“BUILDING A BETTER MOUSETRAP IS one thing. Testing it is something else.”
Category: Life
Each moment is different. Here are some of mine.
Generational Drift
BY OUR BEST CALCULATIONS, HISTORY began in Sumer when people first started writing things down (there are some examples of probable earlier scripts, but no one’s translated them yet). This would be about 6,000 years ago. Let’s assume twenty-five years…
Slouching Toward Tishrei
TODAY IS THE SECOND OF Elul, the month preceding Rosh Hashana, and that fact lends the period an air of expectancy and overhaul. The Jewish New Year is less a time for partying all night and more a time for…
Pithyism #4.5×10^9
IF SEDIMENTARY ROCK LAYERS ARE like pages of a book, archaeology is the art and science of compiling an index and table of contents.
Pithyism #10,000
A MODERN SENSIBILITY IS THE greatest impediment to understanding ancient traditions. (And sometimes vice-versa.)
Putting It In Perspective
GIVEN THE POSSIBILITY OF EARTH’S demise-by-asteroid in 25 years, we at The Metaphorager will be trying to stay awake, aware, conscious, intent, productive, or otherwise engaged for the next days:hours:etc. (Live it up, fellow Earthlings.)
Bicycle Safety 101
THERE IS ONE INFLEXIBLE RULE which, if followed diligently, will result in years if not decades of safe bicycling: Pretend you’re invisible. Now, many get the wrong impression on first hearing this advice — they hear “invisible” and think “invincible,”…
Ol’ Thinkypants Groks
“HEY, MAN, IF YOU WERE in high school when the original Star Wars came out, you know exactly what I mean.”
Touching With Words
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…
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.)…
Pithyism #+/-1
Thank God or your equivalent that the uttermost limits of joy and misery remain mostly unexplored — and largely uncommunicated.
Two Indigent Sketches
1. HITCHHIKING THROUGH RENO IN 1985, I wandered by the green banks of the Truckee River, where a number of seen-better-days men lived in the park, in what apparently remained of their business suits. “Hey buddy, you got a second?”…