Old So What

  Bashar al-Assad was a very bad boy. Well, he was very bad…period. He and his wife, “The Rose in the Desert, (now known as “the first lady of hell”), lived a life of luxury and plenty. How many Hermes scarves can you wear at one time (?), while his people lived lives of hunger, despair and desperation. How do you do that?   How do you live with yourself and do that? How do you go to a family pot roast on a Sunday when you’ve tortured, exploited and starved your fellow Syrians on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday through Saturday. I won’t even talk about the torture prisons and the graves where hundreds of thousands were flung in an effort to dispose of their bodies.   Apparently, these were mostly average citizens grabbed off the streets and checkpoints never to be heard from again. Disposing of human beings. After a while you must become inured to it. All of it. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, Bashar decided to sell his people and the world, the Captagon (a highly ad...

  As of this posting there has been a shooting and killing of the United Healthcare’s CEO, Brian Thompson. The person of interest is, and I will say his name, Luigi Mangione. The suspect is 26 years-old.   A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in computer science. I know this school personally, both my brothers graduated from there, and my husband did design and photographic work for several of their departments for many years. I helped with some supplemental writing for two of their publications myself. So, I can say without hesitation that murder is not the norm. Since we do not know all the facts at this point, I can only wonder what happened? And why? Why did this young man take a life and throw his own away…completely. There must have been a reason. The whole event was so tragic. It could be the plot of a movie. And, of course, eventually it will be.

  In the 1980s, exhibitions of Titanic material started to tour. (I think they are still touring today in some form.) My husband and I were Titanic junkies at the time. It was an emotional experience going to one of these productions. We went to Memphis, Tennessee; Boston, Massachusetts; and Atlantic City, New Jersey to view the sacred artifacts from the Titanic. And they did feel sacred. All the objects owned, valued or used by so many people who died needlessly in such a tragic way. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about you should come up for air from under that rock.) The Boston exhibit was the most exciting because the “Big Piece” had just been raised on August 10, 1998, from the grips of the ocean. My husband memorialized the event of our touching the large piece of the starboard hull on September 26, 1998, with a kind of a plaque for our stairway wall. It wasn’t just a keyhole that you stuck you finger in, as so many Titanic exhibitions give you for just a tou...

On a February day in 2024, in Athens, Georgia, Laken Reilly was brutally struck down for no reason by a monster.  Laken was a nursing student. We will never know now how many patients she would have helped had she been allowed simply to live her life. She has left us too soon at 22 years of age. She has left us with just a glimpse of her promising future. She has left us with her middle name:  Hope. Laken Hope Reilly.

  The father had been a minor player who had come up through the ranks by virtue of his sheer availability.   It was certainly not because of any moral fortitude or advanced level of thinking on his part. The son had been a popular college student, and then, minor entrepreneur, getting ahead whenever and however he could, who now worked on behalf of his father in whatever capacity was required. But now the work started to bother him, some of the loathsome work that he had performed on behalf of his father had left an indelible mark on his very soul. Some sins do not disappear and just go away, no matter how hard you wish them to. In order to forget the more troublesome issues, the son had slipped into some bad habits including drinking too much and too often.   Evaporating quickly was the self-delusion that the more loathsome deals he was dealing, and the wrong turns he was taking in life, were really alright. It would turn out OK in the end, he had told himself, ...

  A documentary produced by Netflix about the 2015 series of tragic events… Looking for something substantive to satiate your brain? Well, look no further, Net flix has done all the work for you! Here is all the pathos and drama of true stories that will grab your attention and not let go!   Compelling television at its best that documents the earthquake which left 3.5 million people homeless, and 9,000 people dead. N ot just individual stories but unexpected events such as the outbreak of violence that happened with the perceived favoritism of just who would be rescued by local government first, from the small village of Langtang (in the earthquake zone). The final outcome had the dramatic heroism of the Israeli military, who helicoptered in and proclaimed that everyone (not just its citizens who had called for help) had a ticket out!