tragedy update

The shooter is still at large 24 hours later, but at this point could literally be anywhere. The fact that he hasn't used his cell phone, ATM cards, credit cards, or passport makes me think he's dead, and probably not too far away, but the fact that they haven't found him yet is a little odd, since they have obviously been looking like crazy.

My boss FK has posted a lot of pictures on Facebook of her smiling friend, the main target, with the theater company.

I turned out to know the wife of one of the victims; she is a much-beloved English professor who runs the Bulldog Book Club that we participate in as part of our work. She and her husband are the sort of people who have friends and acquaintances over every Christmas and Midsummer to read a Shakespeare play aloud. I have seen a description of their marriage that noted that they met as undergraduates (he was 63) and their lives were interwoven like those of two plants that have grown together over time. Here's a page from his website that I thought would resonate with many of you:

(From http://www.benteague.com/books/index.html)

'Fran's mother told her, "Marry a reader. Nobody else will understand when he comes home from work to find you've done nothing all day but sit with your feet up and a book in your hands." Good advice; probably it did not occur to her that it might be Fran who'd come home wanting to know if her support staff had picked up the drycleaning, paid the electric bill, and so forth.

Or that there might be a destructive feedback if two heavy readers get together. (The Nick and Nora Charles effect.) We declared the third bedroom in our house a library, but most often it looks like 4:30 in the afternoon at the garage sale. (To be fair, keeping the table saw in there doesn't help.) The shelves filled up some three weeks after we moved in, and now not only do we not have enough bookcases, we don't have room for enough bookcases. No doubt a skilled storage consultant could straighten this out, or a competent arsonist.'

A great loss for the community, as are the other deaths.

baby name

Born to Alicia (of my old LLL group), Tessa Brielle. Big sister is Cadence.

I generally don't editorialize, but I hate the name Cadence, love Tessa, and hate Brielle. Usually it's not so mixy from one person - either I like their taste overall, or don't.

One thing I ponder about baby names is to what extent trendiness/date-stamping runs in families. It's why I sometimes note the names of the parents. For example, my cousin is named Jeff, b. 1972. His wife is Denise, about the same age. To me, both of those are very 1970s names. Jeffrey actually peaked at #9 in 1966, and is now at #190. Denise peaked at #25 in 1964, and is now #370. Their kids: Alyssa, b. 2002 (#12) and and Ashlyn, b. 2005 (#126, and at its peak that year; it's dropped since).

My mother chose non-trendy names, unusual but classic. Me: not in top 100 in the year I was born (broke 900 in 1990 and is still rising). Sister: #300 in the year she was born, down from a peak of #35 in 1946, and still falling. Brother: #94, in the middle of a slowly rising trend - it hit 61 in 2000-2001. All of our names are actually family names, but of course style influences which family names one chooses. (We were not going to name our kids after Great-aunt Edna or Grandpa Eugene.)

Interestingly, my mother is Deborah (#15, 1949), her sisters are Susan (#8, 1947) and Elizabeth (#22, 1957). So a person from a "trendy" name family can choose to deviate. Whereas her sister Susan (Jeff's mother) stayed trendy - her other son (b. 1977) is Gregory (#35).