(A recent sermon, and the first delivered as an official rabbinic student.) SOMETIMES, A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE CAN be a good thing. A lot of perspective? Even better. That point is illustrated in this week’s Torah reading, when Joseph admonishes his…
Author: Neal Ross Attinson
Neal Ross Attinson is one of those text-compulsives who feels naked without a keyboard, or at least a a pad and pen. He is unafraid of adverbs, loves astronomy and gastronomy with equally unabashed passion, and lives with/in an eclectic library in Sonoma, California.
Aside
July 4, 1776 – January 20, 2025. Magna dum duravit.
Audiomobile
“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…” So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent…
The Zine Scene
A LONG TIME AGO, IN the faraway 1990s, our downtown post-office box was fraught with wonder and excitement. In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines, usually…
Pocket Theology
BEFORE WE BEGIN, LET’S HAVE an agreed-upon definition or two (c. OED, mostly): mystic 1. one who believes that union with or absorption into the Deity or the Absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may…
First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio
PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky. Galileo recorded his…
“You Can’t Avoid the Void!”
IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER WHERE or when I was, beyond that it was a high place from which I felt an overwhelming urge to jump. I felt neither depressed nor sad nor suicidal. But I did feel scared, though mostly…
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
– Philip K. Dick
Points of Honor, Literary and Otherwise
– STUFFING SENTENCES TO CARRYING CAPACITY. – Never starting a blog post (or sermon) with “I.” – Punctuality. – Creative segues. – Repeating verbatim whatever someone wants said to another. – That only what I actually heard appears inside quotation…
A Short Course in Flabbergastery
IN HIS EPIC, THREE-VOLUME Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, the astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr., proposes the following metric: Let one astronomical unit (the mean Earth-Sun distance) equal one inch. On that same scale, one light-year, or 63,360 astronomical units, equals one mile;…
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
— Thos. Jefferson
Come Dance With Me
A QUICK AND HUMBLE ASK: If you enjoy The Metaphorager, please consider subscribing to its newly revised, very occasional, and 100% FREE mix of rusty recollections, offbeat observations, friendly particularism, tasty recipes, unpretentious poetry, wry spirituality, and short stories —…