October 19, 2025

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Tucker’s Cover

October 19, 2025
# 1735
Murder Victims

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Thoughts from the Porch

Thoughts from the Porch: Murder Victims
Before they were murder victims, they were people—loved, flawed, vibrant, with routines and quirks, like the way they stirred their coffee, the songs they hummed in traffic, the texts they meant to send but didn’t, the way they smelled.
Before they were murder victims, they were siblings, parents, lovers, loners, and dreamers, perhaps randomly caught in the wrong place at the wrong time; or targeted as retribution for real or imagined slights, with chilling outcomes.
Before they were murder victims, they had substance, more than, “A twenty-three-year-old woman found dead,” or “A man fatally shot in alley.”
Before they were murder victims, before they were stripped of context and relationships, before their individuality was erased and they were dehumanized leaving scarcely a whimper to mark their passing, murder victims were part of a constellation of relationships and memories, and, after their deaths, unrealized futures.

After their murders, some victims are memorialized in headlines, vigils and even documentaries. Others, after the fateful bang, vanish without a trace, without a whimper. Race, class, gender, police, the judiciary, the media, politics, family, friends, and the vic’s narrative appeal determine who gets remembered and who is forgotten.

And so we ask—not just who died, but who was allowed to live in memory. The calculus of remembrance is shaped by power, proximity, and the stories we choose to tell.

To truly honor and memorialize murder victims is not only to mourn their absence, but to resist the systems that render some lives disposable and others unforgettable.

Nature sees death as a speck on life’s continuum. It falls to us to seek continuity.
To speak their names not as headlines, but as echoes of full lives and to remember the way they stirred their coffee, and to imagine the texts they never sent.

After their passing, people deserve more than silence. Hold a space in your memory for the futures violence stole. Before they were murder victims, they were people: vivid, imperfect, and irreplaceable.

Death of Marat by David

Jacques-Louis David - Google Art & Culture: upload by user FDRMRZUSA. Web Gallery of Art

Jean-Paul Marat was a radical journalist and politician during the French Revolution, known for his fiery rhetoric and support of the Jacobins. Afflicted by a debilitating skin condition, he often worked from a medicinal bath, where he was assassinated in 1793 by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer. His death was immortalized in Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat, which portrays him as a martyr—serene, pen in hand, bloodied but dignified. The image became revolutionary propaganda, symbolizing sacrifice and ideological purity. Marat’s legacy remains controversial: revered by some as a voice of the people, reviled by others for inciting violence.

Thoughts from the Porch: the Barcelona Shoe Mistake
For the past several years my legs and feet have been serious nuisances, causing me pain whenever I am walking. I tried numerous ways to address the issue, all to no avail.
My son Mino researched the subject and bought me a pair shoes designed for walking and running. The result was electric: my legs and feet showed rapid improvement.
Soon after, I packed for a four-day trip to Barcelona. I decided to take only one pair of shoes and for style-sake, chose an Italian leather dress shoe, leaving my comfort shoe behind.
What a mistake.
Throughout the entire trip I suffered severe pains in my legs and feet. My feet actually gave way several times, causing me to stumble.
Upon returning home, I immediately switched back to the comfort shoes and felt instant relief.

So, for all those years, I suffered needlessly.

It was the shoes.

The following is the manufacturer’s presentation:

THIS MEN'S SHOE IS FOR: Prepare for smooth transitions with the Glycerin 22, featuring DNA Tuned, the latest midsole technology that seamlessly blends and integrates dual-size cells, ensuring a balance of luxurious cushioning and energetic toe-offs. This Glycerin 22 is a certified PDAC A5500 Diabetic shoe and has been granted the APMA Seal of Acceptance. Predecessor: Glycerin 21.

NEUTRAL SUPPORT: Provides neutral support while offering the maximum amount of cushioning. Ideal for road running, cross training, the gym, or wherever you might want to take them! Predecessor: Glycerin 21. Look for the Brooks Glycerin GTS 22 for the same style with added support.

DNA TUNED CUSHION: Cutting-edge cushion technology with larger cells in the heel to provide soft, plush landings, while smaller cells in the forefoot invite responsive toe-offs.

ACCOMMODATING FIT: The newly engineered double jacquard knit upper delivers a flexible and accommodating fit, combining durability with exceptional breathability.

SMOOTH, STABLE TRANSITIONS: The broad platform stabilizes your foot while the tuned heel and forefoot smooth heel-to-toe transitions.

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Tucker’s Corner

The Lost Bus

The agitated, ominous vibration of giant power lines and quaking transmission towers feels like a Greek chorus throughout Paul Greengrass’s intense new wildfire thriller, The Lost Bus. Over the course of the film, Greengrass regularly cuts away to the churning cables and metal structures, as well as to the roaring flames of the 2018 Camp Fire, as the blaze makes its way across the mountains and cliffs of Northern California. This helps us follow the spread of this real-life disaster, and it also conveys the puniness and impotence of the mortals fighting it. Based on real-life stories from the Camp Fire (still the deadliest wildfire in California history), The Lost Bus, which just premiered Apple TV+, offers plenty of suspense and heroism. But it’s all tempered by the knowledge that these fires are inescapable, growing, and unstoppable.

At heart, The Lost Bus is a disaster movie — a great one — and it has some of the classic moves of a disaster movie, complete with the slightly on-the-nose narrative shorthand designed to introduce characters quickly and efficiently. Greengrass cuts across a number of arenas and people, including the various fire crews trying to deal with this rapidly deteriorating situation, but the central narrative belongs to Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a down-on-his luck school-bus driver in Paradise, California, who returned here after his life fell apart elsewhere. Kevin is already having one of the worst days of his life even before everything burns down: His dog is dying, his teenage son is home sick from school (and also hates him), his mom is elderly and out of it, and his ex-wife is berating him on the phone. He’s also missed his bus’s inspection appointments, he’s running out of money, and his supervisor thinks he’s a flake. Once the flames come roaring into town, however, Kevin will be the only one in a position to drive a busload of elementary-schoolers, along with their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), through the downright biblical flames and out to safety. It’s Speed meets the end of the world.

McConaughey was made for parts like this: the good old boy facing extraordinary circumstances. He knows exactly how to sell this character and his desperation — not with confidence, but with a “damn the torpedoes, I’ll try anything once” bravado. Honestly, they should cast him in every disaster movie. Plus, he makes a fine match with Ferrera, whose teacher must exude outward calm for the benefit of her kids while she’s not-so-secretly freaking out inside. (Both Kevin and Mary have their own kids elsewhere that they’re also worried sick about.) As everything falls apart around them in ways both big and small, we enjoy watching these two opposites butt heads and quibble and then learn to function as a team.

The film feels like a homecoming for Greengrass, who cut his teeth in the world of you-are-there television documentaries before helping redefine the modern action movie with the handheld urgency of hits like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. The director also carried that approach over to docudramas like United 93, Captain Phillips, and July 22 (as well as his earlier, masterful Bloody Sunday, the movie that put him on the map back in 2002). But the “shaky cam” style ran its course some years ago; his last effort was the stately and old-fashioned Tom Hanks western News of the World, a beautiful picture whose release got swallowed up by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In The Lost Bus, Greengrass combines his thriller side with his reportorial side. He films Kevin and Mary and the schoolkids’ journey through hellfire as a no-holds-barred action spectacle full of immediacy and awe, complete with hair’s-breadth escapes and incredible visions of destruction. (It’s frankly a shame that The Lost Bus isn’t getting a wider theatrical release; it was clearly made to be a big-screen experience.) Some incidents have been a bit sensationalized, but Kevin and Mary’s heroism was very real, as evidenced in Lizzie Johnson’s exhaustively researched and absorbing 2021 nonfiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, on which the film is loosely based. To that end, the film also offers a more diffuse and heavily researched portrait of what goes into battling a wildfire, and Greengrass’s vérité style lends authenticity to the scenes of fire chiefs strategizing, of ground crews and air crews trying to combat the blazes and save lives. The picture thus combines the excitement of an old-school disaster spectacle with a fly-on-the-wall portrait of institutions struggling to function in the face of a calamity. The effect is singular: We enjoy the thrill ride immensely, but it’s the realism that sticks with us. Movies end, but the fires are here to stay.

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Chuckles and Thoughts

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Six Word Story
Knife passes. Questions asked. Bonding seals.

This six-word story captures an intergenerational ritual—a parent passing a knife to a child, not just as a tool, but as a gesture of trust. The act of handing over the knife is tactile, symbolic: it marks a shift from observation to participation, from being cared for to co-creating.

“Questions asked” suggests curiosity—perhaps about technique, tradition, or memory. It’s the child reaching into the past, and the parent responding with stories, instructions, or silence. The kitchen becomes a classroom, a confessional, a hearth.

“Bonding seals” is the emotional culmination. Through shared action and inquiry, a deeper connection forms—not loud or dramatic, but quietly profound. The seal isn’t spoken; it’s felt in the rhythm of chopping, the cadence of conversation, the warmth of being trusted.

It’s a story of legacy passed hand to hand, where the knife is both utensil and metaphor.

Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Cubist Still Life with Eggplants and Bottle

Manuel Ortiz de Zárate’s Cubist Still Life with Eggplants and Bottle transforms the familiar into fractured elegance. The eggplants—typically lush and organic—are reimagined through Cubist geometry, their curves flattened into angular planes, their sheen reduced to tonal rhythm. The bottle, often a symbol of containment or ritual, stands as a vertical counterpoint, anchoring the composition amid abstraction. Zárate’s palette likely leans toward muted purples, ochres, and deep greens, evoking Mediterranean warmth while resisting sentimentality.

This isn’t a still life of bounty—it’s a meditation on form, memory, and perception. The eggplant, a staple of Italian kitchens and ancestral care, becomes sculptural, almost architectural. The Cubist lens invites us to see not just objects, but the emotional architecture behind them: the kitchen as a site of legacy, the bottle as a vessel of ritual, the eggplant as a mnemonic device. Zárate’s work resonates with quiet drama, making the domestic mythic through fragmentation.

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SDM Book Review

Young adults will love this book, a young king Arthur must learn his way with the help of merlin the magician. A classic!

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Lisa’s Corner

Reflecting color.

New England Rituals
We are so lucky to live in New England in the Fall.  Although there are many places where the leaves turn color, nothing compares to our neck of the woods for the whole Norman Rockwell experience.  I think it’s the perfect combination: the crisp weather,the variety of colorful trees, the proximity of working farms, numerous turkey sightings and the abundance of local fall festivals.  Every morning we wake up like kids in a candy store anticipating what visual and literal delights we can gorge on.  An embarrassment of riches is an apt description of the goings on around here every autumn.

We already picked apples and ate cider donuts as you know from an earlier column.  This week was chock full of activities as well.  

We attended an annual exhibit in Peterborough which celebrates local artists and furniture makers.  It is held as a precursor to a Columbus Day weekend tour of the art studios- .  a tour that is a foliage excursion in its own right. One of the landscapes in the exhibit featured Mt. Monadnock, and I knew exactly where the artist painted it en plein air. The canvas truly came alive when we drove past the picturesque scene on our way to the event! By the way, it is serendipitous that Peterborough is the basis for the fictional, quintessential small town Grover’s Corner.  Thornton Wilder wrote his play “Our Town”  while a resident of the local McDowell Art Colony.   

We also dropped in Temple’s Town Day, a cornucopia of hay rides, maple syrup booths, antique fire truck displays,farm animals, and all those other gosh-darn hokey adorable experiences.

The last event we attended is the annual Ocktoberfest at the East Hill Inn in Troy.  East Hill is awesome because it’s an inn, but also a working farm that offers guests a complete immersion into country life.  When you stay there, there are activities all day long, and family style locally produced meals that are included in your package.  They host community events as well, and the Ocktoberfest dinner is not to be missed.  The price of the dinner (under $40) includes live music, heavy appetizers, home made bread, soups, salads, 2 proteins, several sides and 3 desserts.  Holy cow!  And you can take home the leftovers!  It’s not Michelin level fare, but it’s darn good value (look at this city girl using “darn” without affectation) and most of it is real farm to table food.  Next month is the New Hampshire Grower’s dinner, which highlights the local farms.  You betcha we'll be there enjoying more good food and music.

Only forty dollars.

Let’s talk turkeys.  I don’t mean a bad movie or TV show.  I’m talking real wild turkeys; the kind that invade our neighborhood in the fall like a plague.  They are cute when there are a few, but their sightings have devolved into the grotesque by the overwhelming volume of them.  We look out our front window and watch as they squawk and strut their way into the yard, we drive down the road and are forced to stop numerous times to let an entire platoon of them cross the street.  We hear rustling in the woods when we’re hiking, and it’s them! There is no escape.  It makes me look forward to Thanksgiving, so I can exact my revenge upon their relatives.

Let’s talk turkey.

Lastly on our fall agenda is the highly anticipated ritual known up here as The Raking of the Leaves.  We don colorful flannel shirts, use a farm instrument known as a rake, and spend hours moving fallen leaves into an enticing pile.  You city folk simply must experience this wonderful activity.  In fact, I want to share some of the bounty of our rural life and invite you to stay with us, so you can fully participate in the Raking.  You’ll love it!  

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In the Mail
This from Jim Pasto:
FYI: This is the essay on Columbus by Sylvia Wynter I mentioned. It is very good. I highly recommend it.  

1991 Columbus and Propter Nos.pdf

Jim

And from Nick Dello Russo:

Good article but here is another one that is more approachable.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/3/9/retrospection/

In 1939 the Pulitzer Prize winning Harvard historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, retraced Columbus’ voyage using only the same navigation instruments that were available to Columbus. Morison considered Christopher Columbus to be one of the greatest navigators of all time. 

Morison’s voyage occurred on the brink of World War II so it was overshadowed by events in Europe like the Anschluss which happened just several months before his trip. 

Morison wrote a biography of Columbus called Admiral of the Ocean Sea which won numerous prizes. Columbus’ contemporaries considered him a hero. So should we,

Nick

Nicholas M. DelloRusso, DMD, MScD

And from Victor Passacantilli, friend, co-publisher:
To Dom, Nick, Jim and Tom,
Your exchanges in the ezine were enjoyable and very informative. Thanks.

Dom,

Thank you for the respect you shared for teachers and their profession in your prior ezine. It made my day. 

Victor 

From Dom:
Victor, writing that gave me great personal pleasure as well. Thank you for your kind words.

And from the editor, Dom C:

We immigrants should keep Morison in perspective.

Despite his attraction to Christopher Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison disparaged Italian immigrants in his historical writings. In The Growth of the American Republic, co-authored with Henry Steele Commager, Morison perpetuated ethnic stereotypes reflecting nativist biases. Morison portrayed Italian immigrants—especially Southern Italians—as prone to criminality and political corruption. The book was widely used in U.S. classrooms for decades, which amplified the impact of these stereotypes.

Later editions of the textbook were revised to remove or soften these passages, but the controversy remains part of Morison’s legacy.

"Released" photo of en:Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) File source: http://www.news.navy.mil/view_single.asp?id=9159 Website: http://www.news.navy.mil Their caption to the photo is as follows... 030821-N-0000X-001 Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C. (Jan. 21, 1953) – Navy file photo of Rear Adm. Samuel Eliot Morison, USNR, the eminent naval and maritime historian and Pulitzer prize winning author. The director of naval history has established the Samuel Eliot Morison Naval History Scholarship Program to promote the development of a broad understanding of naval history within the American national experience. This scholarship provides a $5,000 cash award to a selected active duty commissioned officer of the U.S. Navy or U.S. Merchant Marine Corps with demonstrated leadership potential, high academic qualifications and whom is already pursuing graduate study in history, international relations, or a related field. The award will help pay for expenses related to research, travel and the purchase of books or other educational materials.

Joseph „Joey“ Gallo - Mugshot

US-amerikanischen Bundesregierung - Mafia-Wiki - Joey Gallo

There were, of course, unsavory characters who were Italians or of Italian ancestry.

There were also Italians who were unjustly tried, convicted, and executed.

An episode of the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans in 1891 after the murder of police chief David Hennessy. The citizens breaking down the door of the parish prison with the beam brought there the night before for that purpose.

E. Benjamin Andrews - Andrews, E. Benjamin. History of the United States, volume V. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 1912.

In 1891, eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans following the acquittal of several men accused of murdering Police Chief David Hennessy. A mob, enraged by the verdict, stormed the jail and executed the men without trial. It was one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.
The victims, many of whom had tenuous ties to the case, were scapegoated amid rising anti-Italian sentiment and fears of organized crime. Though widely condemned abroad, the lynching was celebrated by some American newspapers, revealing the era’s brutal nativism and injustice.

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Last Comment
It’s storming in Boston as I write this. Tomorrow, I fly to Detroit to spend time with my son, Mino. We’ll have two days together there before heading to St. Louis, where I’ll tag along as he handles some business. I won’t be working, just watching, just being near him. That alone makes it feel like a holiday.

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