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 . . .

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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.

Just today I read an interesting comment from Car Title Loan Fast Cash Advance Payday Loan, on the post “The Most Insignificant Office:”

Hi there I was browsing Internet searching for car title loan fast cash advance payday loan and your blog regarding The Most Insignificant Office came my way.Very interesting! You really do know . . .

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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, . . .

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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 . . .

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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 . . .

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