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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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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.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
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.
Praise for Daily Blah:
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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Finding the Flood, part 2
So once I realized my little hammock-sleeping bag cocoon wasn't protecting me, I moved back to my tent. A tent for which, based on two years of Baja experience, I had not bothered to bring a rain fly. But there was some protection from the palm trees, and if I moved the air mattress into one corner, I could avoid the puddles that were forming around my baggage. That earned me a couple of hours of sleep, until the wind started flinging the side of the tent I was sleeping next to in my face. I went and grabbed some large rocks to stick in the corners of the tent, and the wind started playing ping-pong with them.
What really irked me was that, through the mesh where the rain fly should be, I saw a perfect night -- stars and gently swaying palms. Not a hint of cloud, not a single dramatic thunderbolt. It seemed as if this were some microstorm parked on top of my tent. I could withstand this misery, I thought in my sleep-deprived state, if only nature would play by its own rules. What the hell was going on?
When morning came, little rivers had formed around the rocks and the clothes and the luggage on the tent floor. Outside, the deluge had decimated our little utopian community. Much of our food was ruined and the larger tents, like mine, had turned into sails. My friends Dan and Kathleen had, sensibly, packed theirs up at the first sign of wind and gone off to sleep in the back of their car. And still the rain came from what seemed like a clear sky. I did what I could to help and went off to where I should have spent the night -- in the hot tub, where your happily-soaked body barely notices the rain. This is what my friends Lisa and Stewart had done, and then returned to sleep in a tiny, dry, unmoved cheap-ass Wal-Mart tent. They were leaving the next day, so I promptly bought it from them and junked my sleepless sail.
It is a humbling thing to be surrounded by camping veterans when the environment turns harsh. To see that environment with new eyes. To learn that most of the later rain had actually come from the palm trees as the wind bounced off the canyon walls and whipped through them. And to understand how relatively lightly nature had let us off. The canyon was, after all, prone to flash floods. That was how it had been formed over the last few millennia. That was how these boulders, these chunks of mountain, had ended up scattered at our feet.
Then our new arrivals, who had trekked through the night and the worst part of the storm, brought word of a far more merciless act of nature. A tsunami had hit the coast of southeast Asia, they said. Many thousands were dead. Where, exactly? How bad? Was our storm connected somehow, the tail end of a massive meteorological upset in the Pacific? Was there worse to come? They didn't know. We didn't have the Google. All we had were snippets of news from travelers, like a medieval village. In the spirit of gallows humor, we visualized a tsunami rising up from the coast and smashing through the canyon, snapping palm trees like twigs and carrying us all in its irresistible wake.
The weather returned to its standard Baja beauty. We settled back into the slow rhythm of idylic isolation, albeit with the uneasy awareness of something having gone terribly wrong in the outside world. On New Year's Eve, I threw an impromptu masked ball in one of the papalas and we counted down to midnight with the aid of GPS. A couple of days later, we packed up and left. Waiting in line at the border crossing, Dan and Kathleen and I watched in horror as a cat became overly curious about the traffic and got knocked down dashing into the fast lane immediately to the left of us, its paws kicking helplessly in the air. In the midst of life, I thought, we are in death.
We drove to Santa Monica in pouring rain, bedded down at Souris and Sylvio's for the night and trawled the Internet. This was after the first round of tsunami stories and before the full scale of the disaster was known; there was a kind of lull, a calm before the media storm. That's why I wrote it was like finding a time capsule. I was hungry for news, but my usual sources were surprisingly nonchalant, as if the tsunami had happened decades ago in a far-off country. My best source for the disaster's true emotional magnitude was email -- in particular, my J-school class list, where I could watch my classmates try to wrap their heads around it as more information came in -- in real time, as it were.
The rain thrashed at the windows. I sat by the fire into the wee hours, thinking of how irked I had been by those tiny puddles and damp clothes in my tent while, on the other side of the ocean, a giant wave was in the midst of wiping out more than 150,000 lives. There was nothing I could do to express the mixture of gratitude, awe and dread I felt -- except to donate, and to start writing.
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