It's been a wild week, full of family drama, needy pets (my new girl kitten has decided that my beard is her home), and ...
NEWS!
Holy cow! I can hardly believe the things that are going on, and the pace that they're coming.
Jeffrey Epstein was clearly murdered. Even the very suspect medical examiner says it's almost certain he was strangled. There are rumors that other prisoners heard him screaming. One commenter noted how bizarre it is that the one event that will have finally galvinized Republicans and Democrats alike is going to turn out to have been Epstein's murder. EVERYONE is calling foul over this one. The left were hoping Jeff would somehow implicate Trump, and the right knew he was about to drag the entire upper echelon of the DNC to hell with him, so no one is happy that he's gone. Everyone wants answers, and William Barr is going to deliver them.
The power outage in NYC just before his first 'suicide' attempt was suspected by many to have been a botched effort to cover a murder attempt under darkness. Now there are reports that the lights went out in the prison the night Epstein supposedly succeeded in hanging himself.
And remember what I told you about people hanging themselves over doors. All they have to do is stand up. Only foolish kids manage to kill themselves this way playing that 'pass out' game. Even people who gas themselves in their garages usually take pills, too. Suicides want irreversability. Having the option of aborting by just standing up would be unacceptable to them. And Epstein would have had to kneel in that cell in order to hang himself. No way! And there's absolutely no way he could have broken his own hyoid bone that way. Any real trauma to the neck would require a drop of at least a few feet, or, in such confined quarters, extra weight, neither of which could have been supported by any of the materials available to him.
And his island! OMG, his island! With no one to file any objections, the FBI has descended on his island like locust. You only saw a dozen agents on land. I saw video of divers in the water, lots of them, and assumed they were looking for an underwater entrance for the subs, so, imagine my surprise when the reports came in that ...
Children's bones have been found in the water off Epstein's Pedo ... oh, right, we don't call it that any more ... now it's ... Epstein's tortu... uh ... no ... that's no longer appropriate either ... EPSTEIN'S ISLAND OF HORRORS! What are we going to find next?
I'm going to avoid names here, but you can find them out easily enough, and you've probably already heard a few, but, fasten your seatbelts; it's about to get freaky. There are as yet not entirely substantiated rumors of A-List Hollywood 'royalty' being involved up to their ears in Epstein's Island of Horrors. And not just Hollywood. Famous businessmen, CEOs and such, models, celebrities, scientists, nobility, royalty, even some people I HADN'T SUSPECTED.
Ok, just a few names, and only those that have already been released, just in case you may have missed them:
Prince Andrew (Randy Andy) of England. (Just look up his sordid history.)
James Franco
Johnny Depp
George Clooney
Stephen Hawking (As unlikely as it seems, there have been lots of long-time rumors surrounding this guy!)
Naomi Campbell
Sarah Furgeson (AND HER DAUGHTERS!)
Lord Mandelson
Various Victoria's Secret models
Laurence Krauss
David Gross
Lisa Randall
Gerard t'Hooft
Frank Wilczek
Ehud Barak
Ted Kennedy (Show of hands ... Who's surprised?) (Not me!)
Alec Baldwin
Courtney Love
Kevin Spacey
Ron Burkle
Casey Wasserman (grandson of Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman)
Alan Dershowitz
Larry Summers (former Treasury secretary and Harvard president)
Steven Pinker
Chris Tucker
Bill Clinton (at least 26 times)
Hillary Clinton (at least 6 times, and most likely as many as 17 times)
Why so many scientists? Rumor has it they were working on life-extension.
Of course they were. They knew they'd never get eternal life any other way.
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But, WAIT! There's more!
An investigation into election corruption has apparently turned up that those 'politicians' (aka activists) we so love to hate, now known as 'the squad', are themselves the beneficiaries of foreign election meddling.
I've heard tell that they received no more than 5% of their campaign donations from people actually living in the districts they represent, and, in one case, as little as 1%. Worse still, as much as 30% of their campaign funds came from foreign sources.
Russian meddling indeed.
Existing rules are about to be properly enforced, and new rules are on their way.
Some people won't even be on the ballot.
At least one will be looking for a new country to call home. (Go on! Guess which one!)
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And even that's not all!
China pushed the wrong button in Hong Kong, and got an unexpected reaction from what used to be a free people.
Naturally, China is reacting as China does, so you can expect grimm news any day now.
And the protestors are waving American flags, openly praising President Trump, and carrying banners proclaiming their need for a second amendment.
This isn't going to end well, even if China successfully suppresses all the news. Which they can't.
Remember Tiananmen Square? I know Chinese people who came here, and never knew anything about any of that. And they were shocked, even as they tried to dismiss it as the obvious penalty for unjustified rebellion, they had a hard time explaining the slaughter of all those people in the stadium.
We may be witnessing the modern iteration of the Anti-Nephi Lehis.
I pray we're wise enough to handle the situation as well as the Nephites did, NOT getting involved in THEIR war, but merely allowing them to escape behind our lines. Provided they support those lines.
But what's next?
Can you say, Stripling Warriors?
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And then there's this:
We now find ourselves in a cold civil-war ... for now.
How long till this turns hot?
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Did you know?
... that we have two moons?
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From my playlist
I'll definitely have to explain myself here.
I hate opera!
Well, most opera.
There are some really fantastic pieces, perhaps most notably, Nessun dorma, from Puccini's Turandot. (I'm torn between Mario Lanza and Andrea Bocelli.) Knowing my fascination with time and names, you can probably see how I stumbled over that. Besides, I love to have my brain teased. And, just as my bicycling hobby forced me to learn some French, learning something about opera forced me to learn a few words of Italian. I mean, beyond what one normally picks up in the course of living abroad. You don't really even need to know the words to that. You can practically feel the meaning, right? But you should probably know the words (aka libretto), too. It helps. That's when you really grok it.
Of course, everyone knows O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.
"But", you may be asking yourselves, "How on earth did you stumble over Cecilia Bortoli? Yikes!"
I know, right? Typical ear-torture opera fare.
Well, it was 1987, nearing the end of my time in Germany, and I just happened to see her on some show on TV, and was instantly smitten. I mean, not only must it be acknowledged, that she is certainly the greatest coloratura mezzo-soprano (an exceedingly rare talent) of all time, but, just like that actress in the Imagine Dragons video I showed you, her face just does amazing things when she sings. I could watch her all day long. She's just mezmerizing, no?
Eeven better is that she doesn't take any of it too seriously, even herself. Notice how she cracks herself up here, and the audience laughs right along with her. She's almost another classical music comedian, like Victor Borge.
I've even seen conductors watch her for their cues instead of the other way around.
But my favorite mezzo-soprano has to be German-American Heidi Stern, aka Jennifer Rush.
I heard this song on the radio in ... what? ... 1985? And I just had to have it, so I ran right out and bought it.
Jennifer Rush
The Power of Love
I heard somewhere that the microphone is just a prop because she's so awkward on stage (as you can see here), and doesn't know what to do with her hands otherwise; her voice overwhelms everything else, so she doesn't really need the mic. And I believe it, too, because I saw her sing once at a fashion show or something like that, and they put her in the back corner behind a big ficus or such, and her voice just filled the entire auditorium, even without an amplifier.
Hers is one of the few female voices I find soothing. Sorry, ladies, but singing women's voices just hurt my ears. Especially those in the choir who want so badly for us all to hear how great their voices are. And the higher they are, the greater my discomfort. I was raised on country music, after all: Jim Reeves, Charlie Pride, Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall, etc. About the highest voice I heard singing at home was Glenn Campbell.
Relax! I do love a number of female voices: Stevie Nicks (the female Bob Dylan), Allison Krauss, Carly Simon, Lara Fabian, Cher, Sarah Brightman (although, whoever put he up to singing Nessun dorma did her no favors), Annie Lennox, Mariah Carey, Belinda Carlisle, Lauren Mayberry, Judy Collins, Ulla Meinecke, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, ... hmmm ... can't think of too many other outstanding female voices. I mean, most of them are ok, they just don't have outstanding voices.
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