Write what you know. What a load of rubbish. “Write what you don’t know” (Ken Kesey wrote that), that’s more like it, if you want to be good at it. But when you teach, you do teach what you know. That’s the way it seemed when we were children. Once one has spent years, days […]
Author: Ben S. Pollock
Why write more when my home page
will distract you from the real me.
E-mail me here: (written out to reduce spam) ben(at-sign)benpollock(dot)com
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Saturday Surprises
The Tibetans — terriers not people — Mani and Hopper needed a vigorous walk today. The humans’ leash schedules intersected once: me and morning. I aimed my Prius, Kar-L, toward Wilson Park. It’s empty, maybe not too odd going toward noon on a July Saturday, but to the west we saw an inline roller-skater and […]
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It’s Health Care, Still
Today’s Supreme Court decision that affirms most aspects of the 2010 Affordable Care Act has two main positives — besides the obvious, setting up universal, fairly priced health insurance for Americans. The first is more micro: The worker is not as enslaved to his job now. Over the last four or five decades, the main […]
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A Legacy of Carnegie
Laurence “Larry” Luckinbill should be a more familiar name. Sure, he’s from Fort Smith and I’ve seen a number of his movies, but if you start thinking about all those solid character actors from say childhood on — sigh, it’s a lot of folks. Why it was just the week before last that a stray […]
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Johnny Be Good, Or Not
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 […]
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Describing a Rectangle
When I’m driving somewhere with My Beloved, when (not if) she corrects my navigation, I recall the junior high geometry class phrase “describing the sides of a rectangle.” The distance and time are roughly the same: My over then down, or her under then up, and there you are, thptpth. This is the feeling I […]