August 01, 2008

FreakFridayFilter: On the Busses. News for a slow work-day: a beheading on a bus by a cannibal with a possible taste for carny flesh. Enjoy!
posted by Capt. Renault 16 years ago
  • carne levare carne vale
  • Read this yesterday and kinda went "yeuuuuugh!" That whole bit about the killer walking up to the front of the bus and casually dropping the guy's head like it was a bad melon. Wow.
  • And THAT's for the bucket of confetti. And THAT's for the white face paint. And THIS ONE is for the oversize shoes.
  • yet another reason to avoid the bus mmm?
  • FYI - there are some sick fucks out there! I just ran across a website (have since lost the url) that looked like a legit webpage for news on the victim. The page claimed to have video info on the perp, Vince Weiguang Li, so I clicked... and got tons 'o porn spashing across my work monitor. Bastards.
  • Latest word is that the family found out when a reporter came knocking on the door -- the cops were too slow.
  • Capt: how awful for the family--the whole thing is just too awful to contemplate WTF were the passengers thinking? Couldn't someone at least THROW something at him?
  • Maybe. But then the freaky guy would turn the knife on them. The self-preservation part of my own brain would somehow beat down the urge to help. (then it would stab it repeatedly) The problem I see here is that somewhere, someone is thinking, "wow, I could do that on a bus? Nice idea." then run off and commit a copycat crime, blaming the news media and the original hacker. Our world is clearly going to hell.
  • GramMa, looks like this happened in the dead of night. I'm sure most of the passengers were too confused and in a state of shock to react quickly and subdue the guy - - not to mention he was waving a big bloody knife around. What could they have thrown at him? I'm sure they were all thinking "get the F*$k outta here!!"
  • Indeed, it looks like their only thoughts were to get to get off the bus.
  • Somewhere, the owner of the company that proposed that wacky security product is waiting for his phone to ring...
  • Via Capt's link above, the father of the victim is still trying to get in touch with the victim's mother who is on an Alaskan cruise until next week. Ugggh. That. Sucks. <3's to the family...
  • Maybe someone on the boat can give her the head's up. Oh, I am so sorry...
  • It sounds like something out of a graphic novel -- Preacher came to mind (but I've been reading that recently). Just the way he went about it so methodically and then to hold the head up like he'd done the passengers a service...
  • Sounds like he was a pretty big guy and did threaten the other passengers in a psychotic frenzy. G_d, this world sometimes sucks.
  • "He just never came across as the type of person that could do something like that." Does anyone?
  • I really can't blame the passengers at all on this one. They were riding along in the middle of the night, and suddenly this guy goes mad and starts stabbing his seatmate. It's not as if this was a verbal argument that gradually went bad. According to the accounts, McLean never had a chance. Li just turned around and went at it. By the time everyone realized what was happening, McLean had already been stabbed several dozen times. At which point, discretion would certainly be the better part of valor. Kudos to the passengers for working together to trap the psycho inside the bus until the police could get there. That's the sort of thing which sounds like an obvious choice in the situation... unless you're in the middle of it.
  • Ralph, yeah, I've met a few. *shudder* One in particular sticks with me from my days temping at customer service for a phone company. Every once in a while I google his name to see if he's hit the news yet. (I just checked again... he hasn't. I'm convinced it's only a matter of time.)
  • Hmmm, 5'8"... Saw the news about the passengers saying he was 6' and 200lbs. Guess a knife makes a murderer look a heck of a lot bigger (more menacing.)
  • Ken Gallinger = Captain Obvious.
  • I took the bus from Houston (TX) to Dallas (TX) one time, and we stopped off in Huntsville, where many of the state prisons are. A man got out of jail and directly onto my bus, still in his orange prison jumpsuit. (I assumed that he had not escaped, and merely had nothing else to wear.) He fixed us all with a pretty mean look then proceeded to sit alone in his little row for the rest of the trip. I thought I had a pretty scary bus story to tell until I read this.
  • you requested a copy cat??
  • Gallager: "To expect ordinary people, under those circumstances, to be capable of calmly weighing the risks and benefits is to ask the impossible." We were leaving the Port Authority from NYC when the bus driver says, "We're smoking out the back. Should we go on, or would yous rather wait for the next bus?" Of course we all said that we should go on. DEMOCRACY IN ACTION! So we do forge onward, until we are filling up with smoke –-even with the roof vents wide open. Finally some girls in back order us to stop and forthwith lead us all like sheep destined not for slaughter off the bus. (True Story) It's raining, and nobody is prepared. "It's gonna blow, move away!" some guy shouts. We all move away from the, not only smoking, but flaming bus. I swear that the flames coming up from the back of the bus were TWICE as high as the bus itself. We're all shivering out there until the next Greyhound/Trailways bus finally does come around. THE SAME ONE WE WOULD HAVE WAITED FOR IN COMFORT BACK AT THE TERMINAL! So maybe Gallager DOES state the obvious, but who under these or those horrible constraints would choose rightly? Need I draw analogies to our democratic process as it stands media filtered to us today, or not? (This comment is is SO hard to make now compared to working with Linux, instead of with this abortion called Windows Vista 2007. "Bah! " Conan would say, but in fairness, Windows is not democratic, yet it is equally WRONG.)
  • I meant *Gallinger*, Ralph. Golly dang this whole borrowed Windows Vista 2007 OS and/or Toshiba keyboard, if I may?
  • Alright, I mispelled the guy's name, but under extreme duress...
  • Fired from Wal-Mart one month ago... The more details that come out, the more it begins to sound like a classic case of the "quiet-loner-can't-keep-a-job-and-goes-berserk". Put that on top of the difficulty of assimilating into a new culture, and you've got the makings for something bad...
  • Peta adds one of their own
  • I see their point, that there is a moral equivalence between human life and animal life; that said, the fact that the vast majority of the population (or the law, for that matter) doesn't see the killing of Tim McLean the same as that of a chicken shows just how far removed Peta is from understanding mainstream North America. Until Peta changes its approach to become more understanding of the mainstream they hope to change, they will never achieve their aims, but only be written off entirely as a bunch of extremists. Tim McLean didn't deserve what happened to him in the first place, but he doesn't deserve this treatment, either.
  • I don't know what Peta was thinking with that one. They're only going to alienate themselves further. "Capitalizing" on the moment, as it were, as a result of that horrific tragedy, is shameful, at best, for whatever the purpose [IMHO, YMMV, WTFWJD, ETC].
  • One friend of McLean's said PETA's ad is misguided. "I'm behind animal protection ... but don't try and take away from what Tim was. He was a great person," said Doug Mitchell, who helped organize a vigil for McLean at the Manitoba Legislature last weekend. "It just seems they're trying to take that away from the light. I know Tim loved animals ... but don't run something so gruesome with something else that's gruesome."
  • Oh, but that's the point. PETA's primary goal is to get as much press for itself as possible. The bigger and more appalling the press stunt, the better. Their theory is that "more news for PETA = more animals saved." But saving animals is strictly a residual effect of their marketing campaign. PETA is all about shock value for shock value's sake. Whether they're leveraging the Holocaust or Tim McLean's murder, it's all about getting the eyeballs.
  • People for the Exploitative Treatment of Anybody
  • PETA is full of weirdos and idiots. I hate what people can do to animals, but ... really.
  • Did I say PETA? Maybe I meant Facebook.