Ashley Herzog
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What I learned from the murder of Phil Masterson
I’ll never forget the phone call I answered, mid-morning on a weekday, in the fall of 2011. It was the day after Labor Day, and I’d spent the weekend trying to ignore my looming sense of dread. I blamed my pregnant brain—I was eight months along—and got back to the daily grind. Until I got the call.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in Confessions
I don't date guys who love horror movies. Top Story - October 2021.
When I was 11 years old, I wrote a horror novel. At nearly 70,000 words long, it's the longest work I've ever created, slightly longer than the novel I wrote about my Irish ancestors when I was well into my 30s. I wrote it in one month, between September and October, finishing two weeks shy of my 12th birthday. I typed it all on a CD-ROM program for kids, writing up to 5,000 words a day between school and volleyball practice. The story was a murder mystery set in rural Western Ireland, where all my maternal ancestors came from.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in Humans
Harold Lowe, the unsung hero of the Titanic disaster. Top Story - October 2021.
I just finished Titanic Valour: The Life of Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, the biography of the 28-year-old Titanic officer who is best known as "the guy with the gun." Most people remember the shooting scene from the movie. It's a turning point scene; it's when Cal tells his servant that things are "starting to fall apart" and this is more serious than they thought. But that's pretty much all you see of Harold Lowe. Lowe was such a minor character that few people realize the "guy with the gun" is also the guy who returns to the wreck to pick up survivors. (In the movie, he finds Rose floating on a door; in real life, it was a Chinese guy they found atop a door - a scene that James Cameron cut from the movie.) No one even calls him by his full name. In fact, the only time Lowe's name is ever mentioned in the movie is when Officer Lightoller says, "Mr. Lowe, man this boat," and hands him his revolver. This is right after Lightoller tells a group of unruly men he'll "shoot them all like dogs," while Lowe comes across as Lightoller's polite, level-headed junior officer.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in FYI
Do you even know why we celebrate Columbus Day?
The biggest mass lynching in U.S. history was committed against Italian immigrants in New Orleans in retaliation for the murder of an Irish police chief. That’s probably not what comes to mind when you think “lynching,” but it’s a fact. Although the vast majority of lynching victims in American history were black, a small but not-insignificant percentage were not. The glittering surface of America’s “Gilded Age” — roughly 1880 to 1910 — served as cover for the dark underbelly of the era: rising white nationalism, explosive growth of the Ku Klux Klan, racial pseudoscience (genteely described as “eugenics”), and mob terror — certainly against African-Americans, but also anyone deemed not quite white. It was also a time of extreme wealth inequality — the Tech Titans of the era were called “Robber Barons” for a reason. Industrial fat cats and their political allies knew that the best way to keep voters from noticing the real source of their problems was to find a scapegoat — preferably one with dark skin and a foreign language and religion. On the West Coast, Chinese immigrants would have to suffice. Everywhere else, bronze-skinned immigrants, mostly from Italy, made the perfect whipping boys.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in FYI
Are we really starting the freakout over "Haitian Voodoo" already?
That was fast. Those were the only words that came to mind when I saw Ann Coulter's weekly column pop up in my Twitter feed. I was a big Coulter fan in college--with some readers of my weekly column in the school newspaper calling me "Little Ann Coulter"--but she's a one-issue woman now. She admits it, even declaring that she wouldn't care if Trump personally performed abortions in the Oval Office as long as he built the wall. When I was in college, she was writing hefty intellectual treatises like "Godless," in which the highbrow moral and philosophical arguments were easier to digest because of Coulter's raucous humor. It was an important book for me as a student who was raised in a devoted Irish Catholic family, now trying to survive on a Godless campus. My philosophy 101 professor even had us write essays answering the question, "Does God exist?" Knowing it was a setup to make religious students--not only Christians, but Jews and Muslims--look like idiots, I took up the challenge, using Coulteresque tactics. Although my professor was clearly an atheist himself, he was so impressed with my freshman 101 attempt at making the case for God he called me "an independent thinker" and gave me an A.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in The Swamp
Living on Native Land
Back in the fall of 2014, my then 3-year-old daughter ardently desired to blow off steam after preschool by running into the woods behind our apartment complex. Being tall enough to see the whole area from our back window every morning, I told her there was nothing to see. Our "backyard" consisted of a small wooded area and a marshy, muddy field separating us from I-75, the longest expanse of highway in the country. Still, having seen too many episodes of "Dora," my daughter insisted it was a “magic forest” worth exploring.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in Earth
White Privilege on Parade: The trouble with St. Patrick's Day
Thanks to COVID-19, Cleveland’s 2021 St. Patrick’s Day parade has been canceled for the second straight year. First held in 1842, the parade’s incredible staying power is a testament to its popularity. St. Patrick’s Day in Cleveland has always been a celebration of Irish survival in the face of adversity.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in Confessions
The "past lives" craze: Yes, we can see into the past
Thanks to TikTok and YouTube, dabbling with the supernatural has become trendy. Using a YouTube video to induce a state of hypnosis, social media influencers are emerging from their alleged hypnotic state with wild claims. Some say they discovered they "let the Trojan Horse in" during a battle in ancient Greece; others say their past lives were more recent, and that they died on 9/11 or caused the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Apparently, discovering your "past lives" is the latest way of going viral - and as a middle school parent, I know going viral is the goal.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in Humans
No Blood for Dope
NO WAR FOR OIL. Were you alive and watching the news in the years following September 11, 2001? I was, and I remember this slogan well. The anti-war crowd insisted America’s dual wars in the Muslim world—in Iraq and Afghanistan—were about “oil.” The War on Terror had nothing to do with the Taliban or terrorism, only oil and America’s access to it. Even Nancy Pelosi called George W. Bush and Dick Cheney “two oilmen” who were dragging American troops to the Middle East in shameless financial self-interest. Bush’s name became “Bu$h.”
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in The Swamp
The great sharks of the Great Lakes
Based on a true story told by my great-great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant and Civil War soldier. William Chambers could sing Union Army songs in his sleep. He knew every word to “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and "Always Stand on the Union Side.” He enjoyed singing them in his hearty baritone voice. His fellow infantrymen liked it too, although they’d never admit it. And best of all, singing made it difficult for an American to realize that Will had an accent.
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in Fiction
Call him by his real name
“Don’t worry if it spills over. The patrons like it that way,” Mary Gannon explained to Breda. Mary was the Whiskey Island dance hall owner who called herself Calypso. She was teaching Breda the art of pouring ale. “’Tis better than filling the glass halfway, which induces the men to complain that they didn’t get their money’s worth.”
By Ashley Herzog4 years ago in Fiction
