March 14, 2011 (JTA) — An Alaska Airlines flight crew issued a security alert after three Mexican Orthodox Jews began praying with tefillin. The flight attendants, who were concerned by the prayers being said aloud in Hebrew and the unfamiliar…
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.
Looking Back on Apocalypse
HOW STRANGE TO SIT IN 2011, and wax wistfully nostalgic over the heady nihilism of Repo Man. Had we but known …
All-Natural Selection
ONE REASON WHY CALIFORNIA HAS so many smart people is that, periodically, the lesser-reasoned go down to the seashore to watch the tsunami come in.
Unplug: Can You Do It?
LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I was drunk, belligerent and enjoying myself — not a good combination, nor one which I experience (or wish to experience) in real life. The subject of my tirade seems to have been the apologetic and…
Compassionings
IT IS PRECISELY AT THAT moment when compassion seems most remote that it is most greatly needed. This principle is easier spoken than implemented — what isn’t? — but holds true not only for the individual, who is buffeted by…
Free Metaphor: “Don’t Poke The Squid”
STUCK FOR AN ANALOGY WHEN your well-intendeds provoke a horrible mess that you should have known better than to bother with? Then “Don’t Poke The Squid.” Squid are lovely, largely inoffensive creatures who flash and lurk throughout the ocean’s vasty…
Cinematic Question: Shifting Allegiances
SINCE WHEN, IN THE MOVIES, did the Romans become the good guys?
Ship Geeks Ahoy
IF YOU’RE CURIOUS ABOUT LIFE on the other side of the foghorns, waste no time in clicking on marinetraffic.com — a global, scalable, real-time map of the world’s shipping traffic, from cargo and passenger vessels to navaids and tankers to…
Words Mean Stuff
A SHORT LIST OF WORDS which, through overuse, have been consigned to the meaning-deficient self-parody heap: Blatant Flagrant Offen(sive/ded) Rabid Sexist Racist Controversy Security Freedom Democracy Republican Terrorism Diva (There are others, but these are what I found in this…
Quick Review: Toy Story 3
ANOTHER GREAT PIXAR ROMP — IMAGINATIVE, colorful, well-rendered, well-written. But I can’t get over what a JERK that stuffed bear is.
Something Else About Archetypes and Inevitability
ANOTHER THOUGHT ABOUT STEVE’S DEATH: A social molecule is a group of co-creators of a private but shared reality — a sort of living group-mythos inexplicable to those outside its specific bounds but real as air to those within. When…
Pithyism #99
WE ARE IN TROUBLE IF our need to be heard exceeds our need to understand — or to be understood.