How To Honor The Sandy Hook Victims

I am sad. And I am angry. I don't want to debate anything. I don't want to argue. I don't want to hear about the politics. The theories. The ideas. The law. I'm way beyond that.

I have been overwhelmed most of yesterday and today. The idea that 20 little kids have been shot to death in their classroom is staggering. Some of them, I just heard, were shot 7 times. I don't have anything to say. I'm wordless. I'm idealess.

Maybe on Sunday I will be able to write my usual rant and post it. I doubt it. Right now, though, that seems far away and oddly beside the point.

I wish there were something I could do that would comfort those who have lost their children. Or those who lost their parents and spouses.Or those who lost siblings. I wish there were something I could do that would make it be all right. Sadly, there isn't.

So I have decided, while I am sorting out my inner landscape, to make a donation to the Coalition To Stop Gun Violence. I made my donation in honor of the Sandy Hook Elementary Children. There really isn't much else I can do.

Please join me. Because this is the Internet, a small donation, one you won't even feel later on, can provide important resources for the upcoming battle to control gun violence. To prevent further murders of this kind.

I don't ever want to hear again that school children have been killed in their classrooms.

Making a donation seems to me to be a step toward that.

Phil Spector Convicted Of Murder

The New York Times reports:

Phil Spector, the rock music impresario behind such hits such as “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling” and “Be My Baby,” was found guilty of second-degree murder in the death of an actress at his mansion in 2003, after a night of drinking.

Mr. Spector, 69, faces a possible 18 years to life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for May 29.The jury reached its decision after deliberating whether one of the recording industry’s best-known producers shot the woman in a fit of anger or, as his lawyers argued, merely witnessed the woman’s suicide.

Mr. Spector, who was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, is famous for his “Wall of Sound” lush orchestrations heard on an array of hits in the 1960s and 1970s with groups like the Ronettes. He has worked with the Beatles, Tina Turner, the Rolling Stones and others but had receded from the public stage in recent years and was known as much for eccentric behavior — he has been often photographed wearing a large fright wig — as his talent.

Bummer. And what an macabre footnote to the history of rock. This is the end of a very creative career.