At 11:24 AM EDT on March 21, 2023, in Nazareth, PA, my dear girl Ashes passed peacefully into eternity. We had been together 15 years, with never a cross word between us, a wonderfully close and affectionate relationship. I brought Ashes in off the West Philly streets in 2007, along with two of her kittens, one of the first beneficiaries of Leo’s Cat Rescue, which I ran with my friend John Mignone for over ten years.
The 95th Academy Awards are now history, and it was a night of firsts and record-setting nominations. Angela Bassett was the first actor to be nominated for work in a film from the Marvel Comics franchise (for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), and sixteen of the twenty nominees in the acting awards were up for the accolade for the first time. Michelle Yeoh became the first performer of Asian descent to win Best Actress, Ke Huy Quan became the second to win Best Supporting Actor, after a gap of nearly forty years, and Daniel Kwan won for Best Director (all for “Everything Everywhere All At Once”). Composer and conductor John Williams became the oldest Oscar nominee ever, at age 91, though he failed to take home the gold statuette.
On Thursday, 2 March 2023, a South Carolina jury convicted lawyer Alex Murdaugh of the murders of his wife and younger son, after just three hours’ deliberation. The trial which began January 25th lasted five weeks, and had become a cause celebre, with national news organizations running live coverage during Murdaugh’s testimony and final arguments, then breaking into primetime programming to cover the verdict live. The sentencing came a day later, with Murdaugh receiving two consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole.
First, let me say that I totally renounce and disown that charlatan rodent weather prognosticator, Punxsutawney Phil, who on Groundhog Day 2023 predicted six more weeks of winter. He’s often wrong, and I’ve tried to defend him in the past, but he has been so colossally off the mark this year that I can no longer continue with his charade. On the other hand, if by that prediction, he meant “six more weeks of the same,” then he’s been spot on!
The traditional first anniversary gift is paper, but no peace treaty looms on the horizon between Russia and Ukraine as the war grinds on into its second year. Perhaps the modern version, the gift of a clock, would be more appropriate, to time the conflict’s duration. What many predicted would be a triumphal progress for the Russian army a year ago, with expectations that Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv would fall in a matter of days, has turned into a long, hard slog, mainly serving to illustrate the resilience, spirit and determination of the Ukrainian people, and the relative weakness and ineffectuality of the Russian armed forces.
On Sunday, 19 February 2023, transit asteroid Troemper exactly conjoined transit Pluto, symbol of criminality and devastating change or transformation, inaugurating a new cycle for the former president. For this update on Donald Trump’s legal woes, I’ll be focusing on progressions, an astrologic technique I rarely employ. The birth chart is a dynamic thing, continuing to evolve and unfold as we age; secondary progressions are a method of forecasting which equates one day of planetary movement with one year of life. So, if you want to know what things are highlighted and on the move for age 30, for example, you look to a month after birth.
