I DON’T LIKE THAT specific nouns are being co-opted for brand naming. Twenty years from now, some teenager watching Star Trek: The Next Generation will say, “Hyuk! Data doesn’t look like a smartphone!”
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.
Literal Legend
HE SAID HE WOULD FIGHT Wall Street, but it wasn’t long before he was brought down by a perplexed SWAT team.
Apropos Punditry
DOESN’T ALL THAT JERKING MAKE the knees hurt?
Something With Which All Pundits Seem To Agree, Post- “Arizona Tragedy”
“WE ALL NEED LESS VITRIOL from those other guys.”
Sorting Debbie
IN THE WAKE OF SINGER and prolific synagogue-music innovator Debbie Friedman, I find myself mourning her death but ambivalent about her legacy. The mourning: If you worship at most “progressive” (i.e., non-Orthodox) North American synagogues, you’re familiar with her work…
Pithyism #65
MATURITY IS ALSO REALIZING THAT life is less about doing stuff than it is about the stuff you do; less about filling, and more about what it’s filled with.
365 Names: Great Magnet
THE GREAT MAGNET is what conceptual journalist Hunter S. Thompson called our mysterious Subject in his Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Typical of Thompson’s grim, savage outlook, the Great Magnet is mentioned only indirectly. It may be neither prayed…
Just Off The Block of My Head
IF THERE IS ANYTHING SCARIER than writer’s block, I hope I never discover it. For me, writer’s block is more than just an inability to string together something pretty or useful. It’s like losing half or more of my personality.…
David Mamet’s Christmas Wishes
From our Wish-We’d-Found-This-Two-Weeks-Ago department: Over on Tablet, playwright David Mamet literally pens a Christmas card to the Jews from the Chinese “who do not completely understand your dietary customs.” To say more would sound horribly post-facto; let’s say instead we’re…
365 Names: The Immensity
“THE IMMENSITY” is what Monsieur Ibrahim calls Whatever we’re now in our fourth day of naming. M. Ibrahim calls It that toward the end of the film, after spending much of the time answering his young protege’s questions about God…
Why 365 Names of God?
Why not? Well, the folks at Make Something Every Day And Change Your Life (http://makesomething365.blogspot.com/) crossed my path, and where the whim goeth, goeth I. Names are sourced from: 1. Traditional religions 2. Science fiction, fantasy, autobiography or other literature…
365 Names: Elohim
ELOHIM. Hebrew usually translated in most Bibles as “God,” but also occasionally for “gods,” “divine beings,” or “judges.” In the Torah, this Name denotes God’s judgmental aspect. It’s also the first one given in the Torah, and as it’s associated…