Tag archive: Lachesis

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Aster-Obit: Pele

December 29, 2022 saw the passing of a man generally acknowledged as the greatest soccer player of all time, Pele.  The mononymous sports superstar is the only player ever to compete in three winning FIFA World Cup finals, holds the Guinness World record for most lifetime goals, and was designated Player of the Century by international soccer’s governing body, FIFA.  Raised in poverty in the Sao Paulo state of Brazil, too destitute to afford a real ball, Pele learned his sport by playing with a sock stuffed with newspaper and tied off, or a grapefruit.  He joined his first professional team at age 15 and was picked up by the Brazil national team a year later.

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The Colorado Springs Drag Show Shooting

Just before midnight on Saturday, 19 November 2022, a man clad in body armor with an AR-15-style long rifle entered Club Q, an LGBTQ+ watering hole in a strip mall on the outskirts of Colorado Springs, Colorado, which was hosting a drag show that evening.  He began shooting into the crowd, but was tackled two minutes later by two patrons and subdued until police arrived.  In those two minutes, he had killed five and wounded 18 others.

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Art Imitates Astrology: Buffyverse Character Tara Maclay

In a recent AAA post, I honored the 25th anniversary of the premiere of perhaps my favorite TV series of all time, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and opined at the article’s close about how much I missed seeing the show.  Well, the syndication gods have smiled upon me, and just months later, “Buffy” retuned from the celluloid undead to brighten the screen via Comet TV.  As faithful readers of this site will remember, October usually brings at least one horror-or-Halloween-related article, but after five years, I was running out of ideas.  There didn’t seem the ghost of a chance that I’d find a suitable topic, and then my replay of “Buffy” paid off in a snippet I could sink my teeth into:  birth data from the tombstone of a major character.

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Liz, We Hardly Knew Ye: UK PM Truss Resigns

It’s ironic that Britain’s longest-reigning monarch should be succeeded by its shortest-serving Prime Minister, but that’s just what happened when Liz Truss stepped down from office after only 45 days in power.  The fact that they both had the same first name is just icing on the cosmic cake in this bizarre juxtaposition.  Truss stepped into the breach in the Conservative Party when embattled PM Boris Johnson resigned in the wake of scandal on July 7, but it took two months to wrap up those loose ends before she was officially appointed by Queen Elizabeth II on September 6.  Now, just six weeks later, she’s gone.

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Aster-Obit: Queen Elizabeth II

She advised 15 Prime Ministers, interacted with 14 American presidents and 7 popes, but the long life and seventy-year reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II came to a peaceful close on 8 September 2022, when the 96-year-old sovereign passed away in her sleep at her private estate of Balmoral Castle in Scotland.  Most of the United Kingdom’s population – indeed, most of the world – cannot recall a time when Elizabeth was not Queen; her reign spanned the post-World War II era to our post-Modern society, and her life saw massive technological change, from telegraphs to Twitter.

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Salman Rushdie Attacked

On 12 August 2022 Salman Rushdie, 75, famed author of “The Satanic Verses”, was attacked in public as he was being introduced for a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.  Hadi Matar, 24, rushed the stage and flung himself on Rushdie, stabbing him multiple times in the face, neck and abdomen.  Airlifted from a nearby ball field to Erie Hospital, Rushdie remains on a ventilator, unable to speak; his agent stated that he may lose an eye and has extensive liver damage, as well as severed nerves in his arm.

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