An overcast, gray sky this early Thursday, with visibility here on California’s north coast constricted by a moist, dense ground fog.
Wind will tell the tale of sunshine this morning — if a decent breeze arrives, the shoreline and thereabouts could get bright, but until then, a gloomy watch.

Odd life nowadays has seemingly developed a creepy kind of accelerating gloominess, like turning horror of a plane crash into something even worse — French prosecutor Brice Robin (via the Guardian):

“He had no reason to do this,” said Robin.
“He had no reason to turn the button making the plane go down, he had no reason not to allow his captain to return to the cockpit, he had no reason to refuse to reply to air traffic controllers, he had no reason to refuse to tap a code to alert other aircraft in the zone … already that’s a lot.”

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Tragedy,’ found here).

In a near-incomprehensible way, Prosecutor Robin was describing conclusions to the Germanwings airliner crash in the French Alps on Tuesday — ‘no reason.’
Apparently, evidence from a cockpit voice recorder recovered from the wreckage makes Robin feel that way: ‘“Forty-eight hours after the crash … the interpretation for us is that the co-pilot deliberately refused to open the door of the cockpit to the flight commander, and pushed the button causing a loss of altitude.”‘
No reason other than murder-suicide.

A nasty, well-publicized example of an old form of extreme-expression making a comeback in the genre of ‘killing-to-settle-whatever-the score,’ the personal murder-suicide escapade. A horror in all forms, but mostly family-oriented, usually husband-wife, or boy/girl friend — no area is exempt, we supposedly had a murder-suicide locally a couple of weeks ago (husband shot up his wife, then killed himself, though, wife survived).
In the Germanwings incident, the narrative on that co-pilot guy, now identified as Andreas Lubitz, will be way-way expanded. Also from the Guardian this morning, the press conference of Carsten Spohr, chief executive of Lufthansa Airlines, which owns Germanwings — noteworthy:

Spohr said the company was in complete shock.
It was “beyond our worst nightmare,” he told reporters in Cologne.
“It leaves us absolutely speechless,” he said.
“I wouldn’t not have been able to imagine that the situation would have got even worse.”
…
Spohr said that it appears the captain punched in the emergency number into the cockpit door to gain entry, but the co-pilot deployed the five-minute over-ride.
He said that, irrespective of all the sophisticated safety devices, “you can never exclude such an individual event,” adding “no system in the world could manage to do that.”
Asked about the theory that the co-pilot killed himself, he demurred. “
“We can only speculate what might have been the motivation of the co-pilot.
“In a company that prides itself on its safety record, this is a shock. We select cockpit personnel carefully.”

Other than an outbreak of “no reason.”
Yet there always a reason, even if that reason is bat-shit, murderous crazy.