THE FIRST TIME I DISCOVERED that my words had an effect on other people was when something I wrote made other people cry. The people were my fellow high-school English students, and the topic was a personal essay we’d been…
Author: Neal Ross Attinson
Neal Ross Attinson is one of those writing-compulsives who feels naked without a keyboard, or at least a a pad and pencil. He is unafraid of adverbs, and lives with an animal companion and eclectic library in Sonoma, California.
“Starbase 33 Minyan”
According to the Official Couch Potato Handbook, each official Couch Potato Viewing Lodge must have its own name. Ours is the “Starbase 33 Minyan,” mostly due to a love of science fiction in general (and Star Trek in particular). The…
The Purist’s Question
HOW MUCH CAN YOU CHANGE something before it no longer resembles the original — yet still call it by the same name?
5 Thoughts: Comic Strips
1. THE MORNING ISN’T COMPLETE WITHOUT checking into the daily comics page and some of my favorite parallel universes. I scan most of what’s there (as my friend Gary Nordstrom says, “If the author went to the trouble of writing…
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DO ANT THEOLOGIANS EXHORT THEIR multitudes against the fate awaiting them under Dante’s Magnifying Glass?
Echo (Pithyism #18)
YOU REALLY FEEL LIKE A Jewish Teacher when a former student says “This needed to be here” and gives you a rock he picked up at Masada. (Thanks, Nick. May you also be blessed to know the difference you make.)…
Words To Bring Back: “Juggernaut”
– Definition: “1 chiefly British : a large heavy truck 2 : a massive inexorable force, campaign, movement, or object that crushes whatever is in its path” – Used in a sentence: “My sister’s new baby is a juggernaut of…
First Graf: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1
THERE ARE BOOKS, AND THERE are books. This one contains “The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time Chosen by the Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America,” and is standard issue to all geeks and geekettes who want…
Equationary Simples
METAL = ROCKS + FIRE / SLAG. WRITING = WORDS x TIME / TALENT. LOVE = PEOPLE – EGO x ACTION. COOKING = INGREDIENTS + TASTE x EXPERIENCE. TEACHING = THOUGHT1 + THOUGHT2 x EXPERTISE / TOPIC. FILM = IMAGES…
“Self-Deleting Jews”
(Feel free to skip if you’re not hot for ethnoapologetics.) THERE’S AN UGLY MEME IN the Jewish community that may or may not have analogs among other minority groups: the so-called “self-hating Jew.” This term, most often used in online…
Pithyism #+/-1
Thank God or your equivalent that the uttermost limits of joy and misery remain mostly unexplored — and largely uncommunicated.
Metaphorager Hope’d
(Tip o’ th’ Metaphorager Topper to obamaicon.me!)