30. Where's the Beef?
. . . Features, 14 September 2001.
31. The Campus Reconnected
. . . Features, 21 September 2001.
32. God's on Our Side
. . . Features, 28 September 2001.
33. The Good Old Days
. . . Features, 5 October 2001.
34. Holy Cross: Gotta Love It
. . . Features, 19 October 2001.
35. Making Up the Grade
. . . Features, 26 October 2001.
36. The Suite Life
. . . Features, 2 November 2001.
37. Where the Heart Is
. . . Features, 7 December 2001.
38. Chill on the Hill
. . . Features, 25 January 2002.
39. Living Dangerously
. . . Features, 1 March 2002.
40. The Naked Campus
. . . Features, 12 April 2002.
41. The Man, the Legend
. . . Features, 19 April 2002.
42. Passing On
. . . Features, 26 April 2002.

A. A figment of my imagination. When Joey first appeared in print, some of my closest friends (no names here) wondered who he was and why I'd never introduced him to them. Even after he had been through some pretty unbelievable things (such as being arrested and jailed for a month, and getting lost in Mulledy), people still asked me if he was real. In fact, even after the final Brocklesby column was printed, a friend (still no names) called me up during our senior year's Exam Week after she had scoured the Facebook, phone directory and email address list looking for "J.M. Brocklesby."

Q. What I meant was, on whom was this guy based?
A. Joey's personality came from three main sources. The first, and most obvious, was myself. There's a little bit of me in everything that he did and said.

The second influence was the work of Mike Royko, a famous columnist for Chicago newspapers whom I had read daily in the early 1990s. Some of Royko's columns had a character, Slats Grobnik, who served as a comic foil for him in much the same way that Joey did for me. Another columnist to use this technique is Dick Feagler at the Cleveland Plain Dealer ("Mrs. Figment"), though it dates back to Plato's dialogues between "Socrates" and various ancient Athenian guest stars.

A third influence was a character named "Scott" from the Web-based game Addventure, which was a massive ongoing story to which you could add. As a bored high schooler, I wrote a number of "episodes" for Addventure, mostly focusing on the story's main character, Scott Chen. Aside from giving me practice in telling a story in print, Addventure taught me, through Scott, how to treat the main character with contempt, write him as an idiot, and make it funny.

Q. Why "Joey Brocklesby"?
A. The last name "Brocklesby" is an inside joke to an online science-fiction club to which I belonged when the column started running. Joey's first name is the diminuitive of my own middle name. Care to guess what Joseph M. Brocklesby's middle initial stands for?

Q. How did you choose where Joey lives?
A. His hometown (Winooski, Vt.) was selected because on a school trip freshman year, the bus passed a sign for Winooski on the way to Montréal, Québec. I remember thinking it was an interesting name for a town. I have never actually been to Winooski (well, I have passed it many times on I-89, and I once flew into Burlington Airport, but I've never set foot in the town).

Joey's freshman year residence (Hanselman) was picked because that's where I had lived the year before. His sophomore residence (Loyola) was picked for two reasons: first, it had been suggested in print during the lost-in-Mulledy escapade, and second, it allowed me to look at the campus from, literally, a different perspective (although at this point I was still living on the Hill). His junior-year residence (Carlin) was picked because that was where I was living at the time.

Q. Who were Joey's roommates?
A. His roommate and best friend through all three years was Wayne-O Kerrigan, who takes his first name from a minor character in a Gordon Korman book and his family name from my grandmother. When Joey moved into a suite, I myself allegedly became one of his theoretical roommates. Not like it really matters. He's a fictional character.

Q. What made you want to write a weekly column, and why did you start sophomore year?
A. I had had the idea in mind since high school, when I had served as a cartoonist and opinions writer, at various times, for Freshprint, Sophomore Ink and The Evanstonian, all official newspapers at Evanston (Ill.) Township High School. When I got to Holy Cross, I immediately began writing opinions columns. Pretty soon, however, I realized that writing opinions columns feels a lot like writing Poli-Sci papers, and I was having a tough enough time at doing that already. So I quit the paper.

Q. You didn't answer my question.
A. Hold on, I was just pausing to catch my breath. Yeesh. So anyway, Tim O'Coin, who would eventually be my editor and my roommate, had worked for Features section since freshman year, and I went with him to the Crusader organizational meeting in September '99. Just for the heck of it, I asked Features editors Tim Spoth and Brendan Leith what it would take to be a columnist, expecting that they would ask me to start off small, writing music and theater reviews. Instead, they told me to just write a column, and if they liked it, they'd publish it.

Q. Was there any particular Crusader writer after whose work you patterned yours?
A. What a strangely-worded and leading question. The answer is yes, there was: Mike Terlizzi. I had tremendous fun, freshman year, reading Terlizzi's feature articles, but his best work (in my opinion) was his "Oddities on the Hill" columns, which ran two installments in the '98-'99 year and three more in the subsequent year. "Oddities on the Hill" was basically a "notebook column," with three or four topics, and was light observational humor on campus personalities, events or places. It was my intention to write an "Oddities"-like column every week.

Q. And did you?
A. Well, no. First of all, I was much too lazy to actually make deadline every week, and did not always have a decent idea for a column. Second, there were notable instances (The Quorum Question, Where the Heart Is) when I decided not to write a comedic piece.

In fact, only a few times did I really write a true "notebook" column. Usually, there were only two topics addressed: the main topic of the column, and a smaller, side topic that usually tied in with the main topic in some unexpected way.

Q. Why did the column, in its first year, bounce back and forth between Features and Opinions sections?
A. The Crusader's editors serve terms that are based on the calendar year. So when I began writing in late '99, my editors were Tom Spoth and Brendan Leith. In January 2000, Tom and Brendan were replaced by RaeJean Spears, who eventually -- around March-ish -- made it clear to me that Comments on the Passing Parade did not fit in to her vision for the Features department. Kara Lamb, editor of Opinions, was gracious enough to give the column space in her section, which is the smallest one in the paper.

Q. Why go back, then?
A. Simply put, I was under subtle pressure, at Opinions, to make the column more serious and political. RaeJean went to study abroad in September 2000, and Tim O'Coin -- my good friend and then-roommate -- took over Features. He agreed to take back Comments on the Passing Parade, and it stayed in Features, under his and Spring 2002 editor Alicia Starkey's stewardship, until it ended its press run.

Q. And you never left Features again?
A. Just once. I consistently wanted to write more sports-oriented columns than Tim wanted me to write. He enjoyed my annual salute to Holy Cross football (An Empty Shell, Football Returns and God's on Our Side), but I always wanted to write a criticism of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, and couldn't, until Sports editor Kate Barker gave me the okay to pen a column for her section. Joey appeared in both Features and Sports sections that issue, although he was not identified by name in the Sports article. "Greatest Rivalry Ever" was the only non-Features article in the column's second and third years, though.

Q. Where did you get your ideas?
A. My own warped little mind, mostly. I would sit around my room brainstorming, sometimes for hours. Occasionally I'd get more than one idea, and I maintained a list of ideas in a file on my computer. The most fertile "outside" sources for column ideas were SGA (student government) meetings, which I attended as a representative (sophomore year) and as a member of the Judicial Council (junior and senior years); and the weekly Kimball menu and my daily visits to Kimball, the campus dining hall. I don't remember ever having a suggestion by a friend turn into a column, but I'm probably mistaken on this point.

Q. Why so many inside jokes, especially about Kimball?
A. I made a conscious decision not to write something that could have been written by Dave Barry or Dick Feagler or Maureen Dowd (although not writing like Dowd was more of an attempt to maintain high quality, not narrow scope). I wanted my column to be about Holy Cross. I wanted to force myself to find my inspiration on the campus. The premise of "Comments on the Passing Parade" was that Holy Cross was strange enough to support a humor column by itself.

Q. Did the premise hold?
A. Yes and no. I had to struggle not to write about Kimball every week, because it was an inherently funny and nonsensical place. Every week they published a menu that was full of spelling errors. Their food was frequently of high quality (for an institution, at least), but every now and then they foisted something truly heinous on us. If Holy Cross students had water coolers, the talk around them would have been about Kimball, just like worker drones gripe at any company about the boss, traffic, etc. Student Government tilted at the windmill that was Kimball a few times during my tenure, as I faithfully reported.

Although Kimball probably could have produced 10 columns a semester for me, I did make a choice not to let it. Frequently it was the "secondary" point of a column that focused on something else. But that something else was always Holy Cross-related, even though people often told me I should be writing about President Clinton, or "Survivor," or other things I would criticize at parties and with friends.

Q. Were there any ideas that you never managed to pull off?
A. There were two disappointing failures. During all three years of the column's run, I attempted to write a Valentine's Day article -- and failed each time. Also, I wrote half of an article that was to poke fun at Pub Night and criticize the school for not having a wide enough choice of academic minors, and as I look back on it, it was shaping up to be a really good article, too ... and then I ran out of inspiration.

Also, there were two articles freshman year that never saw the light of day (or the grey of newsprint, as it were) because they were turned in too far past deadline. These were Snow Problem, which remains one of my favorites, and Features Fights to the Finish (and Other Scenes from Hogan 2), which does not. It was a tribute to The Crusader's graduating seniors of 2000.

Q. How long did it usually take you to write an article?
A. The most difficult part was coming up with a topic. The articles that I consider to be my best usually "wrote themselves" -- often in less than three hours, in one sitting. Keep in mind that these articles could be anywhere between 900 and 1500 words, which is the length of a 7-page research paper (double-spaced). Sometimes, on the more difficult columns, the writing process -- often including a substantial amount of brainstorming and deleting -- could take a couple of nights. You can imagine the effect that this had on my grades.

Q. So are there some articles that you are particularly fond of?
A. Yes. I consider ITS Alive to be my best work, along with The Suite Life, Connecting the Campus, Scary Life and College is Hall.

Q. And are there then articles that you don't care for?
A. There were a lot, actually, before I started working on this website. I remembered a lot of my work as much worse than it was, and discovered -- to my surprise -- that there are only two articles that, if I had them to do over again, I would not submit for publication. These are "Crunch Time," from junior year, and "Razzies Hit Rock Bottom" from sophomore year. My muse simply wasn't with me on the weeks that I submitted those ones. I don't consider my penultimate column, "The Man, the Legend," to be a particularly good article either, but a lot of my readers liked it, and that fact alone has buoyed my memory of it.

Q. You had a lot of positive feedback from this column?
A. Not a lot, but enough to know that the column was being read by people I'd never met before (i.e., people would say to me, "oh, you're Mike Ballway ... the guy who writes the column for the paper!"), and by people who would make it a point, every now and then, of telling me how much they enjoyed my work. And for every comment you get, you know there are five others who didn't think to comment. So that made me feel good.

Q. Any negative feedback?
A. Not to my face -- but two instances from junior year stand out in my mind. After "West of the Hudson" was published, my then-girlfriend reported to me that a number of the girls in her hall (Mulledy 2), Long Islanders mostly, were "offended" by its tone. This was a clear sign to me that the column had succeeded in communicating its point. A little later that year, some guy wrote to the Daily Jolt (online message board) complaining about how I got my facts wrong in "ITS Alive"; apparently the IT Task Force is NOT connected with ITS. Anyway, his little diatribe against what he assured us was the worst writing he'd ever seen had me on cloud nine for days; up until that point, I had no confirmation that anyone outside my circle of friends actually read the column, and I was tickled pink to see that it was important enough to be bashed on-line.

Q. Is it not true that these questions are not in fact 'frequently asked' at all, and that you are simply making them up to suit the answers that you want to give?
A. Alright, this interview is over.