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 at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once. The first comes from a post about Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; the second, from Villette itself. The third? You got me. “Pflaaaap!”

“The estrade — okay, platform”
“The nobody you once thought me!”
“Get on with it”
“Post stuff”
“Space for thought”
“At work or at play”
“Walking through a wooded area”
“Brought to the screen on an excellent shoestring”
“When we started communicating, we were using pay
    phones”
“They grow up so fast”
“Click for larger turtles”
“The wet lead makes a darker line”
“Extensive parking facilities”
“Now with more Chock full o’Nuts”
“Stealing radio tubes and engaging in fisticuffs”
“Faculty-sharpener”
“A candy store of the imagination”
“E, G, D, A”
“Ontological underpinnings”
“Not a clue”
“Eyes open”
“And supplies”
“Did he write this himself?”
“Torn between ‘Huh?’ and ‘Wha?’”
“Qua qua qua”
“Where has Merrick Garland gone?”
“Redolent, redolent of coffee”
“Just ‘music’”
“Giveaway”
“Why a duck”
“Shirtsleeve weather”
“Dose folks”
“Check your local listings”
“Mid-century postmodern”
“America is minorities”
“Once a subfolder, always a subfolder”
“Truth matters”
“Pflaaaap!”
“Hey, what a cat, to dig Troy”
“67 + 92 + 25 = 184”
“Run rushes with Zanuck”
“I’m on it”
“Items in a series”
“Changeable signs”
“The reason is not because”
“Sound it out”
“I hope this blog post finds you well”
“Easy to install … see back of box”
“For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so”
“Shiny topics”

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