Every prize-winning day in the White House

Stan Washburn doesn’t know how he wound up on the White House’s distribution list for “Your 1600 Daily,” but there it is, in his electronic inbox every day. “I had no idea the president’s first weeks had been so full of triumphs,” observes Washburn.

The list he received on Thursday, March 16, includes, as he says, many optimistic notes (“Today the Office of Management and Budget released the president’s FY 2018 budget blueprint to make America great again”), as well as reports of cheerleading appearances (“President

Trump gives remarks at American Center for Mobility in Detroit, MI: Buy American and Hire American”), and snapshots of daily White House life (“Photo of the Day is the White House grounds covered in snow”).

There are also pleas to vote in the national popularity contest: Citizens are asked to “Share YOUR Obamacare disaster story with President Trump” (a gracious nod to the Oval Office’s previous tenant) and to “Like Vice President

Mike Pence on Facebook” (note that FB reaction icons for “liking” include representations of shock, misery and anger).

Image to savor and share after a short stint on jury duty: At the first courtroom stage, where many in the pool of prospective jurors are trying to avoid serving, a young woman pleading ill health accessorized her outfit with a roll of toilet paper she carried in her arms. The judge let her off.

In the Wild Card greeting card store in the Castro district, Ed Rose overheard a customer asking a clerk for age-specific greeting cards. “What age are you looking for?” asked he clerk. “Seventy-five,” said the customer. “They’re right next to the sympathy cards,” said the clerk.

A Redwood City Nextdoor listing harvested by Courtney Wasserman: “Found a stolen and discarded Amazon box opened but with a book left in it . ... Apparently the thief had no use for a how-to book on money management.”

“Love and Taxes,” Jacob and Josh Kornbluth’s new movie, showed at the Roxie on Friday, March 17. The filmmakers were on hand, as was former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who plays a tax lawyer in a cameo in the movie. Jacob and Reich partnered on the making of the movie “Inequality for All.” Joshua introduced Reich, who is now on the faculty of UC Berkeley, as “a new up-and-comer I think you’re going to be hearing a lot more from.”

The lesson of the movie is that taxes are not bad, “and if we don’t like the way the money is actually spent,” said Reich, “we have an obligation to do something about it.” There were many twists and turns in the eight years it took to make the movie, which is based on a monologue Josh first performed at the Marsh. But here we were, in the here and now, particularly in a week when the new administration had proposed a federal budget not exactly to the liking of many Bay Area taxpayers.

“Each week under Donald Trump is like a dog year,” said Reich during the Q&A. “We’ve got to get rid of him ... through orderly process,” such as impeachment or Article 25 of the Constitution, which refers to presidential incapacitation. “He is incompetent and insane.”

Upon reading a recent Overheard about a fourletter word we’ll call “buck” being usable as just about every part of speech, Cathy Robbins referred the matter to her friend Aaron Smith ,an academic with a doctorate in linguistics.

Smith wrote a brisk refutation: “It just isn’t true! Buck is not a grammatically fascinating word.” It can be used as a noun and a verb, but that’s not unusual, he writes, as well as an interjection — but that’s all. According to Smith, “the assumption of the adjectival status of ‘buck’ is a misanalysis of the use of the word in compounds like ‘buck face,’ ‘buck head,’ etc.” He explains further that you can’t use buck as a comparative or superlative, and that “‘bucker’ is not the same as the agentive noun ‘bucker’ as in ‘what a bucker.’ ”

I got completely lost in the linguistic briar patch of his explanation, but thank you, Professor Smith, for sharing your wisdom. (Though my spellcheck didn’t much like “misanalysis” and “agentive”).

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I need you to retake my picture. The one you took before was rejected by the passport office. They told me my eyes look red and I look stoned.” Woman to clerk at CVS in Terra Linda, overheard by Juliane Cortino