Well, you know.
I don’t get this stuff about sportsmanship. You play to win, don’t you? Say I’m playing short and Mother is on first and the batter singles to right. Mother comes fast around second with the winning run — Mother will have to go down. I’ll help her up, dust her off and say, ‘Mom, I’m […]
While watching a local 9/11 commemoration Tuesday, a curious thought came to me, “What day was Osama bin Laden killed?” Did anyone in the audience know? I didn’t know, myself. When the Al-Qaida leader met his fusillade of bullets is the smaller query. The larger one is, Why does America obsess over its setbacks or […]
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 […]
Copyright 2012 Ben S. Pollock I knew what to expect of The Artist, a “silent” film, meaning no talking, though it did have sound effects and music (and beforehand, ironically, the loudest-volume trailers since those running with Avatar). Still, the teenage box office cashier warned My Beloved and me, while giving me $7 change for […]
And I feel like a beetle on its backAnd there’s no way for me to get upLove’ll get you like a case of anthraxAnd that’s something I don’t want to catch— Gang of Four, “(Love Like) Anthrax,” 1978 Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock JUST AFTER ELEVEN — Two hundred eighty-something million Americans had nothing on […]
The following is my president’s column for the May 2011 edition of the monthly newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Had a bizarre dream the other night, that World War III had started. I saw Dianne Feinstein, she having moved up from senator to secretary of state or vice president, holding a news […]