The week opened with genial father-figure Cliff Huxtable -- better known as Bill Cosby -- named a “sexually violent predator” and sentenced to three to ten years in prison. In a Pennsylvania court, Cosby was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for drugging and sexually assaulting a Canadian woman, Andrea Constand,

            The same week, Christine Blasey Ford, professor at Palo Alto University, testified before a U.S. Senate committee that she had been the victim of attempted rape by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, 36 years earlier.

             Also, former media celebrity Gian Ghomeshi published an essay in the New York Review of Bookswhitewashing his own sexual escapades. Although Ghomeshi was acquitted, Ontario Court Justice William Horkins made clear that he was not saying that “these events never happened.”

           Three threads run through this sorry tapestry.

This is my 1000th Sharp Edges column. At around 50 columns a year, that’s almost 20 years of writing a weekly column! 

            “How do you find something to write about every week?” people ask me. 

            That’s easy – by paying attention. To the world around me. To my own reactions. To what other people are saying. 

            Given the number of issues in the news each week, the problem is not finding a topic, but selecting which topic to focus on. 

            But there is a second step. If a local story grabs my attention, how does it connect to a larger topic? If an international story, how does it relate to life here in the Okanagan Valley. Or closer still, in little Lake Country. Or even in my own home. 

            There’s no point in raging about Donald the Dump – or lobbying for an endangered salamander in the Congo – if it isn’t relevant in some way to life here and now. 

            Macro and micro, universal and particular, belong in the same picture. I don’t care whether I zoom out or zoom in; the big picture and the small picture belong together. 

The scammers are getting smarter. 

            We’ve all received those emails that tell us there is $27 million waiting for us in an unclaimed Nigerian bank account, haven’t we?

            One arrived the other day, from “Miss Vivian Ibrahim Coulibaly, only child of my late father, Late Chief Sgt. Warlord Ibrahim Coulibaly…” Miss Vivian needs my help, because her wicked stepmother – of course! – is trying to swindle her out of her father’s illegitimately acquired fortune. 

           The same day, I received a second email that assumed I had fallen for scams like Miss Vivian’s, headed FRAUD ALERT: “This letter is to notify you about your compensation as one of the scammed victims…”

The video images of flames shooting skyward out of the National Museum of Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, stabbed me in the heart.

            I spent close to 20 years alternating between president, secretary, and grunt volunteer with the infinitely smaller Lake Country Museum. I know from personal experience how hard it is to document the past, especially from societies that maintained no written texts. 

            Every artifact, every letter, every story, is like a clue in a mystery novel. Clue by laborious clue, a museum puts together a coherent picture of what life was like, back then -- whenever “then” was. 

            The Rio fire, in effect, ripped out almost all the pages from the novel about South America. 

            How can you read a novel that isn’t there any longer?

The Roman Catholic church is taking flak from the mass media. The most recent attacks follow revelations from a grand jury in Philadelphia, described by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General as the "largest, most comprehensive report into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church ever produced in the United States."

            According to the report, more than 300 "predator priests" in six Pennsylvania dioceses have been credibly accused of sexually abusing more than 1,000 child victims over 70 years -- prior to 2002, when scandals involving Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston forced the U.S. Catholicbishops to adopt new rules for reporting abuse. 

            The reaction has even led to demands that the Pope himself resign, for failing to act sooner.