Tag archive: Ixion

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D is for Dayton, E is for El Paso: A Child’s Mass Shooting Primer

Dayton and El Paso join the entries in “Baby’s First Pop-Up Book of Slaughter”, along with “A is for Aurora, C is for Columbine, O is for Orlando, P is for Parkland, S is for Sandy Hook, and V is for Vegas,” among others. Two mass shootings within hours rocked the nation on the weekend of August 3rd and 4th, 2019, as 32 people lost their lives in senseless violence, with dozens more wounded. At least one of the shootings was politically and racially motivated, with the killer avowing his desire to kill “as many Mexicans as possible.”

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The Birth of the Slasher Film: Forty Years of “Halloween”

On October 25, 1978, in Kansas City, Missouri, director John Carpenter premiered his third feature film, “Halloween”, with a plot involving a psychotic, knife-wielding killer stalking a group of libidinous teens in a sleepy Illinois town on Halloween night. The movie starred Hollywood scion Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, in her film debut, with a role that would soon become known as that of “the final girl”, that is, the lone survivor of the killer’s rage. A new terminology was required, for “Halloween” broke unhallowed ground in the horror genre, essentially inventing the slasher film

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Omarosa, With Thorns

On August 14th 2018 former “Apprenticebete noire and White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman released “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House”, her tell-all expose of nearly a year as Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison. Say that ten times fast. It’s a lot of words to identify a position that was difficult to define, but seems to have been related to her prior work with the Trump Campaign as Director of African-American Outreach.

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Nicholas & Alexandra: A Royal Tragedy

July 17, 2018 is the centennial anniversary of the assassination of Nicholas II, last Tsar of Russia, his wife Empress Alexandra, and their five children. Forced to abdicate in March 1917 in the aftermath of a disastrous Russian defeat in World War I, the family was held in captivity in various locations for almost 18 months, prisoners of one or another faction in the civil war which followed revolution, ending their lives in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, before an impromptu firing squad.

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Let Them Eat Cake

On Monday June 4th, 2018, a much-anticipated ruling came down from the US Supreme Court. By a 7-2 majority, the justices upheld the right of a Colorado baker to refuse services to a gay couple, based in his religious beliefs. The case centered on a 2012 incident when David Mullins and Charlie Craig approached Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, and asked him to bake a cake for their wedding.

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The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Fifty Years Later

 

April 4, 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee. The much-lauded civil rights leader, whose impact on legal racial equality in the US cannot be overstated, had spent the better part of his adult life fighting for freedoms which White Americans took for granted, but which were habitually denied to Blacks.

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