Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking back at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once, sometimes not. “Who are we as a country?”: Jonathan Capehart, on PBS, November 5, 2024. “Yes”: my mom’s last word to me. “Trying to work off some ‘writing’ on you”? I had to look it up.

“Pineapples don’t have sleeves”
“Puzzled over”
“Off the streets and out of trouble”
“Minus glases”
https://vote.gov/register
“Do not obey in advance”
“Forward”
“It is never too late to change the future”
“You just open it up and you go”
“Could be screens”
“Constantly but quietly in motion”
“Who’s shining you?”
“No kings”
“WWDFWD?”
“I think starting an essay with a quote is a bit clichéd”
“No last-sale date”
“A bag with different things in it”
“Orange door hinge”
“On hiatus”
“Yes”
“Bananas”
“Love and mercy”
“Trying”
“Looking out”
“Across an imaginary transom”
“It doesn’t bend on its own”
“Two words”
“Like we used to say as kids on the playground, it’s a free country”
“Blërg”
“Writes a chronicle”
“The beauty of fall is the beauty of things fading away”
“Too”
“Later, who knows?”
“Oh yeah?” “Yeah!”
“M’onderstanding”
“Overthinking”
“Early blogger energy”
“Trying to work off some ‘writing’ on you”
“Oh, I know that one”
“Look at this”
“Squirrels do bark”
“Take me to your simulacrum”
“Yes, Virginia”
“Tonight we bake”
“Not to be confused with fictional characters”
“Such as”
“Part-beagle”
“Wade through weeks”
“Is this the same morning, or a different morning?”

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not : Still more items in a series : And still more

Stefan Zweig’s Salzburg mansion for sale

From The New York Times:

The Paschinger Schlössl, the former home of Stefan Zweig, the Jewish Austrian writer, unexpectedly appeared for sale with the French luxury real estate company Le Figaro Properties in June. The mansion has long been meaningful to Salzburg, Austria, which is also home to the namesake six-week festival celebrating classical music, opera and theater now in its 106th year.

Hidden within two acres of wooded parkland on the Kapuzinerberg, a city mountain in Salzburg, this stately home has belonged to Wolfgang Porsche since 2020. The 83-year-old German car magnate purchased it from the same local merchant family, the Gollhofers, to whom Zweig’s first wife Friderike sold it, for 63,000 shillings, in 1937.

The castle, which cost Porsche €8.4 million ($9.59 million), is now priced at $14,540,900. It has been beautifully restored. Exactly what prompted the sale remains unclear. In 2025, the city controversially granted Porsche planning permission for a private access road and parking space tunneled into the mountain. The current listing highlights this permission, should its future owner act on it, as “an unparalleled feature within historic Salzburg.”

A longstanding campaign for the city or the University of Salzburg to secure the property for public use has been revived. A petition underscoring Zweig’s legacy in promoting “cosmopolitanism, understanding between nations, and peace in Europe” has garnered more than 6,000 signatures from actors, playwrights, musicians and others. When asked if the university stands a chance to purchase the property, Bernhard Fügenschuh, the school’s rector, said in a phone interview that it depends on the seller, but he hoped so.

Zweig fled Austria for England in 1934. In 1940 he left England with his second wife for the United States. He left the United States for Brazil in 1941, where he committed suicide in 1942. The dramatic film Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (dir. Maria Schrader, 2016) is a brilliant portrait of a writer lost in exile. Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (1943) is eerie reading in these times.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zwieg posts (Pinboard)

Adam Kinzinger’s Substack

Like Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, This Is Adam Kinzinger is a useful daily digest of news. I keep both in my RSS reader, where they don’t get lost among e-mails.

Profs, busted

From The Chronicle of Higher Education : “Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They’re Defending Themselves.” An excerpt:

Two professors recently admitted to using generative AI to assist them in writing opinion articles for major publications, igniting a debate over the standards faculty should be held to in their public writing.

The Financial Times added an addendum to a guest essay published August 13, disclosing that its author, Ricardo Hausmann, a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab, had used AI to “condense” his piece condemning President Trump’s tariffs, in violation of the outlet’s policy. The Financial Times is conducting an “editorial review process” to evaluate the piece in more detail, a spokesperson said in a statement. Hausmann said in an email that he hadn’t been aware of the policy when writing the article, adding that he believes AI is becoming too common for policies like that to exist.

On Tuesday, The Daily Californian reported that Zvezdelina Stankova, a teaching professor in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley, had used AI to edit an August 15 San Francisco Standard opinion article. The piece argued that the UC system was admitting underqualified students because it doesn’t consider standardized testing, and cited the fact that some students use AI to write admissions essays as a reason to bring back such requirements. A spokesperson for The Standard said in a statement that it allows AI use to assist with writing, but expects that “humans are behind every article.” The piece reflects Stankova and her colleagues’ “original analysis, research, and expertise,” the spokesperson added.

Hausmann violated the outlet’s guidelines; Stankova didn’t. But beyond a newspaper’s code of conduct, what ethical responsibility — if any — do professors have when it comes to AI in their public-facing work, given that students are generally expected to refrain from using it to write?

The justifications from Hausmann and Stankova that the article goes on to detail are, well, something. What’s the harm? And everybody’s going to be doing it anyway.

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[I’m not interested in focusing OCA on AI in academia. But I couldn’t pass up this item in the news.]

Misheard

Honest. On NPR: “Your donation supports the muse and information we rely on.”

Related reading
All OCA misheard posts (Pinboard)

“That’s very perspicacious of you”

Today’s Dustin : Kevin reads a thesaurus. See also these two — 1, 2 — Zippy strips.

Related posts
Beware of the saurus : Rewording : Rogeting

Mutts vibrations

[Mutts, August 23, 2026. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Mutts takes up a great American song. I’m glad I didn’t miss the title (aka “throwaway”) panel.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts and Mutts posts (Pinboard)

[I know: “Good Vibrations” did not appear on the Pet Sounds album. For anyone who needs it: the album cover.]

Writing and AI at Harvard

At The Atlantic (gift link), Tyler Austin Harper writes about “Why the Closing of Harvard’s Writing Center Matters.” He suspects that Harvard’s decision will give other schools permission to close their writing centers:

The decisions that Harvard makes create a permission structure for other institutions to follow suit — after all, if one of the most venerable schools in the country doesn’t need a writing center in order to be “elite,” why would a public university, or a regional liberal-arts college, or a community college need one?

I see it differently: I think that emphasizing the presence of a writing center might offer a lower-tier school a smart and snarky way to present itself to prospective students. On a campus tour, for instance: “This building also houses our writing center. As you may know, Harvard University recently got rid of its writing center. Unlike Harvard, we still have a writing center, because we believe that students benefit from working on their writing with another human being, not with a chatbot.”

As Harper points out, Harvard is all in on AI. A development that just made the news, postdating his essay: Harvard is now selling a course on entrepreneurship “taught” by AI replicas of business faculty (The New York Times , gift link). Only $699!

The prose of Harvard’s unrelated Teach with Generative AI page (AI-generated prose?) does not inspire confidence. For instance:

Harvard has consistently tried to embrace new technology across our classrooms, residential and virtual. GenAI has been no different.

It’d be Harvard that’s been no different, not AI.

Behold, a fused sentence:

Faculty and students have access to a range of tools. Some of these tools are free and open to all faculty, students and staff behind Harvard Key (Harvard Sandbox) other tools require a license or approval.

My favorite:

Out of this there have been several learnings worth considering.

And I’m sure there’ll be many more.

Another Yankee Diner

[2494 Flatbush Avenue, Marine Park, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Did you know that there’s a Brooklyn neighborhood called Marine Park? I didn’t. Did you know that at one time there were at least Yankee Diners in Brooklyn, this one, the one above, and a third whose tax photograph seems to be unavailable? I did.

The nameless dining room to the left looks (emphasis looks) as if it was part of the Yankee enterprise. And notice the bakery/restaurant to the right. And those cars. There’s more food on this block, coming soon.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Tell me you’ve never read my blog without telling me that you’ve never read my blog

In today’s mail:

We recently came across Orange Crate Art — a quietly artful personal blog.

That's exactly the kind of artful personal blog we built [redacted] for — an AI content team that keeps creating for you. Tell it what to make — newsletters, videos, podcasts, or articles — and how often; it researches fresh sources, picks what matters, and produces editable content on schedule, so morning musings draft with the coffee.

And so on.

I replied with a link to my Pinboard list of OCA posts tagged AI (three of those posts are on the front page right now) and three more words: “No, no, no.”

[“Morning musings”? And they “draft with the coffee”? Seriously?]