Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Episode 280: Sky Father The Uncrumbly

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Definitions can be difficult sometimes, especially when the word you are floundering to define doesn't really have a concrete definition, but rather a multitude of different applications and associations. It's best then to define something with double negatives, as I try to demonstrate in this Episode 280: Sky Father The Uncrumbly.

In this episode, I read a definition from my computer's quickie dictionary. I relayed from memory: a detail from a college course on Modern Jewish Philosophy; a Card Catalog article that makes the Searchie Search engine really useful; an Ed Zitron article called "The Man Who Killed [Searchie] Search" outlining how one guy destroyed two different search engines (but only for a good cause—profit!); Charles Stross's book The Family Trade; and an episode of The History of English Podcast.

I played: the voices of David McRaney and Martin Carcasson, both from Episode 331 of McRaney's You Are Not So Smart Podcast. The "great" today came, appropriately enough, from L33tMinion himself. Musically, I played: KMFDM backing a new intro with Martin Carcasson. Julie & Rolf & The Campfire Gang play us out with "Over The Rainbow".
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2 comments:

  1. L33tminionApril 6, 2026 at 5:17 AM

    Good stuff! I think in the context of that course title, "modern" Jewish philosophy is "modern" relative to "biblical".

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    1. Ad AttackerApril 7, 2026 at 1:16 PM

      Thanks, L33t!

      As to the course, it turns out "philosophy" in the western tradition—where one posits hypotheticals and rationalizes toward a conclusion, that sort of thing—fell out of favor around the 1500s. Mysticism became more popular, as did (as you note) a more biblically literal approach.

      Pity. The Rambam was an entertaining thinker.

      —Jim

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