It only got up to about fifty today, with cloudy skies, and tonight it’ll rain. It might turn to snow.

See, I told you. The stab isn’t coming in March as I predicted, I grant you, but Madame March just handed the shiv off to Lady April. Lady April is just as villainous as Madame March, and the more dangerous because we trust her more.

In case you were wondering what happened with the police cordon I reported on Friday, it was indeed a serious business. And it ended in tragedy. Though not as awful a tragedy as it might have been.

According to news reports, a man named David Dahlen, previously incarcerated for bank robbery in California, walked into the Four Seasons Mall US Bank in Plymouth, Minnesota (which is next door to my dentist’s office, as it happens) with a gun. It’s unclear whether he left with the money he wanted or not, but he fled the bank and entered a house in the neighborhood. He forced the woman who lived there to leave at gunpoint. She called the police, and they sealed off the area. And waited.

While they waited, trying to contact him, he called his family. Then he put the gun to his chest and shot himself. After some hours the police entered the house and found the body.

It’s a sign of the depravity of our times that a story like that seems almost sweet. Here was a guy with a gun, on the run. The standard procedure for someone in that situation, in recent years, has been to take hostages or just shoot down innocent bystanders.

Robbing a bank is a bad thing. Pointing a gun at innocent people is a bad thing. I don’t want to be misunderstood on that. And I consider suicide a mortal sin.

But this guy had the chance to end his life like a Tarantino movie, and instead he chose to go out like someone in a Bret Harte story. In my book, that wins him a few sympathy points.

How many times have I heard of a hostage or sniper situation in the last few years and thought, “If you want to kill yourself, just kill yourself—don’t murder people who want to live”?

May the Lord have mercy on David Dahlen.

Here’s a link to a video from a Hollywood guy on how liberals think. In short, any kind of values or culture must not be judged better or worse than any other, relatively speaking. Arguments ensue.

More rain today, and it’s supposed to rain even more over the weekend, then snow early next week.

But it’s Friday. I don’t intend to go out any more than I have to over the weekend, anyway.

I stopped for groceries on the way home. A side street at the grocery store intersection had been cordoned off by the police. Cop cars were parked all over. A news helicopter hovered patiently overhead. I don’t know what was going on, but somebody was involved in a life-or-death drama, just a few hundred feet from where I was buying bananas.

It seems wrong, somehow, that we can be utterly oblivious to the sufferings and stresses of our fellow humans, even near at hand. I often remember that episode of Star Trek where Mr. Spock felt a sudden psychic pain when a Vulcan starship exploded.

On the other hand, I have to admit what we’ve got is a mercy—a kind of spiritual and emotional air-lock system. C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Problem of Pain that, by God’s kindness, the greatest amount of pain that can exist in the universe is limited to the greatest amount that one individual can endure. That may be a lot of pain, but there is no accumulation of common suffering.

There’s been some “buzz” around the blogosphere about the proposal in the Minnesota State Legislature to make the Tilt-A-Whirl the Official State Carnival Ride. The proposal was made by a representative from Faribault, where the Tilt-A-Whirl was invented and continues to be manufactured.

Let me state for the record that, as a person born in Faribault myself, I fully support this initiative, and indeed any initiative intended to promote anything or anyone originating in Faribault (pronounced “Fair-boe”).

I plan, in fact, to petition to have myself named Official Minnesota Washed-Up Midlist Author.

I have less than nothing to say tonight. Anything I said would actually reduce the sum of public knowledge, just as a carbon credit is supposed to reduce global warming (but doesn’t).

Gleaned from a comment at Luther At the Movies: Scenes from Luther’s life done in Legos! That’s what I call culture!

For Aitchmark and other cat-lovers: This piece by Austrialian writer Hal G. P. Colebatch on cats in literature.

Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. Wake me when it’s summer.