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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... Thursday, February 05, 2004
Making Names
Fascinating piece in the NYT’s Circuits section, which seems to be getting a little better every week, on spammers using random name generators. This would explain why they send out their pernicious little marketing mails from characters with such intriguing monikers as Purposes J. Xylophonist. (Spam seems to be generating all sorts of weird literary phenomena in its neverending war to get round software filters; witness the spammer who inserts portions of an obscure 19th century Russian novel into his messages).
Anyway, I was glad of the story for another reason: I didn’t realize until now that what I needed was a good random name generator. Writing science fiction in your spare time means having to come up with exotic-sounding names; as the world becomes increasingly diverse, it gets harder and harder to imagine a future in which the world’s movers and shakers, heroes and villains, have ethnically pure English names like “Jeff” or “Dan.” Names that once sounded sci-fi – like “Lex” or “Luke” or “Zack” – are now relatively commonplace; no doubt in the future they too will seem very white-bread. (Apropos of which, here is a website dedicated to the notion that white bread eaters will one day take over the world and exterminate “inferior peoples” who eat wheat and rye. You can find all sorts of ironic junk out there.)
I’d bought a book called “Baby Names: A New Generation” for this very purpose. It’s full of very ethnically rich 21st-Century sounding names. It also never fails to raise the eyebrows of anyone perusing my bookshelves. “Baby names, eh?” they smirk. “Something you want to tell us?” No, I’d blush, it’s for fiction-writing. “Yeah, sure.”
As with other reference books, however, it’s getting to be too much trouble. I barely open the dictionary or the thesaurus these days; in most cases, it’s simply easier, faster and more beneficial to go to Dictionary.com. Ditto with the Yellow and White pages. Will such hulking beasts, once the mainstay of a writer’s life, be gone from our libraries within a generation?
Anyway, I’m very excited that I no longer have to peruse the Baby Names book and pick at random. Now some distant server can do it for me all day long. Migdalia Pera! Suzan Longtin! Sheba Grambling! Ngan Cushingberry! What do they all mean? Who cares? All are somewhat obscure names culled from the most recent U.S. census, according to the Random Name Generator, slapped together in much the same way that the world’s ever-more heated ethnic melting pot will create our distant descendents. Want a character with an Albanian father and a Chinese mother? No problem; let me just head over to Behind the Name. Introducing: Jin Li Gjerg. I can’t wait to meet him. Isn’t the future a wonderful thing?
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