Tag archive: Lachesis

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Grace Notes: An Asteroid Bio of Grace Kelly

Grace Kelly has always been one of my favorite actresses, despite a thin body of work, with just ten films to her credit over her truncated, five-year career.  But what credits!  “High Noon” with Gary Cooper; “Mogambo” with Clark Gable; “The Country Girl” with Bing Crosby and William Holden (which garnered her an Oscar); and three Hitchcock classics: “Dial M for Murder” with Ray Milland; “To Catch a Thief” with Cary Grant; and “Rear Window” with Jimmy Stewart.  Kelly abruptly left show business at the peak of her career for a higher calling:  to become a princess as the wife of Prince Rainier III of Monaco.  The connection to royalty didn’t hurt one bit in my admiration of her.

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2023 Grim Reaper Wrap-Up

What with one thing and another, quite a few celebrity deaths in 2023 slipped through AAA’s bony fingers, unremarked and unmourned.  As the last dregs of the old year are drained from the cup, let’s pause to remember those we’ve lost.  The list below is of necessity incomplete, and for the sake of brevity, we’ll not be doing any full-on Aster-Obits or birth charts, just taking a look at how asteroids representing the dear departed interacted with celestial death indicators on the dates of their passing.

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Aster-Obits: Henry Kissinger & Sandra Day O’Connor

Two conservative icons recently passed within days of each other, as November rolled over to December 2023.  On November 29th, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, propelled from academia into international prominence by Richard Nixon, instrumental in ending the Vietnam War and reestablishing diplomatic relations with Communist China, died at the age of 100.  Two days later, on December 1st, former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Reagan appointee and the first woman to sit on the US Supreme Court, passed at age 93.  While neither would recognize today’s Republican Party, so focused on grievance and retribution instead of policy, and both have serious blots on their legacies, each reminds us that there were once two viable political philosophies vying for control of the country, in a comparatively congenial and collegial atmosphere.

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Happy Birthday, Old Joe!

Now, before you get your knickers in a twist, Old Joe is the name of an asteroid, not just an agist slam on Joe Biden, whose 81st birthday occurs Monday, 20 November 2023.  With vast numbers of Americans, even Democratic supporters, leery about Biden’s ability to continue four more years in the notoriously high-pressure job due to his age, the point seems an increasingly apt celestial moniker to represent the 46th President of the United States.

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Mayhem in Maine: The Lewiston Mass Shooting

On Wednesday, 25 October 2023, the peace of a Down East autumn evening was shattered by gunfire which took the lives of at least 18, wounding 13 more.  At this early date (October 26), names of the victims have not been released, and police are engaged in a statewide manhunt for the suspect, 40-year-old Robert Card, missing after separate attacks on a bowling alley and a restaurant bar.  Card, who has been dealing with mental illness, has a military background and worked as a firearms instructor; his car was found abandoned in nearby Lisbon, but there is no trace of the suspect.  [Author’s note:  Robert Card was found dead, an apparent suicide, late on Friday the 27th.]

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Aster-Obit: Dianne Feinstein

US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) passed away peacefully at her Washington DC home on 29 September 2023, bringing an end to an era.  Her health had been in decline for some time, but the death itself was sudden and unexpected.  At 90, with some thirty years in the Senate, Feinstein had become a Washington institution, initially elected in 1992 as California’s first female Senator, and first female Jewish Senator in the US.  Reelected five times, in recent months ill health had kept her absent from Judiciary Committee meetings for long periods, imperiling the Democrats’ fragile majority and delaying numerous judicial appointments.  In February 2023 she announced she would not run for reelection when her term expired in 2024.

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