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 enclosed Van Dyke’s words. The result is an array of odd slogan-like bits of language.

Here are the latest fifty. Some are immediately familiar to me; others are now mysteries. “Improvisational jazz”? A farcical phrase from Jonathan Turley’s testimony in Donald Trump**’s first impeachment. “Not making cowsheds, I’ll bet”? Ya got me. See if you can spot the salty line:

“The one I thought of”
“A slightly belated Happy National #2 Pencil Day to all”
“Nowheresville my eye”
“What’s an ethos?”
“Applying for a learner’s permit tomorrow”
“I would like you to do us a favor though“
“My great and unmatched wisdom”
“At the kitchen table”
“I’m in. You?”
“I take notes”
“Patience and Fortitude”
“I keep notes”
“Improvisational jazz”
“Online header of a sort”
“And you are?”
“I was just leading a workshop on ornament making”
“Typing 2020”
“Ploks”
“If the truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost”
“Whale, oil, beef, hooked”
“Wait a minute, that’s me!”
“Not making cowsheds, I’ll bet”
“For practical purposes”
“Stay home if you can”
“Stay home if your life and work allow it”
“In a parallel universe”
“The day of small things”
“SITEEMO”
“One-way aisles”
“Me travel?”
“Aiieee!”
“Door stop, essentially”
“You’ve reverted to the Blogger legacy Interface”
“TRUMP = DEATH”
“Vote as if your life depends on it”
“We are waiting for Brünnhilde”
“Hurry, January”
“Georgia Blue”
“More energy, better sleep, fewer typos, less despair”
“Then, voyager”
“Weeks of inward winter”
“Research outfit”
“A single window”
“Dishes of fruit from remembered suppers”
“Somebody was here”
“Still on its display card”
“Spaghetti and coffee at midnight”
“Not one real character concealed under a false name”
“Scroll!”
“The desk fills the screen”

It does.

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?