On April 9th, 2021, Buckingham Palace announced the death of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, at their home in Windsor Castle, just two months shy of his 100th birthday. Prince Philip and the Queen were married 73 years, and he was the longest-serving consort in British history. The couple have four children, eight grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren, with another on the way, due this summer.
Less than a week after the spa shootings in Atlanta, shots rang out again in Boulder, Colorado, as 10 were killed in a crowded grocery store by a lone shooter wielding an assault-style rifle. The suspect, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, is the same age as the Georgia shooter, but this motive is less certain. We do, however, have a birth date, and victim names which match asteroids, so let’s dig in on this latest atrocity.
At approximately 4:55 PM EDT on 16 March 2021, Robert Aaron Long allegedly entered the Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth, Georgia and opened fire with a 9mm handgun, killing 4 and wounding another. He then drove the half hour to Atlanta and continued his shooting spree at two additional massage establishments, Gold Massage Spa and Aromatherapy Spa, across the street from each other on Piedmont Road. Long shot three dead at Gold’s Spa, killing one more and wounding 4 others at Aromatherapy Spa. He was apprehended on the highway at about 8:30 PM, allegedly headed to Florida to continue his murderous rampage.
A number of stories came across my desk during the third week of February involving the Saturn/Uranus square; none was active enough cosmically (not to say unimportant) to rate a full treatment, but here’s a rundown of the week’s highlights, in abbreviated CliffsNotes style.
The recent Jupiter/Saturn conjunction of late December has brought on a rash of celebrity (Jupiter) deaths (Saturn), and as the Sun has come to conjoin this duo, highlighting this effect, famous people have begun dropping like flies. Three such recent departures are star baseball player Hank Aaron, broadcast legend Larry King, and the inimitable Cloris Leachman, one of the finest actresses of her generation, who all passed within five days in late January 2021.
On Tuesday 19 January 2021, I lost my dear fur buddy Charcoal to cancer. What I thought was a respiratory infection, which Charkey got every winter, turned out to be a mass in his mouth. While waiting for the biopsy appointment, the faint swelling I had observed on his left side blew up dramatically over the weekend, becoming so large it looked like he had a tennis ball in his cheek. I dropped him off for his appointment that morning, the vet confirmed the diagnosis a few hours later, and shortly after that, I held him as he passed.
