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	<title>Brick &#187; Life Lessons</title>
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	<description>Muse on News by Ben S. Pollock</description>
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		<title>My Friend Jeff Zaslow</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2012/02/11/my-friend-jeff-zaslow/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2012/02/11/my-friend-jeff-zaslow/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:06:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=3506</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When you&#8217;re middle-aged, what the hell is a friend, anyway? Some of my favorite people I see for one long weekend every year, a conference. In between there will be a handful of emails and, these days, rather more frequently, single-sentence repartee on Facebook. I often have met their spouses, briefly, but damn if I [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
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		<title>Havel and Me</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2011/12/20/havel-and-me/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2011/12/20/havel-and-me/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:06:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=3429</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock I met Vaclav Havel once, while he was president of Czechoslovakia. We were in a castle. Oh, and I avoided shaking hands with him. Now, he&#8217;s dead. Not that I&#8217;d ever had a chance to renew the, uh, acquaintance. In September 1992, I was in Europe for a traveling journalism [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>North East West South</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2011/01/13/north-east-west-south/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2011/01/13/north-east-west-south/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Jan 2011 17:05:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=2641</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock When teaching (it&#8217;s been awhile) or just yakking, I find greater utility in broad definitions. News, for example, &#8220;is whatever is new, whatever is different.&#8221; Meaning front-page, top-of-the-hour news. That&#8217;s where are found recountings of heroism, and more often tragedy. Print and broadcast are front-loaded mainly with bad news, which [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Duality in the Sun</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/12/29/duality-in-the-sun/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/12/29/duality-in-the-sun/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Dec 2010 17:39:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=2541</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock The occasional, amateur anthropologist in me has been studying the spouse for 19 1/2 years. Occasional discoveries have been made during the field work, but a revelation has occupied the study recently: There&#8217;s two of her. I&#8217;m pretty sure of this because there&#8217;s two of me. My Beloved has the [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
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		<title>It Takes Villages</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/08/it-takes-villages/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/08/it-takes-villages/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:56:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=2416</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock Something that&#8217;s amazed me my entire adult life is how lousy a predictor childhood is of adult success. Children reared with all the advantages, the latest psychology and/or consistent discipline &#8212; turn out as anything from national leaders to routinely stable mid-levels to layabouts. Children born in abusive families or [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Heeeeere&#8217;s Bedtime</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/05/heeeeeres-not-much/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/05/heeeeeres-not-much/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:55:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=2395</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The most useless habits can be the hardest to break. The three most annoying routines have dwindled to one.None of them ever was harmful. For me, it was a curiosity, why keep on, no pleasure, not even any risk. The first silly habit I knocked off as an adult was to forego the comic strip [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>Begetting Books</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/04/begetting-books/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/04/begetting-books/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:05:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=2389</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It&#8217;s been some three decades since I last watched them do it, and I can&#8217;t quite replicate it. I wish I could multitask like my parents, who excelled at the feat before it had a name. There&#8217;s one round of activities of theirs that I envy. They could read mysteries and novels (Mom) or thrillers [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>War Paths</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/02/war-paths/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/11/02/war-paths/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:05:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=2316</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock WASHINGTON, D.C. &#8212; Sometimes you have to stop and think. Often thinking and writing looks like loafing. As Steinbeck wrote: “I write many thousands of words a day and some of them go on paper.” It can take quite a while. Visiting Washington&#8217;s Vietnam Veterans Memorial for the first time [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
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		<title>Blind Spot</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/06/08/blind-spot/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/06/08/blind-spot/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:10:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=1998</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[They&#8217;re not miracles. You can call them that, and sometimes I do, but we&#8217;re all going to die someday, and the fact I didn&#8217;t croak Monday is just life. Maybe, it&#8217;s just death. Monday my pooch and I were not tapped by a live, falling electric wire. Last week I was on Interstate 540 heading [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Mug of Work Coffee, Grown Cold</title>
		<link>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/04/23/mug-of-work-coffee-grown-cold/</link>
		<comments>http://benpollock.com/brick/2010/04/23/mug-of-work-coffee-grown-cold/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:53:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life Lessons]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://benpollock.com/brick/?p=1852</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Principled newsrooms allow no gifts, but at Christmas the rule gets softened. One of the utilities has giant tins of caramel corn delivered, staffers dive in, and all know rate increase requests will be dissected in the news pages and mocked in commentary. That may be why the huge White House-shaped cake got to stay, [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
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