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Category Archives: Body, Home, Street

Ranging from near-memoir to considerations of local news.

Unkle Katrina

Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — In the Mall of the Ozarks where the Toasts of the Town shop, where the vivacious news anchors and the handsome sports anchors check out the best duds to wear on the air, the meteorologists also lurk. They grab the nice clothes as well, but you’ll usually find [...]

WAC-ky in Fayetteville

The Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville at age 16 is being called a relic in some (moneyed) quarters. Those quarters know it’s not old by civic center standards, and in the last year or so it got reupholstered. The quarrel is its size. The main auditorium has about 1,200 seats, and we’re a growing metropolis, [...]

Stone Picnic

The Fayetteville newspaper reported recently that a tombstone was found at a just-vacated rent house. The marker is of a woman who died two years ago. The rental management company phoned police. The Times’ print edition treats us to a photo of the flat marker.
Later in the week the Times reported it reached the family, [...]

Rumble the Roads

This could have been a wicked Brick, ripping up Fayetteville’s eighth annual (but it feels like the 240th) Bikes Blues & BBQ that’s going on this weekend. A couple of years ago I had some criticisms about it, and until Thursday night I had nothing new to add so I wasn’t going to. I have [...]

No Gaming Without Representation

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

– “Gordon Gekko,” Wall Street, as quoted in imdb.com
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock
If “greed is good,” as the fictional financier Gordon Gekko famously preached in 1987, then it follows taxes [...]

Prediction from a Non-Fan

Prediction: University of Arkansas Athletic Director Frank Broyles will fire football Coach Houston Nutt midseason (between tonight and mid-October) and will pretend to collaborate with his just-named successor Jeff Long to instantly replace Nutt. -30-

Tom Sawyer’s Child Labor

A brief in today’s paper arouses interest for those procrastinators among us just getting around to Spring Cleaning.
Northwest Arkansas Sustainability Center’s ‘Pack It In, Pack It Out’ activity day for children will begin at 9 a.m. Saturday at Fayetteville’s Wilson Park. Participants will be organized into groups and have a contest to pick up the [...]

Polishing Apples in Arkansas

One of the changes planned by the state Department of Education is to increase the teaching of world history by decreasing the time spent on Arkansas state history. The Legislature, however, mandated in 1997 one semester of state history between seventh and 12th grades. (The law and the new plan are explained a bit [...]

Stox and Bondz

Why I’m in journalism and not real business, Point 2001: I do force myself to save some salary twice a month, once to IRA things and the second to more-immediately available accounts. I do mutual funds, no-load indexed jobs just like neutral experts advise: Money market, stocks and bonds. This is called diversifying, and is [...]

Perspective in Southern Light

We were talking Sunday over coffee about the Demzette publishing a conversational yet solid-punching essay by UA’s Mohja Kahf as the lede piece in the Perspective (editorial) section. Under her name is printed The Washington Post, where the piece first ran a week ago.
We were proud. Mohja is one of us. Not just a “Fate-ville” [...]