Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Commodity. I didn’t know that was a bad word. During the early years when I covered business while reporting a lot of subjects, I learned that one invested in commodities. It is an article of trade or commerce, especially a product that can be processed and resold, such as in […]
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Last Monday, the 7th, newspaper publisher Walter E. Hussman, Jr. had an op-ed piece published in The Wall Street Journal. The essay already had been distributed to employees. The Journal apparently cut his first graf, a soft intro. It read fine this way. As usual the hyperlink won’t be provided […]
Here I am, a James Lileks fan, and I can’t think of a thing to say that hasn’t already been written about his predicament. Maybe I shouldn’t have read all of the articles and a number of the blogs on his, er, transfer. “Transfer.” Lileks has been a humor columnist for the Star Tribune of […]
A pair of problems seem as different as their solutions in huggable Fayetteville, but they’re not, really. It’s all about power, after all. The scary power play is how the local electric company, Southwestern Energy Power Co. (called Swepco everywhere but the phone book when you need to report an outage, where it’s AEP, or […]
I’m trying to kill my library. Not the Fayetteville Public Library, my own stash. They sag shelves in the living room, dining room, sunporch, office, two bedrooms and the laundry room of our manse, Shady Hill. We’ve lived here eight years, and it’s time for painting the walls, even behind the books. A gallon or […]
Some books are so indispensable that you own them, even in the Internet age. Some books are so valuable that if one is misplaced you’ll replace it. This must have happened with The Elements of Style, which my generation called “the Strunk and White” for E.B. White, who in 1957 “tampered” slightly with the self-published […]