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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The story of the June 14, 1986, croquet match played by former Arkansas Attorney General Steve Clark was so memorable to me I did not bother to check the facts when I summarized it last week. I had documents, I kept them in a file — a real manila paper folder, not an icon on […]
As a youngster from the South, I thought cane sugar was the only kind there was. Then, four years at a California university didn’t change that. The Safeways of the area sold cane sugar in 5 and 10 pound sacks. In my first job, a news producer at KFJM-FM and KFJM-AM, Public Radio for the […]