Categories
The Course of Words

The Irreplaceable Art Buchwald

Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Now, there’s any number of articles about one of my heroes, Art Buchwald. Here is one, written by a friend, just a couple of weeks ago. Mr. Buchwald is dying, by choice. He’s well past 80, and his body is shutting down, he knows it and is refusing treatment. The […]

Categories
American Culture

Unintentional humor

Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Friday, Aug. 19, 2005: The latest innovation in Internet advertising is a boon to humor columnists. Maybe it’s not the absolute newest improvement but now widespread is a customization factor: You open a newspaper Web site’s article on, for example, gardening, and a couple of ads on the same page […]

Categories
Body, Home, Street

Can’t see the lights

Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Tuesday, July 5, 2005: For a few weeks, newspaper house ads and broadcast public service announcements have proclaimed that the city of Fayetteville would host a Fourth of July celebration at Baum Stadium of the University of Arkansas. It would succeed the ones held for years at the local mall. […]

Categories
Grapevine Lines

Travel notes

Tuesday, June 28, 2005: I am writing together so many odds and ends that I’ve been taking notes on for more than a week that they qualify for placement under various dates, not just today. This riff has as its genesis the 29th annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, which was June […]

Categories
Grapevine Lines

Lessons from Pete Hamill

Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Saturday, June 25, 2005: The columnists had a great afternoon at the Sixth-Floor Museum meeting with three eyewitnesses to the JFK assassination and-or its immediate aftermath. But the focus of this entry is a morning session led by New York writer Pete Hamill. My longhand notes are fine as records […]

Categories
Grapevine Lines

Couple columnists hit a bar

Two columnists walk into a bar Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Friday, June 24, 2005: A temptation is to write rather complete articles from the notes I took at the just-completed conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, meeting in Grapevine, to the northeast of Fort Worth and northwest of Dallas. But what I […]