Ivan the Not-So-Terrible

by Neil MacFarquahar

 The governor of the small Russian region of Oryol is trying to convince people that Ivan the Terrible was not so bad.

 ...  Ivan’s more dubious deeds include founding the first version of Russia’s secret police and beating his own son to death.

For my views on Ivan read pages 161-166 in Vessels of Rage ...

Also available on Google Play.  

                  

Girl Accused of Killing Abusive Drunk Father

The details are here.

Joe McGinniss

Lessons from My Father

by Joe McGinniss, Jr.

An excerpt:

" ... When we were kids, my sisters and I had a house rule: if it’s after seven, don’t answer the phone. None of us wanted to be the one to pick up if it was dad, his voice dulled, the words slurred and sprawling."

Phil Parker, Who Helped Homeless Alcoholics, Dies at 86

by Sam Roberts

Phil Parker, the son of a Baptist preacher, said he had never tasted liquor until his Harvard graduate school classmates lured him into a smoky cocktail lounge for the first time.

“This night in the bar was like no other time in my life,” he wrote years later. “Not only was I completely at ease, but I actually loved all the strangers around me and they loved me in return, I thought, all because of this magic potion, alcohol.”

After that, he wrote, he lived only to drink. He graduated, but was fired from one teaching job after another, wound up in an asylum and finally landed homeless on the then-squalid Bowery in Manhattan in the mid-1960s. There, he met a social worker, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, who told him how she had sobered up.

LINK 

 

Phil Parker in an undated photo. Mr. Parker had been sober for nearly 48 years when he died. Credit Dana McCoy

Moby Looks Back

The techno music pioneer has reached middle age, with a new memoir out about his struggles with alcohol, poverty and success.

 ...  Moby, born Richard Melville Hall and now 50 years old, has sold more than 20 million albums world-wide; his dozen official releases include “Play” (1999), “18” (2002) and “Innocents” (2013). It wasn’t an easy path. He grew up poor in an affluent Connecticut suburb and battled alcoholism for almost two decades.

 ... Moby was drinking heavily by the late 1980s, before becoming sober for a few years and then starting to drink again in 1995.

Read it all at The Wall Street Journal.

False Accusations

Shameless self-plug:

"Simply stated, false accusations are aggressive lies, but we also know them in milder form as spin, slanting the facts, one-sidedness, tailoring the message, and so on.

"Note: I got the idea of the importance of false accusations from a book I am reading on alcoholism: Vessels of Rage, Engines of Power: The Secret History of Alcoholism.

"The author of this book, James Graham, makes the claim repeatedly that alcoholics very often engage in false accusations. In discussing this book with my partner, we came to conclude that Graham is right about this—false accusations do seem to be common among the alcoholics we both know."

My thanks to the author whose website is here.

Madonna

Swigging tequila from a fan's hip flask, Madonna suffered another onstage meltdown yesterday as she branded ex-husband Guy Ritchie a 'son of a b***h' ...

The 57-year-old singer, locked in a bitter custody dispute with Guy over their son Rocco, couldn't contain her emotions during a second mumbling show in Melbourne, Australia.

Her ‘chaotic’ appearance at the Rod Laver Arena included an emotional plea to the crowd, begging, 'Somebody take care of me please. Who is going to take care of me?'

... Erratic behaviour: Fans expressed their concern that Madonna was drunk as she performed in Australia. At one point she asked for a cosmopolitan cocktail to be brought on stage for her (circled)

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3489697/Madonna-suffers-second-onstage-meltdown-swigs-tequila-Melbourne.html#ixzz42mwvsPgN