As comments to Kris’s excellent post on Williams Carlos Williams’s psych-out apology, a couple of people mentioned discussions of the literary cafe.

When Kris and I were in college, our friend Jatt Mohnson (that’s not his real name, so don’t try and google him) and some other folk came up with the idea of the literary cafe. Another friend Shlevi Shwilliams was back then an aspring chef, and we thought we should open a restaurant, where, get this, all the names would be literary references! The recent comments on this blog mentioned, for instance, “Williams Carlos Waffles” and “Sound and the Curry.”

 It’s me, so you know what’s coming up… Yep, exactly right, a contribution competition! Name a dish, and, if you’d like, append an explanation. My example, stealing one we thought up all those years ago:

Ezra Pound Cake (there’s already a food blog by that name, by the way): A pound cake with ingredients balanced so precisely, you want to call it fascist, a slice of the Ezra, more than just tasting fantastic, evokes the image of a perfect pound cake. Home made and decorated, we make only one cake a month. $25 a slice, reserved for friends only.

Anirban, in response to the last post, remarked that we at 12apostrophes have not received a lot of comments recently.

“Ha!” I say. We at 12apostrophes currently have 262 comments in a holding pattern (or “spam box”), waiting to be unleashed upon the blog-reading public.

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I have a bad habit of responding to people who are in no way talking to me.

The other day, the cashier said “Thanks so much!” and I turned around from the door and gave her a hearty “Thank you!” back, thinking, boy, she really appreciates a customer, even if it’s just a small cappuccino, only to see that she was, obviously, in conversation with someone she knew, about something else entirely.

The other other day, on a plane, I totally went the other way. I was at the window and in the center and aisle seats were two women, relatives or good friends, who went through each other’s bags and chatted easily.

Airplanes are getting smaller, I think, in tandem with my own bodily expansion, and the center-seat lady and I shared the armrest, arriving at an amount of arm-touching that we could live with. I turned to my magazine and later, as she went through her purse, I heard her quietly say, “I’m sorry.”

Was she apologizing to me? Had the arm touching increased to apology-necessitating levels as she jostled her purse? I hadn’t noticed, my mind having been occupied by my magazine and the improbable nature of jet flight.

She kept her gaze steadily into her purse, apologizing, it seemed, to her bag. What if I missed a conversation between her and her relative? What if her relative said, “My shoulder hurts,” and Mrs. Center Seat said, “I’m sorry?” and I only caught the last part?

In that half-second it took me to look up from my magazine, I raced through the above what-ifs, and as I turned to her, I hadn’t made up my mind yet as to what was going on. So what came out of my mouth was, “Hmmmm.”

Not, “Hmmmm?” like “Pardon me?” just the straight up declarative: “Hmmmm.” Like “Hmmmm, you’re odd.” Or “Hmmmm, I’m a dick.”

But by God I didn’t talk out of turn . . .

I can’t decide who Barack Obama should choose as his running mate.

I’m sure he’s on the edge of his seat, waiting for my call, but I’ve got nothing to tell him yet. Ken Rudin at NPR discusses the pros and cons of Mrs. Clinton, and a short-list of other possibilities, including Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, and Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, among others.

Who do you think it’s gonna be? Who do you think it should be?

The pertinent Clinton question is, will her supporters vote for Obama because they’re Democrats even if she’s not on the ticket? And the question’s corollary: could the vitriol against Clinton get-out-the-vote for the GOP when faced with their own lackluster (to some) candidate?

Although I think Clinton’s bad rap is mostly undeserved, folks do love to hate her, so I would make her the Health Care Czar and move on — betting that Dems love to hate Bush more, and that the chance to put a Democrat in the white house after eight years will get out the Clinton vote, while a less well-known Veep could help keep disaffected conservatives home.

Sebelius and Napolitano are excellent politicians (each was named by Time in 2005 as one of the five best governors in the U.S.), but I worry that the news story would be, in this race, that Obama picked a woman for a running mate that wasn’t Clinton (although Sebelius, along with Obama’s Kansas roots, might get the Dems those six electoral votes).

Jim Webb, the conservative-ish Senator from Virginia, is an interesting choice. He makes sense geographically, as Presidential candidates often try for a Veep from a different region of the country, and VA’s got thirteen electoral votes up for grabs — at a dead heat in the latest polling. Plus, he’s a decorated Vietnam veteran, which might bolster the ticket’s national security ethos against McCain, who is, of course, the more well-known veteran.

But, on the other hand, Webb’s conservative. (Ish.) Anti war but pro gun. Hard on corporations, but hard on immigration, too. It’s refreshing to see a politician from either side have a complex take on the issues, but, for me, I like it better when politicians take my side.

Webb brings up a good question; how important is the Vice’s politics anyway, considering, as VP John Adams, once said, that his or her job is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived?” If somebody helps electoral math, do their stances have to add up?

(A final word on Webb: although he’s pro gun and was Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, this does warm my heart — when Bush asked him, about his son serving in Iraq, “How’s your boy?” Webb said, “That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President.” Plus Phillip Thompson, the aide who was arrested for carrying Webb’s loaded gun, in a briefcase, into the Senate Office Building in March? A high school friend of my brother’s.)

Somewhere along the way, people decided to start saying “It is what it is.” No one knows why, but God knows everyone wishes they would stop.

I started hearing it last year some time, and I knew “it is what it is” had really made it when it appeared on the American version of the office (B. J. Novak, as Ryan, throws it in a rant filled with other business platitudes).

Soon after, I heard my actual boss say it on a conference call. Then, a client at work. Now, as of last week, my therapist, from whom I expected more (Me: “Why are the flying monkeys talking to me?” Her: “It is what is is.”)

Could any phrase, in the history of language, signify less? A is equal to what A is equal to. “It is what it is” could be summarized thusly: “it.”

My friend Ian pointed out another recent offender: “Going forward.” This is used, very, very often in my experience, at work to propose an action, for example: “Going forward, let’s make money instead of losing it.”

You don’t need the “Going forward” part. We’re certainly not going to do things previously. Proposing or mandating action is rarely effective when applied to the past. “Looking backward, let’s sell more ads yesterday.” Actually, I wouldn’t put that past the rank and file of managers I’ve met, but, you know, “time travel is impossible as time travel is impossible.”

“It is what it is” reminds me of our neighbor Patrick in Mississippi who would say “for obvious reasons.” But he never left well enough alone, and was compelled to then spell out his reasons, no matter how obvious. The one Pulao and I remember the most was when he got his pet rabbit, Floppy, whom he had named “for obvious reasons,” which were (obviously) that the rabbit grew up in a flophouse.

Salma passed her dissertation defense! Congratulations!

Think all the way back to college. Do you remember William Carlos Williams “note-I-left-on-the-refrigerator” poem?

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

Pulao and I listened to a podcast of This American Life from three weeks ago, an episode called “Mistakes Were Made.” In it, among other things, are a few riffs on “This Is Just to Say” — which is, according to This American Life, one of the most spoofed poems around.

I want to do that, I said. I bet you do, too.

They key to spoofing “This Is Just to Say,” This American Life pointed out, is to not be sorry.

Come up with one and post it in the comments. I’ll go first:

I’m Just Saying . . .
by Kris

If you didn’t
want me
to eat all
the cupcakes

why would
you leave them in the fridge?
Don’t tell me
you were
saving them for breakfast.

Nobody
would eat cupcakes for breakfast –
too sweet
and I ate them already.

This year, Minnesota is the third-worst state for drunk driving. We got beat only by Wisconsin and North Dakota. In fact, the top five are all in the upper Midwest: WI, ND, MN, NE, and SD.

In Minnesota, nearly 24% of people in a survey admitted to driving drunk, compared to a national average of 15%, and the low of Utah’s 10%. This means one of two things:

1. At 6:30 in the morning and 14 degrees below zero, the only way to gather enough courage to get out of bed and layer yourself in wool and fur for the reward of scraping ice off your car and going to work in the dark is to start the day with a six-pack.

2. People in the upper Midwest are honest to a fault.

I can see arguments for either one of these contributing factors. How else to keep your sanity intact during the long, cold winter than to pour a little sunshine in your glass? Q.E.D., it snowed yesterday. Yesterday. When T.S. wrote that April was the cruelest month, he meant something else altogether, but we understand him fine up here. I would drive drunk right now if the roads weren’t so icy.

Other folks in other climes, in tropical locales like Pennsylvania and Kentucky, have had whole springs; plants have grown, flowered, and moved on; barbecues have already become passé. In Minneapolis, we just danced around the first ragweed to poke a little green through the yard.

The other argument is even simpler:

Survey: Have you driven drunk in the last 12 months?
Minnesotan: Oh ya, you betcha.

From last year’s Strike Rally at the University of Minnesota

Our cat, Hank, now appears over at www.catonmydesk.com. Internet star! CatOnMyDesk.com is a site for pictures of — you guessed it — cats on desks.

Perusing the pictures, you’ll notice that Hank is the only cat standing on a desk. The rest of the cats are sleeping on desks. Lazy bums.

CatOnMyDesk.com is another good example of the true power of the world wide web at work; that is, disseminating funny pictures of cats. If you missed ICanHasCheezburger.com and the entire lolcats phenomenon, you’re in for a browser treat today at work, where you previously had many important tasks planned.