Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Whassup?
New-Fangled Cars Today!
My son got a new car with a lot of “bells and whistles,” new gadgets. He writes: “Alas, it lacks the latest Telepathic Soul-Connection (TSC) technology. So it’s not so great. It doesn’t do the driving for you.” But he says he is relatively sure we will be able to buy self-driving cars within 10-15 […]
Not-Really-Effortless Writing
It’s true that writing comes easier to me than many people, but it’s not as easy as it seems. What I write is at times flowing, but I have tendencies to digress (in case you hadn’t noticed), and on re-reading from a new reader’s perspective, I think I would lose part of my audience. So […]
Para-Nomasia
"Lexophile" is a word used to describe someone with a love for words as words, such as a paranomasiast—a punster. Some puns include: "You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish." "To write with a broken pencil is pointless." A competition to see who can come up with the best “lexophillies” […]
Peace and Quiet
Ahh. In another dimension I’m a sort of hermit. (My wife Allee is too.) In this cartoon, if we were to put on an international hermit’s conference and not tell anyone where and when it was, that’s okay with us. Ha ha!
Pioneering?
A friend, Dr. John Christie-Casson in England wrote, in response to my saying that I considered him a pioneer in his researches into the actual authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, “…the fact is I have only travelled on from where others had previously gone.” I appreciated his modesty, but it occurred to me that most pioneering […]
Play With Son
A snippet of correspondence between my son David and myself, to illustrate the quality of our interchange: A few days ago, he quoted a limerick told to him by his friend Kris Coppieters.: A doctor in Gastroenterology In charades drew the word entomology But no-one could guess And his act was […]
Pre-Summer Solstice ‘18
We are approaching the summer solstice in a couple of weeks. It’s 8:30 PM and there is still a pick cloud in the evening sky, while it’s darkening—but not yet dark. I’m very happy because (chiefly) I have a wonderful and beloved wifey who attends to my needs while also attending to many other things. […]
Priorities!
I just opened to the fact that I’m not just growing older, but I’m getting old. (I’m 80.6 or thereabouts.) What this means to me: 1. My mind is going a little. I can’t recall facts as well as I used to. I’m still pretty sharp, but not how I used to be. It’s […]
Pronoia-2
A friend asked, “ Won’t “they” be mad?” I replied: Great question. Actually, “they” hardly know I exist any more. Alas, “they” haven’t been persecuting me at all since the FBI-CIA have looked at their budget and reassigned priorities. (Just kidding! Not really paranoid!) My contact—you know? The one who used to beam threatening messages […]
Pseudo-Spam?
I just received what I think was a spam email based on my web-blog posting 65 (a couple years ago) that was unusual. Usually they have a few general lines, but this character from Russia sent a lengthy paragraph: It illustrates how easy it is for politicians and others to say nothing while seeming to […]
Rain! Ahhhh!
Being in a time of drought is intriguing. Today it is raining. Don’t know how long it will go, but Allee and I are savoring looking at it. There’s a singing group named “Ladysmith Black Mombaso” who in the 1970s (?) had a record (back in the olden days when there were vinyl 33.33 rotations/per/minute […]
School Supplies
For the first time in ages I haven’t shopped in stationery stores or drug stores for school supplies. I have enough to last me, and I won’t purchase more. This “came home” to me yesterday when I was at a Dollar Tree store, when in the past I would buy school supplies. No longer: I […]
Strung Out and Spread Thin
Perhaps I’m being a sort of "Cassandra here, shaking my tambourine and prophesying, but it must be said: “Overload!” The information explosion and media glut has arrived. We are in exponential times, with accelerating everything. The trickle became a creek, a stream, a river, a delta, a flood, an ocean, and a tsunami, all in […]
Testing Again
I got discombobulated from signing on. My sainted son has suggested some remedies. Let’s see if this works.
The “Ethos of Effort”
This term refers to the un-thought-out valuing of effort, trying hard, doing your best. I was a little delayed in popping out of bed, enjoying the relaxation of sleeping, then enjoying a relaxed contemplation, but I was a little jolted by a guilt spasm at my lackadaisical behavior. I heard the line from and old […]
The Appeal of Psychoanalysis
I’ve wondered why Freud became so popular. It was not that he was charming. He could be pleasant but also somewhat opinionated. For one thing, he wrote fairly clearly, compared to his peers. The riddle of why any personage, artist, showman, etc., becomes “popular” is not easily answered. However here are some other factors. Freud […]
The Art of Blogging
So perhaps we consider blogging as an art form, as valid as sculpture or dance. How much attention should I put into it? Should every piece be rehearsed, re-worked, evaluated in terms of a variety of criteria? Is it elegant, well-written, understandable, persuasive, innovative? It is the extension of easy self-publishing, that’s all. Open to […]
The Minions, Gib-reesh and Taboo
You don’t really need words. There was a movie in 2015 titled “The Minions,” a sort of cartoon movie about those cute, diminutive medicine-capsule shaped little guys. They were sidekicks to a villain in the popular movies around 2012 and got their own film in 2015. They speak in a kind of gibberish that, with […]
The Origin of Seasons
For thousands of years the Earth slept, hardly being aware that it spun about its axis every about 24 hours. But about 88, 301 years ago, a primitive lady said, about the sun, “Hey, that there evening was there yesterday, too.” Not that anyone believed her. But later that year, they conceded that she was […]
The Roots of My Interest in Scriptology
I’ve been making a series of presentations about scriptology, the very inter-disciplinary not-yet-officially formed field that deals with writing and associated technologies. It has been a sort of hobby of mine since the early 1970s, though I now realize that I’d been somewhat sensitized to the whole enterprise through a number of blessings (as I […]
The Teardrop
Or maybe it should be called wiggling through evolutionary time, over millions of years. Of course it’s multi-dimensional, very much so. But simplifying it all, in the cause of imagination: Most are in the bulbous middle, some a bit more ahead, “civilized,” some more toward the tail, “savage.” But all are needed for progress, and […]
There Goes Another One!
It turns out that there is one other universe—but of course, if there were one, there could be an infinite number! I dreamt about it last night—but it wasn’t a dream—it was a segment: Everything went fifty times faster than in our world. Bibbi-badda-bu-bi-bam! Faces, people, events—vaguely oriental, I recall, but oh-so-fast. I realized that […]
Upon Reflection
I’ve done a lot, learned a lot, loved and been loved a lot. I like the words of the song, “My Way,” which was Frank Sinatra’s theme song, though for me I have to confess that it should often have been called “Thy Way.” I was forced to do some things I didn’t really want […]
We Got Off Easy
It’s not just watching television! As grandparents grow older, there’s hosting family in trips out to eat, or at home. Clothes for grandchildren. Kids who are in financial straits or crisis. Paying off cars. Worrying about kids’ family’s debts. Attending sports, graduations—it goes on and on, filling one’s whole life. In our case, we have […]
Whassup (Early 2018)?
I’m doing my last edited book on non-psychotherapeutic applications of psycho-dramatic methods, which are really just the application of the technology of “enhanced” simulations to psychotherapy. The enhancement comes from the technique of the “double” (or “voice over”) which allows the audience to know what the role players are thinking or saying to themselves. I’m […]