Monthly Archives: January 2005

Taking, or accepting, responsibility

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 28, 2005: Recall­ing a dream is not where I want to go with Brick. But what the heck. It’s a Brick. It doesn’t go any­where until heaved. That’s Krazy Kat’s down­fall, he real­izes just as he sees one head­ing toward him from Ignatz Mouse, too late to duck. It’s

Johnny Carson

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Wednes­day, Jan­u­ary 26, 2005: My news­pa­per rarely does front-page obit­u­ar­ies, par­tic­u­larly of celebri­ties. The last was Mar­lon Brando’s. Mon­day morn­ing it gave top-of-2A play for Johnny Car­son, the penul­ti­mate spot. The front page would have been appro­pri­ate. Car­son was a sig­nif­i­cant icon of the 20th cen­tury, in Amer­i­can cul­ture (pop­u­lar

Coming to term limits

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Wednes­day, Jan­u­ary 19, 2005. In read­ing in the papers about another piece of embar­rass­ing pro­posed state leg­is­la­tion, I real­ized finally, after many years of con­sid­er­a­tion, a sin­gle rea­son to sup­port term lim­its. Over­all, though, hold­ing leg­is­la­tors from the com­mu­nity through state lev­els to a max­i­mum num­ber of terms is fun­da­men­tally

Ex-executive privilege

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 17, 2005: Days ago, George II brought in George the First and Bill Clin­ton to lead pri­vate fund-raising for the south Asian tsunami dis­as­ter of 12/26/04. This is life imi­tat­ing art! “Sat­ur­day Night Live” has a peri­odic car­toon by one of its staffers– Robert Smigel — that is called

Hammered point nails thumb

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 10, 2005. Just thought of another way to explain my con­fu­sion with a cer­tain kind of col­umn. Or blog now. The dis­com­fort is partly from the frus­tra­tion of not being able to explain, but mainly because their writ­ers are some of my favorite peo­ple. The genre: Anec­do­tal essays about

I invented the wheel

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 7, 2005. It’s impor­tant to be effi­cient. To not rein­vent the wheel is my oft-repeated goal, likely annoy­ing oth­ers. Def­i­n­i­tion: Com­ing to know what works and what doesn’t, what is tol­er­a­ble and what dri­ves you batty. It’s a process of elim­i­na­tion, where over the years you gain knowl­edge

Last of the inbreed

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Jan. 2, 2005: In the paper and online today is Dave Barry’s final col­umn as a reg­u­larly run syn­di­cated humor colum­nist. He announced this a few months ago, call­ing it a sab­bat­i­cal of indef­i­nite length while acknowl­edg­ing writ­ing projects in other media, maybe includ­ing papers. Also in the fall, Jimmy

Hear a second?

Hear a sec­ond for the First? Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pol­lock Jan. 1, 2005: I won’t look back to a year ago in the Brick. I try not to look back on much. There might be too much I might regret. Any regrets are too many. Besides, as cau­tious as I can be (though I take