It never occurred to me to presume this, probably because I’m not a technophile. But here I sit with a new computer (waiting months for the Apple operating system update as a few pieces of both hardware and software on my blue 7-year-old iBook fail), and it asks if it can take my picture. This […]
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Got a crazy idea the other day: I need matches. The Shady Hill manse is running out, and we had few to begin with. We’re not ones to collect matchbooks at restaurants and bars with regularity so, now that essentially no business hands them out, we don’t have the means […]
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock A pet peeve is one of those list poems, It’s why Whitman bores me then I feel guilty, because isn’t he some kind of Poetry God? But for the last 29 of my fifty years, I’ve bound myself with society’s popular rules. If its wisdom is questionable My wisdom must […]
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Humorist Richard Allin died Thursday in Little Rock. He was 77. The following is why he’s important. It’s from the acknowledgments page of my journalism master’s thesis, spring 2003. At the family breakfast table in Fort Smith, 30 to 35 years ago, Dad laughing would read aloud paragraphs from the […]
Yokel teevee is very proud of itself to have wireless capabilities and satellites and compooters and dishes. It forgets the ability to broadcast live, and to broadcast live away from the studio, reaches to the days of the Hindenberg. It’s called a “remote feed.” This morning all the channels have treated us to the landing […]
The Nobel folks awarded its 2007 literature prize Thursday to Doris Lessing. The wire service story was the usual. It began with the summary lede. Then it had a sliver of who she is — elderly and English but with first-hand knowledge of the Near East and southern Africa, prolifically writing fiction often sci fi, […]