in legal defense circles to beat indecent exposure raps. “Your honor, it may seem like my client spends his days in public parks wearing nothing but a raincoat and tennis shoes. But in actual fact he is the unfortunate victim of a malfunctioning wardrobe. We plan to file a countersuit against Ralph Lauren.”
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