I posted this to Facebook a while back, but wanted to include it here.

The OxyContin Clan: The $14 Billion Newcomer to Forbes 2015 List of Richest U.S. Families

Ran across The Burrard Street Journal today.  Seems to be a sort of Canadian version of The Onion.

Watching the Japanese NHK news (in English, of course).   I used to watch it in the morning when I got up a bit earlier.  A story on the upcoming Japanese elections mentions some of the political parties in Japan.  Interesting bits:

• Second most popular party by representatives is called The Party of Hope
• The oldest political party in Japan and currently 5th largest representation is the communist party.
• Another loosely translates to the party that cares for Japan’s heart.
• There seem to be smaller parties that splinter off from larger parties or merge.  The Japanese Innovation Party no longer exists, but sounds like a good one.

Other stories on tonight’s news are a rare and strange road rage case outside of Tokyo this summer, and declining dental care among children in Japan.  Ouch.  Just showed a kids tooth getting pulled.

Right up the road in Schulenburg. From Texas Public Radio:  Texas’ First Medical Cannabis Dispensary Set To Open In December

From the BBC:  David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ 40th Anniversary

Florence Welch, from the British band Florence + The Machine, marks the 40th anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s seminal “Heroes” LP by exploring the personal and musical factors that influenced the album’s writing and recording in Berlin in 1977.

Sunday night, nothing on TV.  Decided to have a look at this PBS documentary:  Lafayette: The Lost Hero.  Growing up in Louisiana, I found the title of this show a bit odd.  Everybody in Louisiana remembers Lafayette.  Turns out I didn’t know a fraction of this story.  I’m going to have to read up a bit on the French Revolution, too.

I have been a huge fan of Henry Miller since I read Tropic of Capricorn many years (ok, decades) ago.  I ran across a later book of his, Books in my Life, and decided to give it a read, mostly on the hope of finding some other good books to read, on his recommendation.  He mentions lots of writers from the previous century that I have heard of and might get around to one day (Hamsun, Rider Haggard, Celine).  But the book rambled on, a bit like listening to a talkative fellow in a bar.  An interesting fellow no doubt, but I kept wondering when he was going to get around to something interesting.  Maybe never, but it was worth soldiering on.

Somewhere around page 200 he goes off on a tangent about Walt Whitman and Dostoevsky.  As good as anything the has ever written.  Been meaning to read Dostoevsky for a long time.   Might have to take the plunge.  After a bit of Krishnamurthy (also from this book by Miller).

Gene Sharpe’s writings on nonviolent revolution are available for free download at the Albert Einstein Institution.  Worth reading, even if you aren’t planning a revolution.

The latest in patriotism, from India.  I don’t go to the movies much. Hope they don’t start doing this on Netflix.

The Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice table / map of gun deaths by state.  What led me here was an article about the (relatively) restrictive state gun laws in Hawaii.  I was wondering how that was working out for them.  If lowering gun deaths is the goal, I would say:  pretty well.

Number of Deaths Due to Injury by Firearms per 100,000 Population

Most of the data wasn’t very surprising.  My home state of Louisiana is #2 (behind Alaska) in gun deaths, despite a somewhat lower rate of gun ownership.  Hawaii was #49.  The map pretty much echoed the red state / blue state theme.  One exception was New Mexico.  A Blue State with a high gun death rate.  Not sure what is going on over there.  Have to add Texas wasn’t as bad as I would have thought.  But maybe it isn’t as Red as we are all led to believe.