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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... Thursday, November 10, 2005
The Case of the Missing Cases
The last few hours of now-precious sleeptime were this morning filled up with the certain knowledge that I was on a trip to England and had managed to lose both my suitcases.
I had done so in quite a lackadaisical manner, too. I was wandering around in a daze, getting on and off trains, when I looked down and noticed there were no suitcases in my hands. I responded, at first, only with dim bewilderment, the way you might if you were suddenly empty-handed and had been sure you were holding a pen. And then the question arose: but if this is the UK, I must have brough some baggage, right? I can't remember having deposited my stuff anywhere since I arrived, so where the hell is it?
Note to self: never, ever let such logical questions intrude on dreams. What happens? My subconscious responds with logical answers. You must have left them, it said. It called up images of my inventory to bolster this argument. See this, the large purple one? You left this on the plane. That small black one over there? You must have left that on some train or other.
I must have spent a couple of hours running around hunting suitcases. Yes, I know dreams feel like they last a lot longer than they actually do. This one, however filled me with such anxiety that I was constantly waking up -- but not to the point where I was aware it was a dream. The situation didn't really give me a shot of adrenaline, so I wasn't propelled into fully alert wakefulness, the kind that would allowed me to laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole affair. Why not? Because it wasn't a life-or-death loss. Clothes? Ahh, I'll get some more. Laptop? It's all backed up; I can buy another one. It sucks, but I'll survive.
Plus, they might have still turned up. And while there was still that chance, I was stuck in this anxiety dream. Stuck in corridors full of slick mechanical complaints executives, stuck with heavily-made up counter-clerk fembots who reeked with feigned ignorance about the whereabouts of my bags. The bastards were obviously lying to me.
That I could have taken, but the humiliation! Friends lost not one opportunity to laugh, to insinuate cluelessness, to say they'd always suspected I'd have lost my head if it wasn't screwed on. This should have been my tip-off: my friends, generally, are not the kind of people to say such things. Not my American friends, at least, and these were all American friends, inexplicably transported to the other side of the pond. Yep, that should have been a real tip-off.
And the moral of the story is, if you're going to look for logical inconsistencies in your dreamtime, look hard or don't look at all.
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