Categories
Life Lessons

Deus Ex Machina

Close Calls for Second Chances from Second Sight Copyright Ben S. Pollock 2008 Brick paused. Posting this month has been more inconsistent than usual. Bricks do get started but tossed to the slag heap. The lump, with its gaps and off corners, can be reshaped or mushed with others. After all, none of those has […]

Categories
Body, Home, Street

Not in my Frontyard, Either

My Beloved and I celebrated the first cool weekend in months with a brief, tame adventure: to see the progress of the Fayetteville trails by bicycle. Lengths are now connected that weren’t before. We hit only a few incomplete patches along the Scull Creek and Gordon Long paths. Makes you wonder about Springdale. Maybe others […]

Categories
News, Spin

Strategic Lactose Reserve

Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — The crisis in ice cream is one that should concern even those who dislike the confection, though that’s one smear of fudge sauce against them already. The price of ice cream and comparable cooling sweets has jumped so much, so quickly that the confection industry has begun […]

Categories
Mr. Boo Klist The Course of Words

Duma Me

Book report: Duma Key by Stephen King I can be a snob sometimes: I enjoyed most movies based on Stephen King novels but read nothing of his until seeing a short story or two early this decade in The New Yorker. The plan’s not to catch up on everything he wrote, but so far I’ve […]

Categories
Mr. Boo Klist

Hollywood 1, Critics 0

Mr. Boo Klist — liking audio books nearly as much as printed ones — now wants to recommend a new movie that’s gotten ho-hum reviews, Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote. Even the critics I like get stuck on the probability of its premise, that a presidential election through odd circumstances depends on a single vote, in […]

Categories
Technical Difficulties

Don’t Stop the Presses

Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock I’m not nearly old enough to say I’ve seen it all, or even seen a lot. But when I worked there, my college newspaper, The Stanford Daily, had a noisy Teletype for AP and UPI stories, complete with increasing numbers of bells to rate degrees of breaking news. My first […]