Brick

Feb­ru­ary flies by, and not just because it’s a cou­ple of days shorter than other months. Here in Arkansas the weather at the end of the month is worse than the begin­ning, marked by the Super Bowl on Sun­day the 3rd. Like the other 49 states, prit’ near all of us watch the game, or …

The con­ver­sa­tion began with me telling the handy­man, who remem­bered I was some sort of writer, that I was going to report on Fri­day afternoon’s state leg­is­la­tors’ forum. Both social media and some news media noted that a likely topic would be the pro­pos­als to expand where con­cealed hand­guns could be car­ried, specif­i­cally col­leges and …

I don’t get this stuff about sports­man­ship. You play to win, don’t you? Say I’m play­ing short and Mother is on first and the bat­ter sin­gles to right. Mother comes fast around sec­ond with the win­ning run — Mother will have to go down. I’ll help her up, dust her off and say, ‘Mom, I’m …

While watch­ing a local 9/11 com­mem­o­ra­tion Tues­day, a curi­ous thought came to me, “What day was Osama bin Laden killed?” Did any­one in the audi­ence know? I didn’t know, myself. When the Al-Qaida leader met his fusil­lade of bul­lets is the smaller query. The larger one is, Why does Amer­ica obsess over its set­backs or defeats …

Although it’s been a cou­ple of weeks, my mind turns back, about mid­night on the week­nights since, to the PBS biog­ra­phy of come­dian Johnny Car­son. That two-hour doc­u­men­tary had every­thing — we view­ers learned a lot about an Amer­i­can cul­tural icon — but for me it went two steps too far. Watch Johnny Car­son: King …

Copy­right 2012 Ben S. Pol­lock I knew what to expect of The Artist, a “silent” film, mean­ing no talk­ing, though it did have sound effects and music (and before­hand, iron­i­cally, the loudest-volume trail­ers since those run­ning with Avatar). Still, the teenage box office cashier warned My Beloved and me, while giv­ing me $7 change for …

And I feel like a bee­tle on its back And there’s no way for me to get up Love’ll get you like a case of anthrax And that’s some­thing I don’t want to catch – Gang of Four, “(Love Like) Anthrax,” 1978 Copy­right 2011 Ben S. Pol­lock JUST AFTER ELEVEN — Two hun­dred eighty-something mil­lion …

On my most recent big trip, I was struck by light­en­ing. Right, not light­ning. I walked hours through a city I did not know with my trusty lap­top car­rier. It was after a day­long con­fer­ence. Com­pared to most brief­cases, day packs or mes­sen­ger bags, the can­vas Domke Reporter’s Satchel is light­weight. After years of refin­ing, …