This tale is in honor of Robert Benchley, on account of the day. For those of you who don’t know much about him, Benchley’s nickname in his Hollywood days was Dick Cheney. Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — Saturday I rushed into the yard for some early spring gardening. My neighbor had been […]
Things are tough all over so what am I doing, about to criticize non-profits I favor? The endeavors — literature, fine art, serious music — are the sorts of things that keep me rooted here, but some of their staff members could use some free advice, for what it’s worth. 1. The literary bimonthly Oxford […]
Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock Book report: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu When I saw this title online I had a flashback. In an early primary school year (the early 1960s) Mrs. Friedman gave me for my birthday a subscription to a Disney comic […]
Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock In the last couple of weeks, American politics took a big turn — all of it, from national to state to local. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., gave a speech to explain how he has devoted his life to acting on inclusive feelings of love and harmony while following the […]
Book report: The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists, by Suzette Martinez Standring The reviewing trade has a law that a critic doesn’t write up works created by friends. It’s a group of laws, actually. When a periodical’s staffer or regular contributor […]
Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock My main club — only because inclusion means adherence to its rules before and beyond any others — is the Journalist Club. The name for the rules collectively is Conflict of Interest. Being an ethical person from early childhood, even teaching a semester of journalism ethics to UA undergrads, demonstrates […]