Matt Lauer needs fresh blood to spread on his bread and so it was announced Thursday that Carson Daly, a dreamy-eyed father of two with heady, rich blood, deep crimson like the stigma of a saffron crocus, will be joining the Today show, as a permanent feature, beginning Monday, September 16. The program will also unveil its new open floor plan set on the same day.

Daly will be the host of something called "The Orange Room." Today's press release describes the Orange Room as a "first-of-its-kind digital studio," "situated directly within the new Studio 1A" that will act as "the nexus point between the Today audience and the show." It will have a "casual, lounge-like setting" that sounds really cool to the 50-year-old man pitching this idea at a 9 a.m. social media integration meeting 14 months ago. It will be a "hub of emerging technology, equipped for everything from social media hangouts, to extended live-stream interviews with Today guests, analysis of real-time social data and reactions from the web, as well as the home for Today's original digital franchises." It kind of just sounds like a computer! Like a big orange iMac computer inhabited by Carson Daly.

As gatekeeper of the Orange Room, Daly will guard the bridge between worlds: "newsroom" and "living room," "audience" and "broadcaster," "living" and "dead." Those who have not the coin to pay him for passage, or whose bodies are left unburied, will be forced to wander the shores of the Orange Room for one hundred years.

(After rereading the press release multiple times, it seems like viewers will tweet things at Carson Daly and then he will respond to them on air? And sometimes Today will make celebrities sit in the Orange Room with Carson Daly? And technology will drip from the ceilings, snake up through the floorboards, and burst through the walls in an orgasm of dynamic, engaging content?)

In addition to working as bouncer for the Tangerine Boom Boom Room, Daly will continue to host NBC's The Voice as well as his "top-rated morning drive radio program on 97.1 AMP FM Los Angeles" that I guess he also hosts. He will also remain on staff at “Last Call" as an executive producer.

[Image via AP]