Black widow

This morning Yahoo ran a story about Betty Neumar, who died yesterday. She left behind a trail of dead husbands, all of whom died in mysterious circumstances:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110613/ap_on_re_us/us_wife_cold_cases

The odds of having one's husband die in mysterious circumstances are pretty small. Let's just say for argument's sake they're one in a hundred (I'm pretty sure the odds are substantially less). That would make the odds of having all five husbands die in such circumstances .01 to the fifth power, or one in ten billion.

It makes one just a tad suspicious that ol' Betty might have had something to do with those deaths.

Here is her picture:

She doesn't look like a happy woman. And the fact is, sociopaths never have the sort of quiet contentment that others can have. They will always have something gnawing at them: some bitterness, or hatred, or resentment, or envy. They never know the quieter, happier, more peaceful emotions.

By the time we get to the ends of our lives, chances are we will have been burned, or at least singed, by at least one sociopath. (Had you married Ms. Neumar, she likely would have been the cause of that end.) But sociopaths' lack of anything even remotely resembling inner peace is one thing that we should keep in mind: for all the harm they've caused us, for all the damage they've wrought in the world, we're still happier than they are.

I personally have never felt that living well (or, at least, better than them) was sufficient revenge.

But it's certainly better than nothing.