bogged down in D.C.? Kill someone

I once asked my mother if she was ever smitten with "writer's block" and if so, how she dealt with it. Writer's block is a wall that writers can be flummoxed by. My mother said that yes, there were times when she would sink into a slough of sluggish despond or an inability to make a story go forward. Everything you write looks like shit. And what did she do?

"There's no single thing that restarts the engine. But one pretty good technique is, I kill someone."

Of course she was speaking in a time when death of a person or a character was considered a social blow ... a sense of sorrow and loss ensued by social convention. Nowadays, it's not quite the same -- people die and it's more or less OK as long as it's not me.

Donald Trump 59-missile attack against Syria reminded me of my mother's writer's block.

"Trump has quickly discovered the magic principle of US politics: when things go wrong at home, start a military venture in the Middle East," London-based blogger Karl Sharro, who is half-Lebanese and half-Iraqi, commented.