Brick has been sporadic for some weeks. With luck, it will be more active in December. Want an excuse? How about National Novel Writing Month. It’s 50,000 words to create a first draft of a novel (around a 200-page book) in 30 days. November is the one. My third try, and I went past 50,000 […]
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Answering machine’s new message
You’ve reached the voice mail of Ben Pollock. I can’t answer the phone right now because I’m floating above the Ozark foothills inside a balloon — which explains my high-pitched voice — looking for radioactive rabbit droppings. If you now must ask Where the Wild Things Are, they’re eating supper in their room. And it’s […]
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Can’t Vote or Don’t Vote?
Last week, bored with NPR and between audio books, I had the radio scan for AM talk radio and ended up at KURM-AM, 790. Despite being a Rogers station, longtime host Kermit Womack kept getting calls about today’s Fayetteville school millage election. It’s not a vote on building a new high school, because that is […]
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A Horse Is a Horse
Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock Identity is a flummox. Sometimes it feels like you spend a lifetime — or the lifetime thus far — pursuing an identity, but your identity may not be you. I’ve heard of two senior or retired professors who said they chose their doctoral fields rather arbitrarily and lost interest as […]
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Perilous
On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States rejoined its fellow nations in finding itself vulnerable to attack. Because it was attacked. Americans had grown complacent since what, Pearl Harbor, 59 years and 9 months earlier? They aren’t anymore. While increasingly cautious, which is good, and arbitrarily suspicious, bad, Americans overall have gained little wisdom from […]
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GOP School Talk Response
Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — Republicans are grateful that Barack Obama released a transcript early for his speech today to American schoolchildren. Rather than responding to what he might say — as they usually do in drafting responses to the weekly presidential radio address and the yearly State of the Union, and […]