Tag archive: Ixion

(Another) Texas Church Shooting

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” took on a whole new meaning on December 29, 2019 at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, when a gunman’s six-second rampage ended with a single shot from one of the parishioners, tasked with church security. Two had already been killed and a third wounded when Jack Wilson, a local firearms instructor, shot and killed Keith Kinnunen, 43, who was not a member of the congregation, but was familiar with the church, having been given food several times in the past.

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Impeachment Update, “Christianity Today”, and That Four-flusher, Trump

Well, we all know the country is going to shit, but for some reason, as impeachment loomed large on the horizon and his evangelical allies began to desert him, Donald Trump felt the need to call attention to the nation’s true crisis – the need to flush toilets 10 or 15 times to gain the desired result. Far from the four-flusher we already knew him to be, Trump has revealed himself as the much more elusive ten-flusher. And so let’s go down this cosmic rabbit hole, from the sublime impeachment to the ridiculous toilet tantrums, and see where it takes us…

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Summer of ’69, Part IV: The Manson Family Murders

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”.

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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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