"But as you sit there sipping wine and eating pork belly, watching a marathon of The Sopranos — which sounds like a very nice evening..."

"... keep in mind that the distance between you and some imagined figure pounding Mountain Dew and Quarter Pounders while watching hours of Pawn Stars is not so vast."

Willa Paskin, tweaking the snobbish consciences of Slate readers who may have lost touch with old-fashioned it-will-rot-your-brain snobbery about watching too much television.

"It is my belief — my BELIEF in big letters — when people don’t make good choices..."

"... you can yell as loud as you want to at me about this is my body and I do what I want to do with my body, so OK yes you can. But now you are spreading it along generationally so that your daughter and grandchildren have it and everybody’s doing it. It becomes a term of apathy because people say my father had it, my aunt had it. People then ask you, 'What your mother die of?' 'Diabetes.' 'Grandmother?' 'Diabetes.' These things don’t have to happen if you make the correct choice."

Bill Cosby, defending Mayor Bloomberg's soda law.

"But did she drink Diet Dr. Pepper while chain-smoking? I need my villains made clear, though preferably without an Ouija board scene."

Matthew Sablan, exemplifying excellence in blog commenting, on a post this morning, satirizing Hillary and Washington Post journalism by appropriating material from yesterday's post about moviemaking and NYT journalism.

"Lil Wayne Puts Mountain Dew in Crisis Mode."

"How much street cred is too much?"

The family [of 1955 murder victim Emmett Till] was not satisfied with [Lil Wayne's acknowledgement of the offense they took at his lyric likening Till's murder to sexual enthusiasm] and instead called for a meeting with executives at PepsiCo. At the same time, a publicist for the family said, they found an additional way to pressure Mountain Dew: to bring to public attention an offensive Mountain Dew video ad created by the hip-hop producer and rap artist known as Tyler, the Creator, that featured a battered white waitress, bandaged and on crutches, trying to identify her assailant from a lineup that included African-American men and a goat.

What niche of meaning does each particular soda occupy? The Mountain Dew brand was always transgressive:

"Mountain Dew" was originally Southern and/or Scots/Irish slang for moonshine (i.e., homemade whiskey).... Using it as the name for the soda was originally suggested by Carl E. Retzke at an Owens-Illinois Inc meeting in Toledo, Ohio, and was first trademarked by Ally and Barney Hartman in the 1940s. Early bottles and signage carried the reference forward by showing a cartoon-stylized mountaineer. 

Mountaineer? That's Wikipedia text. I guess someone edited "hillbilly," trying to get to something more decorous. To my ear, a "mountaineer" is "A person who engages in or is skilled at mountain climbing" — and that is the 5th definition in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. I'm surprised to see the first definition is: "A person who is native to or lives in a mountainous region; (occas.) such a person regarded as ignorant, uncivilized, or uneducated; (U.S.) a hillbilly." This usage goes back to Shakespeare:

a1616   Shakespeare Cymbeline (1623) iv. ii. 102   Yeeld, Rusticke Mountaineer.
a1616   Shakespeare Tempest (1623) iii. iii. 44   When wee were Boyes Who would beleeue that there were Mountayneeres, Dew-lapt [etc.].

The word "hillbilly" — "A person from a remote rural or mountainous area, esp. of the south-eastern U.S." — is only traced back to 1900:

1900   N.Y. Jrnl. 23 Apr. 2/5   In short, a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.

Has anyone ever before written a blog post that went from Lil Wayne to Shakespeare so quickly? I don't know, but I'm interested in how the product's branding evolved from low-class white to low-class black. But the branding has always been low-class. How do you do that well and remain current when there are high-minded groups getting press, demanding apologies, stirring up outrage?

IN THE COMMENTS: richlb said:

...poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed...

All right, then. That settles it.

"A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese... has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation."

"For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success."

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Ironically, Bruzzese sounds like a villain in a movie about making movies. Cue the hisses and boos:

“This is my worst nightmare” said Ol Parker, a writer whose film credits include “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” “It’s the enemy of creativity, nothing more than an attempt to mimic that which has worked before. It can only result in an increasingly bland homogenization, a pell-mell rush for the middle of the road.”

Like any movie villain, he implores us to see it his way and sympathize:

“I understand that writing is an art, and I deeply respect that,” he said. “But the earlier you get in with testing and research, the more successful movies you will make.”...

“All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful,” he said, taking a chug of Diet Dr Pepper followed by a gulp of Diet Coke and a drag on a Camel. “I’m here to tell it like it is: Some babies are ugly.”

But as our villain delivers these lines, the heavy-handed moviemakers, who think we might be too dumb to get it, have him carry out ludicrous stage-business gestures — taking a chug of Diet Dr Pepper followed by a gulp of Diet Coke and a drag on a Camel — to make sure we understand he's the bad guy.

He's saying "Some babies are ugly," but he's ugly. Get it????!!!!

"Rapper Lil Poopy’s dad cleared of abuse."

"Brockton police filed an abuse and neglect complaint against the 9-year-old rapper’s father, Luis Rivera, in February, saying that letting the fourth-grader rhyme about 
cocaine and risque themes amounted to abuse."

To get you up to speed on why this complaint was filed — perhaps you, like me, had never even heard of Lil Poopy — here's video and a time-stamped list of the worst things about it. Note that a much-repeated line is: "Coke ain't a bad word it's only soda."

0:44  Coke is a bad word. Maybe not like your more high-rent bad words, but 9-year-olds have little business drinking soda, much less rapping a whole song about it. What rhymes with flax seed? Also: Mayor Mike Bloomberg would probably, rightly, beg to differ with your assertion.

0:45  Ohhhh, you’re telling me people are saying the "coke" thing is a reference to cocaine? Well that's not good....

1:38  Again, you should not be drinking soda, Lil Poopy....

Bloomberg's ban on big sodas is "fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences."

"The simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole…. the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the state purpose of the rule."

Says the state court judge.

"Coca-Cola drinking 'linked to New Zealander's death.'"

Ridiculous headline about a woman who drank 10 liters of Coke every day:

The mother of eight... had developed an addiction to Coca-Cola and would get withdrawal symptoms, including "the shakes", if she went without her favourite drink.

She drank Coke throughout her waking hours and her teeth had been removed because of decay.

The fact that one or more of her children were born without enamel on their teeth should have been treated by her, and by her family, as a warning.”

This has nothing to do with Coke as a product. We're talking about someone who consumed 2.2 pounds of sugar and 970 mg of caffeine every day. And the equivalent of 35 8-oz. glasses of liquid. (I'm saying "equivalent" because I don't picture her pouring the stuff into a glass.) This is not the kind of problem that can be solved with tort suits and warning labels.

But Coke is defending itself against this bad publicity. Have you seen this ad?



I love the extremely tactful voiceover which — la la la la — goes on and on and on just to say one very obvious thing to the almost-too-stupid-to-live crowd: It's not just calories that you eat that will make you fat if you don't burn them off — calories that you drink are real too.

Althouse unfair to F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Midway through my journey of isolating and writing about sentences from "The Great Gatsby," I find myself confronted by one creeley23 — a commenter within the confines of this Althouse blog — who says: "Hmm... rereading the first ten pages of Gatsby I see that Ann is picking klunky, atypical sentences out of the text."

I have chosen things like: "Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass." And: "A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea."

But, in my defense, I have also chosen: "A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar." And: "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

Remember, the original idea was:

What I like [about "The Great Gatsby"] is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration....

I feel like starting a blog devoted to individual sentences in "The Great Gatsby," chosen randomly, and continuing until all the sentences have been used up.

I didn't start a new blog, obviously, only a daily discipline on this blog. I confess to not proceeding by random selection. But I haven't gone searching for "klunky" sentences. I've flipped around in near-random style, though. I don't use the first thing I see. Opening up Chapter 1 right now, I see  "I told him" and "We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch." These are examples of non-"klunky" sentences that I would reject, but not because I'm gunning for F. Scott. My initial motivation was love. I thought of all the high school students — I remember being one — who were assigned this book and made to read the whole thing. That being the task, the really interesting sentences are speed bumps. They're completely annoying. You can't take the time to figure them out. What should be loved is hated. Later in life, I reread the book and enjoyed it, because of the worthiness of individual sentences.

Here's a way the book could be taught in a high school class. (But maybe they'd fire you!) Class, this is a book with some very weird sentences. Who can find one? Students read individual sentences out loud and the teacher cuts and pastes the sentences, so they are projected on the board. Encourage the students to pull out things that are the most outlandish and impossible to understand. Encourage laughter. Email the list of sentences to the class and have them reply to the email cutting out all but one sentence, the sentence they'd most like to talk about. Quickly read the email and pick a sentence that got a lot of attention. Puzzle through what it might mean with the students so that they appreciate the fun of getting wrapped up inside one sentence. Give them 20 minutes to write about one of the other sentences.

Must they read the book? Tell them they can read the book if they want. But tell them they can go to Wikipedia and read the plot summary and the list of characters there. The idea is to spend time with particular sentences and to figure out why someone would write like that. Must they love F. Scott Fitzgerald? No! They can be like Palladian — the original commenter genius of the Althouse blog — who said:

Has anyone calculated how long this Gatsby project is going to go on? How many sentences are in the book? How many sentences have been covered so far?

I ask partially out of curiosity and partly because I hate "The Great Gatsby". Why couldn't we have done Chaucer or "Paradise Lost" or something?

I said:

I don't think the project asks you to like "The Great Gatsby." It should work for the haters. Bring that hate!

Palladian said:

That's true! I think the general tone of the comments on these threads led me to think of them as reverential, but your writing about them is actually neutral and occasionally negative.

The watchword watchphrase of this blog has long been "cruel neutrality." And, indeed, I see that even before I responded to Original Commenter Genius Palladian, he was responded to by Upstart Commenter Genius betamax3000, who said:

"the Inquisition that goes on forever. Interminably."

(That's a quote from the post, which is about a "Gatsby" sentence that includes "interminable inquisitions.")

Ann has gone full Althouse Snow Globe Theory now:

"She sets the Snow Globe with cruel neutrality for us to shake and see patterns from the flitter. There is not the expectation of sentimentality. She is asking us to look, together; however, often there is no resolution, each reader seeing only his own flitter of understanding."

And there betamax3000 is quoting himself, from this earlier thread, about one of the least "klunky" sentences that has ever found its way into the "Gatsby" project:

"They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away."

When can we put this "Gatsby" project away, like a dinner and an evening consumed blandly and casually in the Midwest, where all the Gatsby characters belong?

"I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."

That's a sentence I've been saving, in my holding pen of sentences — "klunky" and not-"klunky" — that might get the nod some day on this project, and I guess I've given that one the nod today.

But is today the last day? Is it time to move on to "Paradise Lost" or "The Divine Comedy"?

If the assignment were — in this non-existent high school class — to read straight through "The Great Gatsby," you would know when you were done. The hard task your real teacher tasked you with has a knowable end. It's not interminable, even though the word "ceaselessly" is the 4th-to-the-last word. You get to "ceaselessly" and there's "into the past" and you are done. Your reading of "Gatsby" has receded into the past, like last night's huge, hard-to-digest dinner. You wake up with a stomachache. You can't take too much. You only want to nibble at the edges of some stale ideas, like maybe a blog post, a blog post about one sentence. You can nibble, and — in the comments — you can dribble. Like betamax3000 on last night's "Something was making him nibble" post :

Re: "Oh! For a minute there, I saw 'nimble,' and I was flummoxed."

I like nibble better. Not just because it makes me think of squirrels nibbling on a nosh. I often find myself nibbling at the edge of stale ideas. Of course, it is easier to nibble at the edges when the stale idea is square-shaped, like a behind-the-sofa-cushion Cheez-It: there are corners. Corners are the perfect nibble starters. Plus, Cheez-Its -- and the non-square Cheeto, for that matter -- leave your fingers orangey, like all the best ideas, stale or not.

So one morning when the sun was warm
I rambled out of New York town
Pulled my cap down over my eyes
And headed out for the western skies
So long New York
Howdy, East Orange*.

(*"Even when the East excited me most with sprawling, swollen orange fingers: you're gonna have to take notes faster, friends)

Which brings us back to a point: Naked Dylan Robot would love to hear Fitzgerald try to sing some of Fitzgerald's sentences. Naked Dylan Robot would laugh and laugh.

"Everybody's sturdy physical egotism must get stoned."

"When the winds of changes shift
May your malnourished peremptory heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever slightly worn, young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair."

For a writer whose rep is based in large part on making words sing his words just don't... sing. Maybe Naked Albanian Phonetical Dylan Robot could give a try, but I don't think it would get there. Nor Naked Phoenician Dylan Robot, for that matter*.

(*this is -- of course -- self-contradictory: per Wikipedia "in Phoenician writing, unlike that of most later abjads such as those of Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew and Arabic, even long vowels remained generally unexpressed, and that regardless of their origin". No Naked Dylan Robot of any proud heritage could forsake the long vowels: exps: oooohhhhhmaaa-ma is this reaaaaaaally the eeeeend, etc etc).

Perhaps Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow could make a go of the following:

Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word "MOO
And you say, "For what reason ?"
And he says, "Hoo?"
And you say, "What does this mean ?"
And he screams back, "You're a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home".

-- but Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow is a Talent. And not afraid to nibble, stale or no. Someone should make a Snow Globe for Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow: Ann could put it next to her Robot on her desk and take a picture. I would call in sick to work the next day.

Is your tummy feeling better now? Maybe saltines and ginger ale would help. That's what my midwest-born-and-raised mother would offer me when I was feeling queasy. But you've got to eat something. You must go on — ceaselessly, interminably — when the project is one sentence a day. One day at a time. One sentence at a time. One nibble at a time. One blog post at a time.