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When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022 I thought about creating a whole bunch of memes. I ended up creating just two so far. One was this meme of Vladimir Putin that I made last year when the Wagner Group started this civil war in Russia that ultimately lasted just a few hours. The other I created just last month.
It turned out that so many other people have created incredibly awesome memes that I just don’t feel the need to create them myself. But then it turned out that there was an incident that led me to create this meme.
Here’s some background. I first heard about Russell “Texas” Bentley when he appeared in this video that went viral just days after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Here was this guy in the Russian-occupied region of Ukraine who was making pro-Russian propaganda speaking English with a Texas accent. He originally recorded his video for his own YouTube channel. Once it went viral YouTube closed down his channel and banned him. However his viral video has been preserved on Reddit and Twitter/X.
I looked this guy up online and found that a few years earlier he did this interview for Texas Monthly where I learned that he was born into a wealthy family. He became interested in communism at 12 when he read a book on Che Guevara, he was a pothead as a teen, he dropped out of high school, worked a variety of jobs, joined the U.S. army for a few years, worked a variety of jobs, moved to Minnesota, ran for the Senate as a third party candidate and lost, sold marijuana, was arrested, was convicted, was sent to jail, broke out of jail, spent the next few years as a fugitive on the lam, was caught and sent back to prison, was released, moved back to Texas, became an arborist, traveled to Cuba where he was impressed by the communism there, and listened to Russian propaganda through RT America (back when it used to broadcast in America–RT America got shut down when several cable providers dropped the channel from their lineups soon after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine). He became convinced that Ukraine was run by Nazis so he decided to travel to the Donbass region to fight for Russia in order to help “denazify” Ukraine. He appeared in this Vice News story about his fight with a Russian unit in Donetsk.
He subsequently settled in Donetsk, and married a local Donetsk woman. He also switched from fighting in a military unit to making English-language propaganda on behalf of Russia, which led to his viral video. That video led to more profiles in Western publications like Newsweek and Rolling Stone. After his video went viral he lost his YouTube channel and a few other Western social media accounts and he seemed to fade from the Western media.
But he kept up with his propaganda work. There’s his Instagram account where he had posted pictures of his life in Donetsk but he hadn’t posted there since 2019. There’s his blog, which he hadn’t updated since 2020, where you get to read about things like his belief that the COVID-19 pandemic was a manufactured crisis. There’s also his Telegram channel, which contains his more recent writings until the day before he disappeared and was announced to be dead eleven days later.
The biggest irony is that he was thrown off of Twitter nine years ago, which was long before Elon Musk purchased that platform and began to reinstate previously banned accounts. For some reason Bentley’s account wasn’t reinstated but he was allowed to create a new account just a few weeks before he was killed.
There’s even a book that Bentley wrote called The Donbass Cowboy, which was based on his own experiences fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
He went on to work for the Russian state media outlet Sputnik. It was through his propaganda work that he became a local celebrity in Donetsk where the locals called him “Texas.” Most of the Russell Bentley videos that are still up on YouTube are ones where he made guest appearances on other people’s channels. One such video was where he gave a guided tour of his new hometown of Donetsk. It was the least political of the videos that he appeared in and it showed the tragedy that such a lovely city had to be caught in such a violent war.
After that video he made went viral I remember the outcry on social media from people—especially Americans—calling him a traitor and demanding that he should be hauled back to the U.S. to be tried for treason. My attitude at the time was that while I probably disagreed with about 80% (and maybe higher) of his political beliefs, I could at least respect him because he actually put his money where his mouth was and moved to Eastern Europe and he even obtained Russian citizenship.
My opinion of Russell “Texas” Bentley grew lower the following year when two Westerners who had been fighting for Ukraine when they were captured and imprisoned by Russia, Shaun Pinner and Cossack Gundi, alleged on Twitter/X that their captors had forced them to participate in propaganda videos that Bentley was making. Which meant that Bentley was a war criminal.
Bentley was last seen in Donetsk on April 8 after an attack on the city by Kyiv forces. Bentley and his wife, Lyudmila, had gone to an office in downtown Donetsk to deal with some administrative documents. At the same time there was a Ukrainian strike in that area. Bentley decided to go in the direction of the smoke looking for anyone who needed help. When Bentley didn’t return, his wife had gone looking for him. She found his car, which had his baseball cap, his glasses, and a broken phone. Lyudmila later posted on her husband’s Telegram channel that her husband had been abducted by the 5th Brigade of the Russian Federation Armed Forces. When people suggested that Bentley was kidnapped because he was filming something that he shouldn’t be filming, Lyudmila clarified that she had experts check his broken phone and there were no photos or videos that were recently shot.
Soon messages began to surface on other Telegram channels about Bentley was taken by this Russian brigade because they thought that he was a NATO spy. Then the story of his demise at the hands of this Russian brigade began to change. At first the reports said that he was beheaded. Then the reports claimed that he had been shot in the head eight times. Then the reports said that the Russians initially gang-raped him before someone discovered that he had a Russian passport and other official documents indicating that he really wasn’t a NATO spy and one of the officers said that it was no longer possible to let Bentley go so they killed him either by being tortured to death or he was shot (depending on which report you read).
The only thing all these reports have in common is that Russell “Texas” Bentley was killed at the hands of the same Russian forces that he had fought with and actively supported with making his pro-Russian propaganda. His body has yet to be found as of this writing. It’s highly unlikely that he’s still alive because he disappeared in an active war zone. He’s been gone since April 8 and this post has gone live on May 16 so he’s been gone for over a month.
Why would the Russians turn on him? I’ve read some posts on Twitter/X claiming that he was too much of an alcoholic to be much use as a propagandist, he’s a scammer, he’s a bullshit artist. It’s possible that he may have somehow pissed the wrong person off and he paid the ultimate price for it. I’ve also read posts saying that the two breakaway republics in the Donbass region have apparently been dominated by gangsters and thugs since Russia encouraged the Donbass region to breakaway from Ukraine. It’s probable that Bentley was murdered by them because they wanted a pack of cigarettes or the cash in his wallet or something else. But right now it’s all rumor and speculation so it’s hard to know what is true and what isn’t.
There’s another possible reason. The Daily Mail has a story about him that mentions one thing about his death that I didn’t know about before. Quoting another story in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Mail claims that Bentley had been involved with Russian ultranationalist circles and his death has made him the latest in a number of leaders of the annexation of eastern Ukraine to show up dead. The ultranationalists had felt that Russia was not moving aggressively enough in its invasion of Ukraine.
This group also included the late Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had a falling out with Vladimir Putin after he had the Wagner Group organize an attempted coup against Moscow last year that ultimately failed. Prigozhin died in a plane crash one month later. Since then a number of ultranationalists have fallen out of favor with Putin and many of them have turned up dead. Bentley was the latest ultranationalist to meet his demise.
He had indicated in interviews that he intended to spend the rest of his life in Donetsk. It looks like he got his wish.
The moral of the story of Russell “Texas” Bentley is if you’re an American or a Westerner, don’t ever fight on behalf of Russia because the Russians will turn on you for whatever reason and you could end up dead. I’ll end this post with this song that he “wrote” and performed called “Sweet Home Novorossiya,” where he basically ripped off the melody from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
UPDATE (May 18, 2024): When I first became aware of Russell “Texas” Bentley after his one video went viral in 2022, I did a Google search on the guy and I found this 2017 interview he did with Texas Monthly. That article was probably the most in-depth story I read about the guy because it went into details about his family background (mainly that his family was wealthy) and his life in the US before he moved to Donetsk. Recently the same writer, Sonia Smith, wrote a sequel that is in the most recent issue of Texas Monthly. The only thing about Bentley that’s really new is the report that in late April a white Niva was found near an abandoned brick factory close to the front line. Inside of the car was a burned body. That body is supposedly undergoing a forensic medical examination but nothing further had been released.
Even if that body belonged to someone else, the chances of Bentley still being alive are practically nil at this point. He disappeared from an active war zone a month-and-a-half ago without a trace. If he was simply being kidnapped and held hostage his captors would’ve released a photo or video of Bentley along with a list of demands a long time ago. The fact that it didn’t happen only further proves that Bentley is dead.
The only other new fact about Bentley that was in that article is that he was the subject of this new documentary that was completed shortly before he died. It will air on Al Jazeera in a few months.
Ten years ago I began a series of Throwback Thursday posts in this blog about an animation series I attempted back in the 1990s called The Unicorn With An Attitude. I did the posts after I uploaded each episode on to YouTube. I kept at it for a year until I reached the last episode I did for that series. I’m only mentioning it again because the first episode in that series was a parody of the O.J. Simpson murder trial and Simpson has died today from cancer at the age of 76.
Way back in the 1990s I had this idea of trying to make it as a computer animator. The World Wide Web was in its infancy, there were a bunch of BBS boards that were run by hobbyists plus there were three major subscription services–CompuServe, America On Line (which was later shortened to AOL), and Prodigy. Social media as we know it today just didn’t exist. It was a time when people experimented with being creative online and trying to create all kinds of interesting content. Granted not everything worked out or was even very good but it still counted for something that people were being experimental and that was what made that period so exciting.
I decided to try an animated series of my own. It was called The Unicorn With An Attitude and it was a satiric series. The animation was crude by today’s standards and it was made on a shoestring budget using whatever hardware and software I could afford. The first episode of my series was a parody of the intense media scrutiny surrounding the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. To honor the occasion of Simpson’s death today, here is that animation where I parodied his trial all those years ago.
By the way you can read about the entries about the making of each episode in the series by searching on The Unicorn With An Attitude tag. You can also view my entire series at the YouTube playlist below. And, as for O.J. Simpson, R.I.P. (Rot Into Pieces)
I had attended a free art workshop that was held at The Space in Beltway Plaza in Greenbelt, Maryland. There were blank masks that could be customized so I did this.
I basically did a bunch of Zentangles based on the tutorials posted on the TanglePatterns.com site. That mask also makes me wistful. I ran into a friend at that workshop. He had just moved into a new place and that very evening he was having over Ric Gordon, who had just recently been reelected to his second term on the Greenbelt City Council just a few weeks earlier, and his wife, Carla. The following day I saw a post from that same friend on Facebook saying that Ric had suddenly passed away, which was a horrendous shock. (Apparently Ric and Carla went over to my friend’s home. Everyone had a good time with no drama. About 20 minutes after Ric and Carla returned home Ric suddenly dropped dead. He has had heart problems in the past and he even managed to survive getting COVID-19 twice in 2020 but it’s still a shock because he seemed healthy the last few times I saw him in person.) The two photos I had taken of Ric and his family at a party the week before are now the last photos I’ll ever take of Ric. I went to an impromptu vigil for Ric just two days after I took that art workshop and by the end of the week I went to his viewing at the local funeral home. In some ways I’m still in shock over Ric’s sudden passing (especially since he was only 41 years old) but he’s yet another friend whom I’m going to have to get used to not seeing anymore because he’s dead.
Like I wrote last week, one of my friends, Ric Gordon, died suddenly just two weeks after he was elected to his second term on the Greenbelt city council. He died sometime between November 25-26, 2023 shortly after he and his wife Carla had arrived back to their home after they spent Saturday night visiting a friend. It was quite a shock to say the least. He had beaten past heart problems and he managed to overcome COVID-19 when he caught that Coronavirus twice just a few months apart in 2020. He was among the people who qualified to receive the first wave of vaccines when they were first distributed in 2021. He had just married his longtime partner earlier this year. And now he’s gone at the age of 41.
I found out on Facebook that there was going to be an impromptu vigil for Ric’s sudden passing at Roosevelt Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and I attended. I took a few photos of the event.
A full moon was out in full force that night.
A few days later I went to the funeral home in Beltsville where Ric’s body was lying in state. I didn’t take any photos that day but I can say that there was a huge turnout at that funeral home. I couldn’t even find a parking space at the funeral home. I tried a side street located next to the funeral home but I couldn’t find parking either. I had to drive to a nearby 7-11 to find parking then make the five-minute walk to the funeral home entrance. It was also raining that day, which was appropriate weather for such a sad event. It was very crowded inside. Ric would’ve loved the turnout on his behalf. There were plenty of lovely flower bouquets surrounding his coffin and people had even placed personal family photos in his casket.
It’s going to take awhile for me to get used to the fact that Ric is gone. I didn’t go to the opening of the Greenbelt Festival of Lights that was held on the same night as Ric’s viewing at the funeral home because it was raining so much. The next day I went to the Greenbelt Sparkle Mart where local people were selling their handcrafted wares. Normally I would expect to either see Ric in person at that event or, if I missed seeing him, I would see a post from him on Facebook saying that he went to the Sparkle Mart along with a photo or two. It’s the first time that I would not see Ric at that event at all because he’s gone.
Rest in peace, Ric. I’ll miss you.
I am in total shock right now. I learned that one of my friends had suddenly died this weekend without any warning whatsoever. He was only 41 years old, which makes his death even more shocking to me.
His name was Ric Gordon and he became a fixture in my area. He was a very friendly positive high energy kind of guy who was really into community and making our local area an even better place to live. He attended all kinds of events and I frequently ran into him at various events around the local area. We were Facebook friends and I also followed him on Instagram. He was very prolific with his social media posts so I was able to keep up on his recent activities and events that he went to.
I still remember the time last year when it was just a few weeks before Halloween. I happened to be at the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, Maryland and I was doing some updates of this blog on my laptop. I originally intended to leave once I had finished writing. Ric came into the cafe with a few other friends whom I also know. We briefly said hi and Ric told me that there was going to be a Halloween-themed cabaret show that was starting at the cafe soon and he invited me to come with them and check the show out. I accepted the invitation. I ended up staying later than I originally intended but I don’t regret it. I really enjoyed the show. I shot some photos and video footage and I included them in this blog post that I wrote about that cabaret show.
He was the kind of person who never forgot your name. For his Facebook friends’ birthdays he would go the extra distance besides just typing the usual “Happy birthday” and he would put up special graphics that featured a photo of the birthday boy or girl with lettering and other types of graphics. He probably did them using Canva or something similar but I always felt touched whenever I received one of his special graphics on my birthday.
My birthday is coming up in a few weeks. I’m sure that I will once again feel the loss of Ric when I don’t see any of his special birthday graphics that he created just for me this year.
It was through his social media posts that I learned that Ric had two passions: The Philadelphia Eagles football team and professional wrestling. In fact his big hobby was collecting these wrestling belts and he used to frequently post photos of them online.
The sad irony is that Ric had caught COVID-19 twice in 2020. It was during the first year of that pandemic when there there were no vaccines or specialized medications to take. He managed to survive both times, he regained his health, and he managed to avoid Long COVID. (I have another friend who is less lucky and she’s currently dealing with it.) He was among the first wave of people who were vaccinated when the new vaccines were rolled out.
Earlier this year Ric married his longtime partner Carla. They both have children from previous marriages/relationships and both of them have grandchildren. They have a large blended family and most of their grown children live nearby. They should be buying one of those “Our First Christmas Together” ornaments that newlyweds usually get for their Christmas tree but now Carla is going to spend her first Christmas without Ric.
I also remember a few months ago that I ran into Ric at some event and he introduced me to his father. His father seemed like a very nice man and I thought that since Ric is a grandfather, that would make his father a great-grandfather. Now Ric’s father has outlived his own son.
Ric Gordon had been serving on the city council in Greenbelt, Maryland and he was just elected to his second term on Election Day earlier this month. He threw a victory party about a week later and all of his Facebook friends were invited. I went to that party and I took these two photos of Ric (seated in the front), his wife Carla (standing on the left holding a grandchild), and assorted family members.
I’m just stunned that those two photos are the last photos that I’ll ever take of Ric.
His death was incredibly abrupt. Last Saturday I had gone to a free art workshop where I ran into another friend. He had just recently moved into a new place and he told me that Ric and Carla were coming over to visit him at his new place that evening.
That same friend had posted on Facebook announcing Ric’s death on Sunday. Apparently the visit to his place went well the night before with no major drama. Ric and Carla returned to their home. About 20 minutes after they returned home, Ric suddenly dropped dead.
Ric’s family has just started a GoFundMe in order to raise enough money to pay funeral and burial expenses.
I’ve just returned from an impromptu outdoor gathering of people who were mourning Ric’s sudden passing. To say that everyone was dazed and shocked was an understatement. We sang songs like “This Little Light of Mine,” lit candles, and talked about our memories of Ric. His widow Carla showed up and she seems to be doing well despite the circumstances. At one point I mentioned to a friend who also attended that the two above pictures that I posted were my last-ever photos of Ric and his niece happened to overhear me say it and she asked me to share them with her. She explained that she was working on a commemorative video tribute to Ric and she was looking for as many photos and video footage that she could find. I texted the two photos to her. If her video gets posted online and it includes my pictures, I’ll definitely post the link in this blog.
I took a few photos of that impromptu gathering but I’m going to upload them at a later date because it’s getting late at night and I should go to bed soon. (I was so shocked at hearing about Ric’s death last night that I did some mindless scrolling on various social media platform and I ended not sleeping until 2 a.m.)
The one big lesson of this story is this: Take a moment and just appreciate the family and friends that you have. Make every effort to spend as much time with them as possible. Appreciate the moments that you spend with them because they won’t last forever. One day they could end up suddenly dead just like Ric.
I’ve just did a Google search and the local media is already covering Ric Gordon’s sudden death because he was on the Greenbelt city council. Here are the links:
First up is my Election Day sticker that I received for voting in my local town election.
In the state of Maryland where I live, we usually have off-year elections in incorporated towns for such offices like city council and mayor. The elections for major offices (like president and the two houses of Congress) won’t be held until next November.
Here is a mural that is on the outside of the building that houses the Otis Street Arts Project in Mount Rainier, Maryland.
I had attended an artist reception in that building. It was my first arts-related event that I attended since the COVID-19 pandemic. We were required to wear masks for the exhibition part until we arrived at a main area where the refreshments were located and the huge doors were opened in order to provide ventilation. (That particular building is a former warehouse so there are doors that are large enough to accommodate a tractor trailer truck.) I socialized a little bit but I didn’t know too many people at that reception.
Before I went to that reception I had volunteered to help out at a table on behalf of the Maryland chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign for a couple of hours that was at a Halloween festival that was held in Beltsville (it was on the last Saturday before Halloween). It was also an unusually warm October day (the temperature was about 80 degrees).
So I went from that festival in Beltsville straight to the artist reception in Mount Rainier where I stayed for about an hour but then left because I was tired and I didn’t know too many people at that reception.
The reception was for an exhibition that was held by a guy whom I first met years ago at one of the Artomatic events and we became Facebook friends. (I learned about his reception through one of his Facebook posts.) His name was Roy Utley and he had been battling cancer for the last several years. At one point his cancer had gone into remission but it recently came back with a vengeance at stage four level. In a way it was a miracle that an exhibition of his work was put together despite his illness.
I saw Roy at that show and he looked tired. He had a lot of visitors around him who talked with him so I wasn’t able to speak to him. I think I may have signed a guest book (but I don’t remember for sure). I was tired myself from going to that other event first.
A few days after I went to that reception I found out on Facebook that Roy had died. At least Roy was able to attend the reception for his last art exhibition that was held in his lifetime.
If you’re in the Washington, DC area and you have free time, Roy Utley’s last exhibition, Live! From the Chair, is still up at the Otis Street Arts Project and it will remain until December 2, 2023. The Otis Street Arts Project is open to the public on Saturdays from 12-4 with other days and times available by appointment only. For more information, visit their website.
Way back in 2019 I had shot my documentary about a transgender street performer named Madonna Girl Dale who is such a major Madonna fan that she would literally spend her days dancing along major highways in her then-hometown of Brooklyn Park, Maryland. Her appearance was controversial among the locals with some people objecting to the fact that she used to wear risqué clothes (such as a pair of black underwear that said “I [HEART] DICK” in pink letters) while parents were walking with their children while others were definitely transphobic and felt that Dale was too much of a freak.
In any case Madonna Girl Dale had decided that she had had enough of Brooklyn Park and the narrow-minded locals there and she decided to relocate to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Before she decided to say farewell to Maryland, she decided to do one last dance performance along Ritchie Highway (also known as Maryland Route 2, which begins in Baltimore and goes through the towns of Brooklyn Park, Glen Burnie, Pasadena, and a few others until it reaches Annapolis).
She announced her final Brooklyn Park performance on Facebook and I decided to make a special trip to Brooklyn Park so I could shoot some video footage. I had originally intended to shoot just 10 or 15 minutes worth of footage mainly because it was August and the weather was the usual summer weather in the Baltimore-DC area (very sunny, very hot, and very humid) so I wasn’t into spending huge amounts of time sweating in the hot summer sun. But Madonna Girl Dale had not only brought out a few props (such as chairs) but she also recruited a few of her friends to dance with her in a few numbers. I ended up shooting far more footage than I intended because I was pretty mesmerized by the whole scene of people doing sexy dances to Madonna’s music along a busy highway during the evening rush hour as vehicles were whizzing by.
Among the people who helped Madonna Girl Dale with her last dance in Brooklyn Park was a young guy named Nate. He was shirtless and wore a pink cowboy hat. He also made some sexy dance moves with Dale. Here are a few stills I shot of the two of them together.
This week I learned through Madonna Girl Dale on her Facebook page that Nate has passed away.
I don’t know exactly how old Nate was but, as you can see in the photos, his age was probably somewhere between 18 and 35. As of this writing I also have no information on what Nate died of. If I get any further information about his death, I’ll definitely update this post.
As for me I only met Nate that one time and I didn’t get a chance to talk to him because he and the others were busy with helping Dale with putting on a final show in Brooklyn Park. I know that some of you who know that I have a Bachelors degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland will wonder, with my background and education, why I didn’t even try to interview anyone. Here’s the thing: I didn’t originally intend to shoot a documentary. I was only going to shoot no more than 15 minutes of footage then get in my car and drive away. I simply ended up shooting more than I originally intended. I downloaded it to my MacBook and left it alone for a few months mainly because I had been hired by the Census Bureau to help with the preliminary phase of the 2020 census, which was scheduled to begin the following year. (My job was to verify that certain addresses in certain areas still had people living there.) So I was pretty busy with that job until October when the work dried up so I had more time to take a look at what I had shot in Brooklyn Park just a couple of months earlier. I discovered that I had shot enough footage to warrant a documentary.
In fact the only time I even tried to interview anyone was on that day of the last dance when I briefly asked Dale if she was going to retire from dancing in the streets once she moves to Winston-Salem and she brushed me off saying that she couldn’t talk now. She had this incredible focus that was amazing when you consider the fact that she was dancing along the streets and not in some kind of a professional stage production that’s held in a nightclub or concert hall. I gave up on talking to anyone and just focused on pointing my camera and shoot the action.
I could’ve interviewed a few of the participants when I took a look at the footage again in October but I didn’t know how to find them mainly because I had never lived in Brooklyn Park (I spent the bulk of my childhood in neighboring Glen Burnie). I didn’t even know their names nor did I know how to contact them. I decided that my documentary would just give the view of what an average person who went through Brooklyn Park would see when Madonna Girl Dale danced.
So, as a tribute to the recently deceased Nate, I’m going to embed my documentary, Madonna Girl Dale: Last Dance in Brooklyn Park, below. Dale’s dance with Nate sitting in a chair begins at the 26-minute mark.
Rest In Peace, Nate!
Six months ago I wrote Fuck You, David Crosby! It was in response to Crosby’s public dissing on Twitter of a fan who created this piece of fan art honoring the legendary rocker.
That ignited a huge online storm. Personally I really loved DJB Sackett’s work because I felt that the art had this lovely stained glass quality to it despite the fact that it is a painting. I still think that Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter had the best response.
Yesterday I learned that David Crosby had died at the age of 81, which prompted all kinds of outpouring of grief over his death online. I can understand why people were sad. As a member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash (and sometimes Young), he made a huge musical impact. I have to admit that it’s amazing that he lived to 81 despite the trouble he had with drugs and alcohol.
I’m not sorry for writing that rant six months ago. I was basically sticking up for the artist DJB Sackett because he clearly did not deserve to have his work attacked in such a public forum like Twitter. Sackett was a genuine fan of Crosby’s music and he did his art out of love and gratitude for the music that Crosby created. It was probably demoralizing for Sackett to learn that someone whom he idolized had publicly attacked his creative work like that. Especially since David Crosby didn’t have to do what he did.
David Crosby had the right to not personally like something that someone had created for him but there were better ways of dealing with it other than rudely attacking the artist on Twitter. He could’ve just tweeted a simple “Thank you” at the artist without mentioning whether he liked the art or not. Or he could’ve simply ignored that fan art altogether and acted as if it never existed and he had never seen it. Either one would’ve been better alternatives than that nasty tweet that he sent out.
At least DJB Sackett is now free to create new David Crosby fan art without having to worry about whether Crosby would like it or express displeasure by criticizing it online.
Last New Year’s Eve there was a sudden death. Betty White was relatively healthy in her old age and she was going to celebrate her 100th birthday on January 17, 2022. But then the Grim Reaper decided that she shouldn’t live past 2021 and she died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 99. I still remember this anguished post that was on the gossip blog Dlisted.
This New Year’s Eve is more of the same. Former Roman Catholic Pope Benedict XVI has died at the age of 95. His death wasn’t a surprise because he had been in ill health for a while.
Late last night I learned of the sudden death of another famous person. Barbara Walters has died at the age of 93. Much has been made about how she was a trailblazer who had entered the TV news business in the 1950s at a time when women were encouraged to be full-time housewives and mothers. It’s true that she broke through the fabled glass ceiling, which paved the way for other women to enter television journalism, while she frequently faced all kinds of hostilities from her male colleagues. Along the way she interviewed heads of state, athletes, celebrities, and other types of famous people.
But there’s one very notorious interview she did in 2015 that won’t be mentioned in the various tributes today. It was one of the last interviews she did before she retired and, based on what she said during that interview, it was just as well that she retired soon afterwards. She interviewed an infamous couple who initially started their relationship when one of them was a 12-year-old boy while the other was his married elementary school teacher. She even got pregnant as a result, which was how this whole story came to a head. She ended up serving prison time for statutory rape and the couple got married after she was released. Barbara Walters heralded it as a love story for the ages, which I personally found so personally disgusting that I wrote a rant about it in this blog a few years ago.
So if you want a look at the dark side of Barbara Walters, then check out my 2015 rant on ABC News Legitimizes Pedophilia and Child Rape.
Sagittarius Dolly 
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