Today I have a check up with my doctor. I have these twice a year or so. I struggle with having high blood pressure readings at the doctor’s office, higher than other places. My doctor thinks it’s “white coat syndrome’ i.e. being nervous around a doctor. I think it’s more about worrying about how much I will weigh this time.

Today should be amusing. I have gained and lost about 10 pounds or so since I last saw the doctor. My blood pressure has been consistently low. Except of course for this morning’s reading which may have been influenced by worrying about my doctor’s appointment. Believe me,  I see the irony in this.

Annotations for Jerusalem by Alan Moore – dateline Northampton

In Alan Moore’s Mansoul, the second volume of his trilogy, Jerusalem, he describes a small gang of dead children in the Upstairs (after life) called the “Dead Dead Gang.” When giving the background on the name of the gang, he says that since they all came from different gangs in the Twenty Five Thousand Nights (another of their many names for when they were alive), they had to think of  a new name for their gang. One of them remembers a book they had to read in school called “The Dead Dead Gang.”

I immediately googled for this book and found the above link to annotations for the Moore trilogy. Cool. Reading through it, I was pleased to see that many of the allusions were not lost on me. But I did learn stuff which I will refrain from sharing here in case any of you three or four readers are reading or listening to  Jerusalem.

Incidentally, I liked one of the dead children’s explanation of their gang’s name: “As for what it means, I couldn’t tell you. All that I could think of was, some people are dead lucky and some people are dead clever, but not us lot. We’re dead dead.” p. 465

NYTimes: What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer

I’m working hard on my own echo chamber these days. I have found some critiques of this report on the right. But I think it makes sense that the extreme proliferation of firearms in the USA contributes to this hideous phenomenon.

NYTimes: A Grecian Artifact Evokes Tales From the ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’

Year One: Our President Ubu | by Charles Simic | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Dozens of these silly retrospectives have been floating around. This one has an unusual take, however.

NYTimes: Willie Horton, Updated for the Trump Era

Race baiting marches on.

NYTimes: Martin Amis on Lenin’s Deadly Revolution

My NYT app continues to fail me like so much of tech these days. It offers up a confusing amalgamation of articles from the paper. Somehow I missed this article through the app but found it somewhere else. Bookmarked to read.