We live in the Age of Horror. Beheadings, school shootings, the slaughter of cartoonists. And now an apparently normal young man who turned to the earth to plunge himself, men, women and children to their deaths.

It got warm quick today, from about noon till about mid-afternoon, around the time a gas explosion shook 2nd Avenue at around 7th Street, not far from the old Fillmore East, where other kinds of bombs went off so many years ago.