(I’m leading services today, but here’s the dvar Torah I’m delivering this morning (and posted yesterday).) THERE’S AN OLD SAYING: “IF you don’t look closely at every detail, you miss most of the jokes.” Although there are few obvious jokes…
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
OUR WEEKLY TORAH STUDY SHIFTS this week, as I am honored and privileged to lead Shabbat services tomorrow morning (Sat., 7/9/11) at Sonoma’s Congregation Shir Shalom. We will begin by looking at one of the Book of Numbers’ most action-packed portions: the tale of Bilaam the Evil Wizard. (Just typing “Evil Wizard” is a thrill; but then, I’m easily amused.) If you’re not otherwise on a vacationary road trip, we hope to see you there!
Shabbat shalom,
Neal.
The Two Hardest Words To Say
“HELP ME.”
High Weirdness By Mail: A Hobby In Four Acts
YOU WILL FIRST NEED A healthy interest in the way people interpret the inexplicable — their beliefs, theories, conspiracies, religions, philosophies, ideologies and desperate explanations of What’s Behind It All. (N.B. This works better if you’re a non-dogmatic critical thinker…
Pithyism #888
INTELLIGENT DISCUSSIONS ABOUT ART’S ROLE in shaping cultures and individuals have to recognize the difference between censorship (an external restraint based on fear and loathing) and self-control (an internal restraint arising from the artist’s desire to communicate).
NextWave SF: “Retropunk”
FIRST CAME CYBERPUNK. THEN STEAMPUNK. And by 2021, … RETROPUNK. Shiny robots. Gleaming atom-powered spaceships. Martian canal races. Alien arcologies in the jungles of Venus. Male pronouns. All the glory of a big exploitable universe sans angst or post-apocalypse modernism.…
Synoptipitch: Firefly
“It’s like if Star Wars were about Han Solo, but without aliens and blasters and hyperdrives, with the Jedi a 14-year-old induced-psychotic girl and sprinkled heavily with Old West individual-vs-the-Man subtext. Oh, and written by geeks. That’s Firefly.”
“The Guest House”
SOMEONE WHO LOVES ME SENT me this poem. I offer it to you in the same spirit. This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes As…
Five Summer Haiku
(THESE WERE WRITTEN JUNE 21 on the unnetworked “writing laptop,” which I only mention to explain the last verse and thank you for not skipping ahead. And now, this.) So soon the heat comes after long weeks of spring rain.…
Pithyism #1,914
ANY POLITICAL IDEOLOGY WHICH BEGINS “If only people would…” isn’t worth the breath needed to finish the sentence.
Dorothy Parker Nailed It
(From the should-be-better-known blog Letters of Note, here’s a desperate telegram dispatched by a wall-stuck author to her (apparently, or at least in Ms. Parker’s mind) neck-breathing editor. Between this and the previous post my own writer’s block should be…
Despite The Profanity, He Makes A Good Point
IT’S SO TEMPTING TO SAY “I wish I’d written this” when you find something which crystallizes inchoate feelings into verbal fistpump and hellyeah. I fully recognize the irony in blogging about a piece which calls blogs into question. But reading…