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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:
"It is fun to watch the author's navel-gazing joy." - Sunday Times (UK)
"It's really funny and informative." - Dave Eggers, author
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"Better than Xanax." - Lessley Andersen, journalist
"Dude, lay off the crack pipe." - Souris Hong-Porretta, gamesmith
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Daily Blah for... Monday, March 13, 2006
Got Gum?
Of course, being away from the US for two and a half weeks, having just re-acclimatised myself to the way Britain looks and sounds and smells and tastes, this means that everything appears strangely American when I come back. This process started rather earlier than I expected -- at the gate for my plane at Heathrow, in fact. I got there with about an hour to spare (very unusual for me, but my hosts insisted on me booking a very early taxi), sat down, cracked open my book, looked around, and discovered to my horror I was in some kind of Wrigley family dreamworld.
Every passenger, it seemed, was chewing gum: the granny with the botox and tan and fussy hair who got on first class, her extended brood who flew coach, the otherwise attractive redhead on the coach opposite me, all chomping manically away like Violet Beauregarde. The only mouths not clacking belonged to myself and the BA flight attendants. Never mind stiff upper lips; we Brits distinguished ourselves by our stiff lower jaws. I actually caught myself thinking this thought: "does everyone in America chew gum, and I just forgot?"
I first visited the US in 1992, and found out that its inhabitants were, for the most part, warm, welcoming, friendly, thoughtful, cheerful, experimental and optimistic. Later that summer, I worked my one and only crappy service job, serving tea and coffee to the tourists at a motorway services on the A1. Here I found out that American tourists were, for the most part, loud (their volume setting seemed to be several levels above the British norm), fussy, condescending, badly-dressed, insular, insecure, unwilling to try new things, and generally the most obnoxious and out-of-place of all our visitors.
This dichotomy between the American and the American abroad has puzzled me ever since. Why does the general wonderfulness of the people around me now not translate?
Is it a Jekyll and Hyde kind of situation, where paranoia and xenophobia take over, or is it more to do with changing the context they're seen in? And why, since only 20 percent of Americans have passports, is it not the best 20 percent -- quite the opposite, in fact?
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