Terror

As the wife of a former prosecutor of major felonies and later a judge, I was a close observer of several of our community’s most sensational crimes and their resulting murder trials. Think the young Air Force wife and her two pre-school daughters, the couple who were shot dead walking downtown simply because of the color of their skin, and the attack at a McPherson Church Road restaurant that left four dead and seven injured.

In each of these shocking crimes, a perpetrator was arrested, tried and eventually convicted.

The hope is that the vicious stabbings of four students in a college town in Idaho will follow the same course.
At this writing, though, law enforcement authorities apparently remain baffled as to who committed these seemingly random murders and why.

Like the Cumberland County cases, the Idaho murders seem to be of the scariest sort — strangers who come out of nowhere and kill for reasons incomprehensible to the rest of us.
Fayetteville and Cumberland County support large and experienced law enforcement agencies that have, sadly, investigated and solved many murders over the years. Moscow, Idaho, a small town of about 25,000 that had not had a murder in seven years until last month.

State and federal investigators, including the FBI with all its experience, intellectual horsepower and crime-solving gadgetry, have stepped in, though whatever they are up to has yet to be disclosed publicly. The universal hope is that law enforcement has found a trail and is well on the way to identifying and arresting a suspect, or even scarier, suspects.

The alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

Trees

This holiday season, I have my first faux Christmas tree. Or, as a friend put it, a real tree, just one that has never been alive. My faux tree is, he opined, not a hologram.
I chose this route not because I do not love everything about a tree that has been alive but because I got tired of dealing with putting on and taking off hundreds of little white lights. Faux trees, it seems, can be purchased — mostly from China, “pre-lit,” so all one has to do is plug them in, put on all the special family ornaments, including the clothespin reindeer from Sunday school classes long past.

I am, however, suffering from faux tree guilt.

Debate continues over which is more environmentally safe and sustainable.

A 2018 article in The New York Times addressed this question and, like most other issues, it is a mixed bag. Live Christmas trees are a crop, just like food crops, that are planted every year and supports small farmers, including many in western North Carolina.

They can be recycled, and many recycled trees are now used along our coastline to help stave off erosion. They are also increasingly expensive, with the average price of a live tree this season being between $80-100.

Faux trees, on the other hand can be and are re-used for years, lessening the environmental impact of their plastic. It is also true that the environmental impact of faux trees is not much compared to the vehicular and air travel of the season and all the consumerism that comes with it. In addition, live trees in another big tree-producing state, Oregon, are harvested by helicopters, which can hardly be environmentally positive.

All of that said, I miss my live tree.

Tattoos

And, finally, a London tattoo removal parlor is offering free laser tattoo removal of Kanye West tatts, approximately a $2,500 value, following West’s recent rants admiring Adolph Hitler and other offensive statements.

My question is who would have wanted one in the first place?