Posts by Alex Miller

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Asteroid Sleuth: The Case of the Shameless Shove

It was the shove watched ‘round the world.  On Saturday, 1 June 2024, at a WNBA contest between the Chicago Sky and the Indiana Fever, Sky guard Chennedy Carter gave a superfluous shoulder shove to Fever rookie phenom Caitlin Clark, knocking her to the floor.   Clark was not in possession of the ball at the time, and the foul, later upgraded to “flagrant-1,” made local and national news across the country.  Carter’s teammate Angel Reese, a former college rival of Clark’s, was seen to leap off the bench and clap at the infraction; later, she decked Clark herself with an illegal elbow move that wasn’t called by the refs.  After the game, Reese was fined $1000 for failing to make herself available to the media.  Despite the interference, the Indiana Fever came out on top, 71-70, with Clark adding eleven points to the scoreboard.

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Donald Trump’s 78th Solar Return: Restriction and Negation

Former US President, current presumptive GOP presidential nominee, and convicted felon Donald J. Trump turns 78 on 14 June 2024.  A chart cast for the moment when the Sun returns to its natal degree and minute can reveal much of what awaits in the coming year, a year which, for The Donald, is fraught, to say the least.  Before the twelvemonth is out, Trump is likely to find himself an occupant, either of the White House, or the Big House.  With sentence pending on his criminal conviction in New York state, and awaiting three more criminal trials, the stakes couldn’t be higher for the 45th president.

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Asteroid Sleuth: The Case of the Potty-Mouthed Pope

On May 20, 2024, Pope Francis was speaking in camera to a meeting of Italian bishops, following the creation of a new document outlining training for Italian seminarians, not yet released pending review by the Holy See.  The document is reported to include an attempt to soften the current ban on openly gay men entering the Catholic priesthood, by focusing instead on the need for celibacy by priests, whatever their private sexual inclinations.

But the Pontiff was having none of this, despite garnering a reputation for promoting openness and inclusivity for the gays in his flock, and, in what has been describe as a “joking” tone, His Holiness averred that “there is already an air of faggotness” in seminaries.  The Pope, speaking in Italian, used the term “frociaggine,” a slur against gay people that roughly equates to “faggot.”

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Aster-Obit: Morgan Spurlock

Documentarian Morgan Spurlock passed on May 23, 2024, from complications related to cancer.  The name may not ring a bell at first, but doubtless you’ll remember his 2004 documentary film “Supersize Me,” chronicling his month of subsisting on nothing but fast food from McDonald’s.  Spurlock, judged by doctors and nutritionists to be in “above average” shape when he began his experiment on 1 February 2003, gained nearly 25 pounds in his thirty-day Ronald McDonald binge, along the way experiencing heart palpitations, sexual and liver dysfunction, lethargy, depression and headaches.

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Guilty! Justice Comes for Trump

At last!  Some level of accountability for the biggest criminal scofflaw ever to infest the Oval Office.  Fond of setting records, on 30 May 2024 Donald J. Trump entered the history books yet again, as the only former US President, and presumptive GOP nominee, to be convicted of a felony.  And not just one – the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict on each of the 34 criminal counts against him.

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Helicopter Crash Kills Iranian President Raisi

On 19 May 2024, Ebrahim Raisi, president of Iran since 2021, was killed when his helicopter crashed in a remote region of the country, near the village of Uzi.  Dense forests and thick fog impeded rescue efforts for up to twelve hours; by the time the wreckage was reached, there were no survivors.  Also among the eight who died was Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.  A former cleric and Muslim jurist, Raisi had been nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran” for the part he played as deputy prosecutor general during the infamous 1988 “death commissions” and executions of Iranian political prisoners; for this and other offenses United Nations special rapporteurs accused him of crimes against humanity.

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