Reaping In The New Year

The grim reaper has been reaping them very early in life
very early on in 2008...

The usual contest sought out is to able to grasp the honor
of having the first-born babe of the year.

Some unlucky souls find themselves to be the first ones to go
in the opposite direction, though...

Or, perhaps, they are the lucky ones in that.
They are in "a better place" now - as they say...



Stefanie Rengel, 14, the daughter and stepdaughter
of two veteran Toronto police officers,
was killed on Jan. 1st.
(Photo released by Toronto Police Service)

Rengel's death is the city's first homicide of 2008.
My condolences to her parents and friends.


There were 84 homicides in Toronto during 2007,
fifteen more than there had been in all of 2006.
Toronto measures up, hence, to the numbers reported
by many other large urban centers in North America...
The trend upwards, though, is seen only in a few places
while others saw a small decrease in the number of homicides
committed on their territory...




Such are the pitfalls of urban life
in burstling metropolises...

I may keep going downtown
but I think I am not boarding a bus
for a long, long time now...
First there was the American tragedy, pictured below,
and then it was the Canadian one,
in Bathurst, New Brunswick...

Long distance trips are sometimes best never undertaken...



In this photo released by the Utah Department of Public Safety on Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, a charter bus carrying people from a Colorado ski resort sits upright after running off a wet road and rolling several times down an embankment in far southeastern Utah Sunday, Jan. 6, 2008, killing eight passengers and injuring about 20 others north of Medicine Hat, Utah.
(AP Photo/via Utah Dept. of Public Safety)

My condolences to all bereaved parties.
A sudden death in the family is always so hard to take.
One like this, out of left field, is twice as hard on the system.

You can all share your condolences by signing here.
At "press time" over here (blog publishing time, really)
there were already close to 500 pages worth of sympathy.


An illustrious old-timer also passed away
early in this year of Our Lord, 2008...


Explorers Sardar Tenzing Norgay of Nepal, left, and Sir Edmund Hillary of New Zealand who conquered Mount Everest in 1953, are in this 1953 handout photo. Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered Mount Everest to win renown as one of the 20th century's greatest adventurers, has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday, Jan. 11, 2008. He was 88.
(AP Photo/NZPA,Penguin Books, HO)

My condolences to Sir Hillary's family.


And there were more demises, many more,
of course - Death sees no difference whether it is a new year
"full of promise and hope, for the future" - or not.
Deaths -violent ones at that- occurred on New Year's Day itself
(no, the Rengel tragic end was not the only one to occur
at the most unexpected time, on the most unexpected day)
And, as always, Death picked them in an undiscriminatory way -
all ages, creeds, races and colors list among the notables
as, also, among the anonymously departed,
those who are a mere faceless, nameless number
in all of these death tolls reported by news feeds everywhere...
More - in the comments section.


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