On October 14, 2017, a headline on a news website caught my attention: “As everything around him burned, one Napa man’s house somehow survived.” The headline — and the article that followed — was published on the SFGATE.com website, a sister-site of the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s how the article began:
In 2002, I joined a mastermind group that was organized and led by a well-known business and marketing expert. The group consisted of 20 business owners — three attorneys, a cosmetic dentist, two internet marketers, a painting contractor, and several other individuals. We met three times a year in Phoenix for two days each time.
Last week, I wrote about an experience I had during the summer of 1974. At that time, I was 17 years old. I had a part-time job at the Ramada Inn in downtown Peoria, and one Saturday night after work, I drove to the Shrine Mosque in downtown Peoria to see if I could catch the second half of a show that featured a professional barbershop quartet. The quartet had won the previous year’s international competition of barbershop quartets.
Of all the superhero movies that have been released by Marvel and DC comics, Batman is my least favorite, primarily because of the dark and diabolical nature of the villains. Despite my dislike of the Batman movies, I still watch them. In the last Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, the villain, Bane, delivers a crippling blow to Batman’s back. He then escorts Batman to an underground prison. The only way out of the prison is through a tower-like tunnel that is carved out of rock.
You may have heard about the incident a couple of weeks ago (October 22) in Ottawa, Canada, when a Canadian soldier was gunned down by a homegrown terrorist, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. The soldier’s name was Corporal Nathan Cirillo, and at the time of the incident he was on duty as a ceremonial guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Canadian National War Memorial.