Tag archive: Osiris

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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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Aster-Obit: Jimmy Buffett -Wastin’ Away in Paradise

On 1 September 2023, word came of the death of singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffett, who passed away at his Sag Harbor, NY home, surrounded by his family, friends, music, and dogs, after a four-year battle with an aggressive, rare skin cancer.  Buffet was best known for his patented brand of “tropical rock,” celebrating a back-to-the-beach, “island escapism” aesthetic, especially epitomized by “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” from the 1970s.  But Buffett was also a gifted businessman and entrepreneur, with a net worth at his passing of over a billion dollars, making him one of the richest musicians on the planet, albeit most of his wealth stemmed from these other sidelines, and not record sales.

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Jacksonville Dollar Store Shooting

On Saturday, 26 August 2023, a 21-year-old white male, clad in a tactical vest, shot up a Dollar Store on King Road in Jacksonville, Florida, killing three black persons before turning the gun on himself when police arrived on the scene.  Ryan Christopher Palmeter had been remanded to state care in 2017 after a mental health breakdown which should have precluded his access to firearms, but was able to legally purchase the AR-15 style assault rifle and Glock semiautomatic pistol used in this crime, earlier this year.  Palmeter, who has a history of racism, adorned the rifle with swastikas and ordered all “non-Black” people to leave the store when he entered.  Police are investigating the murders as a hate crime.

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Asteroid Sleuth: The Case of the Murderous Mushroom

On Saturday, 29 July 2023, Erin Patterson of Leongatha, Victoria, Australia, invited her estranged husband Simon, his parents Don and Gail, and his mother’s sister Heather and her husband Ian Wilkinson, a local minister, to lunch, sending her two children to the movies.  The purpose of the gathering was to try to work through the differences that had separated the couple, with a view to their reconciliation.  Simon backed out of the luncheon at the last minute, but the four elders attended, with Reverend Wilkinson attempting to counsel Erin in his absence. 

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Asteroid Sleuth: The Case of the Falling Formaggio

On the evening of Sunday, 6 August 2023, 74-year-old Giacomo Chiapparini entered the storage room of his family-run dairy farm’s cheese factory near Bergamo, Italy, to check the robot used to clean the wheels of Grana Padano as they aged, stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves.  No one knows what went wrong, but one of the metal shelves buckled, spilling its store of hundreds of 40 kg (approximately 88-pound) cheeses and creating a domino effect, whereby the entire stock came crashing down, crushing the septuagenarian. 

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Aster-Obit: Singers Sign Off

In late July 2023 a trio of notable performers exited earth with swan songs of their own.  American icon Tony Bennett passed on July 21, Irish singer Sinead O’Connor and Eagles founding member and vocalist Randy Meisner both died on the 26th.  They were accompanied by a host of lesser-known (to US audiences, anyway) singers cross the globe, with no less than 10 others passing during that five-day period, from lands as disparate as India, Kenya, Brazil, Chile, Greece, Jamaica and the UK.

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