Two competitions of gargantuan proportions reached simultaneous apogees on October 22, 2019, as the World Series of Baseball kicked off in Houston, while in the nation’s capital the House Impeachment inquiry garnered the testimony of a key diplomat involved in the Ukraine “arms for dirt” scandal. While the outcome of both contests is still in doubt as of this writing, it’s beginning to look more and more like the underdogs may emerge the winners.
Roosters crow. It’s what they do. But if you’re a wealthy retired French couple with a vacation home on the sleepy isle of Oleron off France’s Atlantic coast, and you have a local neighbor who owns one, you get perturbed at losing your beauty rest. So, what to do? Why, sue, of course!
That was the case with Jean-Louis Birom and Joelle Andrieux, who accused resident cock-of-the-walk Maurice of noise pollution in a suit brought against owner Corinne Fesseau in 2017. The acrimonious two year legal wrangle ended on September 5th 2019 when a judge in Rochefort ruled in favor of Maurice’s right to sing, awarding 1000 euros in damages against the plaintiffs.
Recently I watched a documentary on TCM which reminded me just how unusual 1939 was for the US film industry. So many classics were released that year, including “Gone With the Wind”, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “The Wizard of Oz”. Eighty years later now, I wondered why that should have been, so of course as an astrologer, for greater understanding, I reached for the ephemeris.
On the night of August 8-9, 1969, four members of the notorious Manson Family invaded a rented home in Los Angeles and brutally murdered five people. Not much by today’s standards, is it? But at the time, the crime created a sensation.
Part of the impact was generated by the celebrity of one of the victims, actress Sharon Tate, who had rented the home with her husband, director Roman Polanski, out of the country on a movie shoot at the time. Tate was eight and a half months pregnant with their child, who also lost its life. Cult leader Charles Manson had earlier instructed Tex Watson to go to the house and “totally destroy everyone in [it], as gruesome as you can”.
“I am the least racist person that you have ever met,” – candidate Donald J. Trump, interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, 9 December 2015
Donald Trump’s gift for hyperbole and unwitting comic self-commentary may be encapsulated in this quote, given just after the GOP presidential candidate had called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the US in 2015. Trump had kicked off his campaign months earlier with a diatribe against Mexican immigrants, whom he characterized as “criminals and rapists.” I guess the kindergarten taunt “takes one to know one” would be appropriate here, given Trump’s penchant for projection and schoolyard bully tactics.
What may have been the most important moment in human history occurred 20 July 1969, when Man first set foot upon the moon. NASA’s Apollo space program, designed to accomplish this astounding feat of ingenuity, technology, mathematics and physics, was conceived during the Eisenhower administration, but not constituted until President John F. Kennedy’s stirring address to Congress in 1961, where he proposed a national goal, “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”