Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock “[Russ A. Charif, a research biologist at Cornell Lab of Ornithology,] said after his talk that the ‘kent’ sounds alone were not conclusive because scientists could not completely rule out a blue jay mimicking the sound of an ivory bill. …” — The New York Times, Aug. 25, 2005. Yeah, […]
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Sunday, Aug. 21, 2005. Saturday, in The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas the local column of my old Little Rock colleague Doug Thompson (an earnest journalist, sardonic in conversation) wrote glibly and at times carelessly of Wehco Media purchasing from Community Publishers the assets of the Benton County Daily Record, […]
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Friday, Aug. 19, 2005: The latest innovation in Internet advertising is a boon to humor columnists. Maybe it’s not the absolute newest improvement but now widespread is a customization factor: You open a newspaper Web site’s article on, for example, gardening, and a couple of ads on the same page […]
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2005. News item: Not now. “News item” is a decades-old method to prepare the reader for an essay or column, especially a humorous one, whose subject, or just an allusion used in it, may be borderline obscure. If it truly is obscure, we wouldn’t use it, would […]
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Saturday, Aug. 13, 2005: News item: The Razorback football team of the University of Arkansas is ending a decades-old tradition of open practice. Starting this summer, the sessions will be closed to the public in general and the press in particular. If a tree falls in the forest and no […]
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2005: It’s only taken three decades to admit I’m a Westerner. That is, I began reading about Eastern religions in my pre-teen years. (It was the late 1960s and the Beatles were into the Maharishi, all reported in Time, Life and the Arkansas Gazette, received at the […]