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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.
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 25, 2005
The Chickens Are Falling!
Sitting on my desk is a bobble-headed doll of Chicken Little, a tchotchke sent by Disney to promote its upcoming Christmas movie. Next to it, laid out like a mosaic, are half a dozen magazines that just happen to be open to articles on avian flu.
Darlings, the ironies are just legion.
There's the one Disney would probably prefer we consider -- that we're all Chicken Littles at the moment, running around screaming about a metaphorical sky falling (or, more literally, that a terrible pandemic will drop on wings from the sky).
But I prefer to savor the schadenfreude. Here's Disney hoping for a big holiday hit to save its moribund animation division, kicking into gear a marketing campaign that has been meticulously planned for years, ordering up thousands of these bobble-headed bird dolls from factories in China.
And what happens? All of a sudden, bird becomes a dirty word. Chicken becomes even dirtier. Chickens from Asia are practically obscene. It's the worst possible timing for the marketers at Disney, and the fear is spread so far and so worldwide there's nothing their campaign can do to combat it, not even with a blank checkbook. Who the hell wants to see a cute movie about chickens right now? It's as if bad batches of Wensleydale had started killing off seniors with food poisoning right before the release of Wallace and Gromit.
Or, to take another disastrous example from recent history, it's as if Microsoft launched a campaign for Windows XP right after 9/11 that featured happy people flying through the air. Which, of course, they did. The timing was so dreadful that Microsoft decided there and then never to launch another operating system.
I'm kidding, of course, but that would explain the dire delay in releasing Windows Vista -- the early marketing photo for which looks unfortunately like it was shot on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Why don't they just rename it Windows H5N1? Tagline: It'll Slay You!
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