AS HOBBITS AND THOSE WHO love them know, nothing makes a meal like a heap o’ mushrooms. Around here, that usually means skilleted with garlic, onions, tomatoes and a big sausage and lovingly ladled atop fettucine or capellini. But last…
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.
Leaving room for silence
Of all the apparent opposites which Judaism wrestles to reconcile — free will v. predestination, universalism v. particularism, applesauce v. sour cream — one of the most paradoxically fertile is words v. the Wordless. Maimonides, the great 12th century rabbi…
An Apology to Douglas Rushkoff
In my previous, I made a cutting remark about Douglas Ruskoff’s “Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.” While my opinion remains that the book is deeply flawed, as noted by, among others, Zeek.net), I didn’t intend to be dismissive. For…
It Started With Fingerprinting
Actually, it started two weeks ago, when I was interviewed by two Sonoma County Law Enforcement Chaplains who asked me why I wanted to become one of them. "To tell you the truth," I said, "the whole idea terrifies me.…
There’s WATER on ‘ing MARS.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks…
inyourhand to metaphorager
Effective immediately, and thanks to a recent free domain offer from the greatest ISP in the world, inyourhand.org is now metaphorager.net. (Well, and it’s also a cooler title.)
Too Mellow to Die
It worries me somewhat that my friends and colleagues are more concerned than I am that I experienced my fourth cardioversion Sunday. “Experienced” is the wrong word. I experienced, and have a clear memory of, the 150 beats-per-minute irregular jangle…
Poetry of News
There is a certain poetry to newswriting that’s not readily apparent to its readers — and perhaps not even to its practitioners. This derives in large part, I think, from the absurdity inherent in exchanging six to eight hours a…
First Week In
Three things: – My beats: fire, cops, breaking news, and meetings as needed.– I work with some freakishly smart, amazingly creative people; two of whom I have now dueled with a lightsaber.– The Game hasn’t changed much — get it…
And so, to work.
It was four-and-a-half months since I was laid off from the sasonal office-manager position at a local nursery, and longer still since I worked in my official profession, when I picked up the phone to call Sonoma Valley’s newest newspaper.…
Thump, Flutter, Gak
I looked up from the computer, wondering about the “thump.” Then I saw the robin on the patio — fluttering wings outspread, struggling to get up. Outside, through the gate, into the side-yard. “Are you okay?” I asked reflexively. She…
Natural Machines
A number of years ago, I got into a cocktail-party argument (or its boho-pomo equivalent, since we were in San Francisco in the 1980s) with someone who decried the “unnaturalness” of spaceflight. Her thesis, IIRC, was that humans were somehow…