Everything but the kitchen sink

Hillary Clinton's campaign is said today to be throwing the kitchen sink at Barack Obama. The New York Times quotes a Clinton aide's description of "a 'kitchen sink' fusillade." The sink has now made it to headlines: "Struggling Clinton throwing 'kitchen sink' at Obama."

The idiom though involves everything but the kitchen sink, the point being that the kitchen sink cannot be removed and hurled through the air, even when one is intent upon throwing everything at hand.

Related post
The kitchen shink (sic)

World Saxophone Quartet on YouTube

A YouTube treasure, in four parts: the World Saxophone Quartet performing for schoolkids in Lovejoy, Illinois: James Carter (tenor), Greg Osby (alto), Oliver Lake (alto), Hamiet Bluiett (baritone). The first tune is "Hattie Wall" (Bluiett), the WSQ's theme; the third is "For the Love of Money" (The O'Jays): 1, 2, 3, 4.

And one more clip, with the original quartet: Julius Hemphill (alto), David Murray (tenor), Oliver Lake (sopranino and alto), Hamiet Bluiett (baritone). Yes, that's David Sanborn (who studied with Hemphill) introducing the WSQ on network television.

YouTube theme song

"It's a blessing for mankind, that's for sure."

Ninety-two-year-old Irving Fields, he of Bagels and Bongos, has written a YouTube theme song.

"YouTube Dot Com" (YouTube)
The making of "YouTube Dot Com" (YouTube)

(Thanks, Ben!)

National Eating Disorders Awareness Week

[Click to enlarge and read.]

National Eating Disorders Association

A New York Times correction

The Corrections page of the New York Times is semi-reliably entertaining:

An article last Sunday about Sandra Boynton, the children's book author and greeting card creator, quoted incorrectly the final part of a passage from her book “Barnyard Dance!” It is “Bow to the horse. Bow to the cow. Twirl with the pig if you know how,” not “Bow to the horse if you know how.”

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A correction
A correction (Yes, another)
Fit to print
"I'll take the soup"
Men and women?
Soy milk, New York Times, and Wikipedia
VINYL GAFFE, LEDDY CHARGES

En mi casa toman Bustelo

I learned about Café Bustelo from UHF television — from commercials on New York's WNJU, channel 47, which served New York and New Jersey's Spanish-speaking population.¹ As a college student, I watched 47 for the hilarity of professional wrestling (in English, with a very young Vince McMahon, and in Spanish, from Mexico) and the strangeness of Walter Mercado. I can still recite the station's mid-1970s slogan: "¡Siga adelante con su nuevo Canal cuarenta y siete, el canal de los grandes y espectáculos!"

I latched onto instant Bustelo back then as my coffee of choice — instant espresso! Back then, one could find Bustelo — "Cuban coffee" — in any bodega or supermarket in the NY-NJ area. Here in downstate Illinois, I buy instant Bustelo at an international grocery. Bustelo is especially good with Vanilla Silk (café con leche de soja, I guess), and it's much cheaper than instant Medaglia D'Oro.

The Bustelo commercials I saw featured a hearty men's chorus, singing "Bustelo, Bustelo, si sabe café," followed by the plaintive voice of one little girl: "En mi casa toman Bustelo; en mi casa toman Bustelo." En mi casa, they (I) still do.

Bustelo Blends (Rowland Coffee)

[Translations: Keep watching (or more literally, follow onward with) your new Channel 47, the channel of the great and spectacular! Coffee with soy milk. Bustelo, Bustelo, if you know coffee. In my house they drink Bustelo; in my house they drink Bustelo.]

¹ What? You don't remember UHF? Oh, okay.

Inclement weather

"Inclement weather": such a dowdy term. Does anyone outside American education use it?

The oddity of inclement just prompted me to look it up. From the Oxford English Dictionary:

Not clement.

1. Of climate or weather: Not mild or temperate; extreme; severe. (Usually applied to cold or stormy weather; rarely of severe heat or drought.)

2. Not merciful or kindly; pitiless, harsh, severe, cruel. Obs.

No. 2 is the older (1621) meaning of the word. The first sample sentence for no. 1 (1667) comes from Paradise Lost: "To shun / Th' inclement Seasons, Rain, Ice, Hail and Snow." So it appears that we may credit John Milton for the anthropomorphized weather that results in school closings unto this day. (Thanks, Milton.)

And to Winter, who has been showing us no clemency this month, I say "Mercy, Sir!"

Overheard

No doubt someone whose class was canceled:

"Dammit — I woke up for nothing!"

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Marianne Moore magic

Consider the title and first two lines of Marianne Moore's "The Fish" (1921):

The Fish

wade
through black jade.

The first line of the poem performs two kinds of magic: it reveals what seemed to be a singular noun as a plural, and it gives these fish legs. To wade: "to step in or through a medium (as water) offering more resistance than air" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). The second line adds another bit of magic, transforming the fishes' medium into one that offers more resistance than water. The water turns to stone via a metaphor whose visual accuracy is surprising: luminous, milky-black water does indeed look like black jade.

Another kind of magic: Moore's idiosyncratic sense of poetic form helps to slow down the movement that the sentence tracks. Compare:

The fish wade through black jade.

And

The FISH

WADE
through BLACK JADE.

The short lines and extreme enjambment enact a deliberate, stubborn progress, four stresses in six syllables.

These strategies of metaphor, sound, and form return again and again in a poem that turns out to be not about the fish but about movement, difficulty, color, light, water, rock, survival, and time.

I never read Marianne Moore as a student: her poems must have seemed slight to an academic community caught up in Yeats' mythic self-absorption and Eliot's mythic impersonality. Now I'm catching up. You can read the poem via the link, Until the Real Thing Comes Along:

The Fish (via Google Book Search)

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Q and A (What's in Moore's handbag?)

Product placement in tween lit

Susan Katz, publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, on product placement in Mackenzie Blue, a new fiction series for 8- to-12-year-old girls:

“If you look at Web sites, general media or television, corporate sponsorship or some sort of advertising is totally embedded in the world that tweens live in. It gives us another opportunity for authenticity.”

Yes, authenticity.

The novels' author, Tina Wells, is "chief executive of Buzz Marketing Group, which advises consumer product companies on how to sell to teenagers and preteenagers." Read more:

In Books for Young, Two Views on Product Placement (New York Times)