All publicity is good publicity

Our president, in a telephone call to Eddie Calvo, the governor of Guam:

“Eddie, I have to tell you, you’ve become extremely famous. All over the world they’re talkin’ about Guam, and they’re talkin’ about you, and I think you’re gonna — tourism, I can say this — in tourism, you’re gonna go up in, like, tenfold, with the expenditure of no money, so I congratulate you.”

Both the president and the governor seem to be operating under the mistaken show-biz assumption that all publicity is good publicity. I think that we’ve just passed some outer limit of what’s plausible in our political reality.

[The passage I’ve quoted begins at 0:57. My transcription.]

Fifty blog-description lines

Google’s Blogger calls the line that sits below a blog title the “blog description line.” I’ve added a hyphen. For years, the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s “Orange Crate Art” sat there: “Orange crate art was a place to start.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, using some word, phrase, or sentence from a recent post. And I began keeping track. Here are the fifty most recent blog-description lines, beginning in November 2016. I like looking at them as pieces of found language:

“Use more glue”
“Bleak enough”
“Low ceiling”
“NO TODO ESTÁ PERDIDO”
“Availability ‘Unknown’”
“A single instrument played with two hands”
“Specially crafted”
“Long overdue”
“Caroline, no!”
“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“”’”’”’”’”’”’”’”’”
“Hardly a horn”
“The missing pixel”
“Great for entertaining”
“Down the slippery slope”
“Save 7¢”
“Thinking especially of produce”
“Anne Frank is a Syrian girl”
“Oh, who listens to the lyrics?”
“#grabyourwallet”
“No challenge is to great”
“Elementary particles”
“Monkey, monkey, underpants”
“Old-fashioned posting”
“Fresh perked”
“Goodnight little house”
“I SAW IT WHATEVER IT WAS”
“Work dreams”
“Truck amok”
“My own notebook”
“$104,425”
“Correct to one-tenth of a second”
“Irrelevancies and solid objects”
“Certainly”
“What is something I’ve never heard of?”
“Superb views”
“Small and fast”
“Meal after meal, plus snacks”
“Probably wouldn’t hold up in court”
“Drink that coffee straight and lets get going”
“Begins talking”
“May transmit moods”
“Biff”
“‘CliffsNotes!’”
“‘I’m supposed to believe this?’”
“‘I’ll get it!’”
“Clickety clack, clickety clack”
“Keep showing up”
“Flout”
“Corrasable”
“It’s Mueller Time”

It’s still Mueller Time, but my, that coffee does smell good.

Related posts
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more

[If you read Orange Crate Art via RSS only, you’ve been missing out.]

Sardines, et al.

Fish and bigger fish: a sardine disco ball (or bait ball) comes to a bad end, as documented by the BBC. “Tuna. Their arrival changes everything.” Also sea lions, sharks, dolphins, and a whale.

Thanks to Matt Thomas at Submitted for Your Perusal for passing on the link.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Re: our improvising president

Earlier this week The New York Times reported that Donald Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” “was entirely improvised.” I fear that this characterization (which I quoted in a post, without comment) gives improvisation a bad name.

In a moment of crisis, improvisation may be urgently needed. I recall the WWII medic who used a pocket knife and fountain-pen cap to perform a tracheotomy. But a capable improviser doesn’t make it up from nothing: the medic of course would have been trained to perform a tracheotomy. Nor does a capable improvising musician just make it up: he or she creates in the moment from a lifetime’s experience as a listener and performer.

There is a marked difference between a resourceful, quick-thinking, practiced improviser and a would-be tough guy who flies by the seat of his pants. We should be careful not to equate improvisation with our president’s reckless bluster.

The aroma and the actuality

The laundry deliveryman will think twice about making a harmless observation when the private detective Albert Arnett (Walter Slezak) is around. Dialogue from Born to Kill (dir. Robert Wise, 1947):

“My, that coffee smells good. Ain’t it funny how coffee never tastes as good as it smells?”

“As you grow older, you’ll discover that life is very much like coffee: the aroma is always better than the actuality. May that be your thought for the day.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Kafka coffee

Still on the balcony. Karl Rossmann has been speaking with a young man who is studying on a neighboring balcony. He works in a department store by day and studies at night.


Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. from the German by Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2002).

Earlier in Amerika Karl and his comrades wash down lunch with “a black liquid that burned in one’s throat.” I’m guessing that’s not coffee but Coca-Cola.

Also from Amerika
The Statue of Liberty : An American writing desk : A highway : A bridge : Companions : Under-porters and errand-boys : In one door, out the other : Sardines

All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Dik Browne centennial

[Hi and Lois, August 11, 2017.]

Dik Browne (d. 1989) was born on August 11, 1917.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Sardines FTW

Karl Rossmann and Robinson are confined to a balcony while Brunelda and Delamarche do whatever in their apartment. Karl has been sleeping in a deck chair; Robinson, on the balcony floor. Robinson is hungry, and he asks Karl to move. There’s something under the chair:


Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. from the German by Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2002).

Also from Amerika
The Statue of Liberty : An American writing desk : A highway : A bridge : Companions : Under-porters and errand-boys : In one door, out the other

All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

A three-headed beast

[Zippy, August 10, 2017.]

God encounters the three-headed beast of parody, satire, and ridicule, as found in the lost book of Walter Lantz, Carl Anderson, and Marjorie Henderson Buell. The perfect touch here would have been no speech-balloon pointer for Henry, who never speaks (though he does in the 1935 short Betty Boop with Henry, the Funniest Living American).

Yes, those look like “some rocks” in the background.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts : All OCA Henry and Zippy posts : All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Please imagine the links in the form of a Venn diagram.

[Why “Marge”? That was her pen name.]

Our improvising president

In The New York Times:

President Trump delivered his “fire and fury” threat to North Korea on Tuesday with arms folded, jaw set and eyes flitting on what appeared to be a single page of talking points set before him on the conference table at his New Jersey golf resort.

The piece of paper, as it turned out, was a fact sheet on the opioid crisis he had come to talk about, and his ominous warning to Pyongyang was entirely improvised, according to several people with direct knowledge of what unfolded. . .  .

Among those taken by surprise . . . was John F. Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who has just taken over as White House chief of staff and has been with the president at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., for his working vacation.

I didn’t think there was much reason to expect that Kelly’s presence would temper Trump. I keep thinking of Maya Angelou’s famous observation: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

[The red is mine. Feel free to imagine an appropriate adverb between entirely and improvised, as I have.]