Of scholars and bonds

No place like home.

Great to be home.
On road again in one week’s time.
Should be compensated by long air mileage on the butt and walking on the sore feet. .

Try sitting on your butt for 18 plus hours from Spore to NY. A dozen trips a year. Sore butt. Back ache. No massage/chiropractor allowances.

I stick to Lamb Chop.:-D

Poor you.
Don’t miss Singapore food?
______________________

Speaking of which, I doubt I will be home till I don’t know when…

Good idea! It will be bonus payment.
_____________

it’s nice to have a non bond-breaking guy standing by to gulp that on your behalf

For me the most important facility is wireless Internet access.
That will keep me happy as I can “harass” my chaps 24X7.

Unfortunately, Boeing Connexion wireless service, being unprofitable, has been cancelled. :’(

Back massage services will “make up” for lack of Internet access.

If you can cook (not me!), you can buy almost all the Singapore cooking ingredients from Prima in Boston, NY, SFO and even in San Diego.

No matter how luxurious or comfortable, 18 hours on the butt dulls the brain.

April 16, 2007

Virginia Tech Shooting Kills at Least 20

By CHRISTINE HAUSER and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

At least 20 people were killed today, some of them students, and more were injured during shootings at Virginian Tech University, some of them at a classroom on the campus, the police said. The gunman was also shot to death, officials said at a news conference, but details about the incident and about the identity of the gunman were still unfolding.

“Today the university was struck with a tragedy that we consider of monumental proportions,” said the university’s president, Charles Steger.

There were two shootings, and in each case fatalities with “multiple shooting victims,” he said.

A police official said there were “at least 20 fatalities,” and that some of the victims were shot in the classroom. News of the number of the fatalities sent up an audible gasp in the news conference, said on television reporter in the broadcast.

The shooting was partially captured on a student’s cellphone video camera showing grainy black figures on the street outside of campus buildings. Popping sounds from the gunfire were audible.

“This place is in a state of panic,” said a student who was interviewed on CNN, Shaver Deyerle. “Nobody knew what was going on at first.”

A few details emerged from the news conference. At 7:15 a.m., an emergency 911 call came in to University police department about a shooting at a campus building, and then another call reported a shooting in Norris hall. The shooter there is deceased, the police said.

#
9.
April 16th,
2007
1:15 pm

absolutely horrible. Why an avg college student can get his hands on automatic weapons or hand guns is beyond me. Those guns simply should not be available. There is no rational reason for them to be allowed. None. I pray for those families and those who have to go back to campus. It will never be the same for sometime.

— Posted by jose

#
7.
April 16th,
2007
1:11 pm

This is an absolutely appalling tragedy. What are we turning into, al-Qaeda itself? Time to kick the NRA to the curb and do something about America’s gun mania. Good thing the shooter was killed, but it doesn’t go far enough. I would be all for irreversibly sterilizing all of his close family members (I’m sure it was a male shooter), and continuing that group punishment until this type of human is removed from the gene pool. They are not needed by our society, and just like smallpox, it’s time we eradicated them.

— Posted by Dan Stackhouse

Virginia Tech is a good school.

Poor kids there. Sad for parents of the innocent victims.

They should ban NRA and all guns.

April 17, 2007

32 Shot Dead on Virginia Tech Campus
By JOHN M. BRODER

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 16 ­ Thirty-two people were killed, along with a gunman, and at least 15 injured in two shooting attacks at Virginia Polytechnic Institute on Monday during three hours of horror and chaos on this sprawling campus.

The police and witnesses said some victims were executed with handguns while other students were hurt jumping from upper-story windows of the classroom building where most of the killings occurred. After the second round of killings, the gunman killed himself, the police said.

It was the deadliest shooting rampage in American history and came nearly eight years to the day after 13 people died at Columbine High School in Colorado at the hands of two disaffected students who then killed themselves.

As of Monday evening, only one of the Virginia Tech victims had been officially identified. Police officials said they were not yet ready to identify the gunman or even say whether one person was behind both attacks, which wreaked devastation on this campus of 36,000 students, faculty members and staff.

Virginia imposes few restrictions on the purchase of handguns and no requirement for any kind of licensing or training. The state does limit handgun purchases to one per month to discourage bulk buying and resale, state officials said.

Once a person had passed the required background check, state law requires that law enforcement officers issue a concealed carry permit to anyone who applies. However, no regulations and no background checks are required for purchase of weapons at a Virginia gun show.

“Virginia’s gun laws are some of the weakest state laws in the country,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “And where there have been attempts to make some changes, a backdoor always opens to get around the changes, like the easy access at gun shows.”

Amazing logic!

Cheaper to buy fish in the market. ha!
__________________________________
Was “hauled” to court anyway when spotted by cop for having another fishing gear (his little kid’s).
2 permits required

Be careful in the current Anti-Asian mood because of the S Korean killer.

Warned my kids too.
———————————————-
Starlet UNITED STATES // Apr 19, 2007 at 7:46 am

Well…I guess it is hard to understand but the US is so huge that every state feels almost like a different country with its own laws and such…

I am a Singaporean. I do not like guns. Ha!

The wicked news chaps keep harping on his origin ~ to sell more papers.
Poor S Koreans. One bad apple and the whole barrel is condemned.

True. In video games, the virtual victims can re-start.

Not in real life.

Liberal violence rating in Hollywood (Moneywood).
_________________________________
it will mask other underlying problems like rising violence in computer games and movies.

VT Killer’s Hammer Pose Resembles Movie

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:33 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) — One of the photographs in the Virginia Tech killer’s ”multimedia manifesto” may have been inspired by a bloody South Korean movie, adding to the debate over the influence of pop culture on heinous crimes.

”Oldboy,” from the respected director Chan-woo Park, is about a man mysteriously imprisoned for 15 years. After escaping, he goes on a rampage against his captor. In one stylized and plainly unrealistic scene, he dispatches more than a dozen henchmen with the aid of a hammer.

In the package of materials that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC News, one photo shows Cho brandishing a hammer in a pose similar to the movie’s signature image, which was splashed across its promotional posters.

The photograph with the hammer stood out from the other 42 photos, which generally showed Cho posing with handguns in a military-style vest and backward baseball cap.

The second film in Park’s ”Vengeance Trilogy,” ”Oldboy” won the Grand Prix prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. It was hugely popular in South Korea, where more than three million people saw it.

The connection was spotted by Professor Paul Harris of Virginia Tech, who alerted authorities. The similarities have prompted speculation, especially in online forums, that Cho’s massacre may have been partly inspired by ”Oldboy.”

There was no apparent link between Cho and ”Oldboy” besides the lone photograph among the 28 video clips, 23-page written message and 43 self-portrait photos that he sent to NBC. Cho killed the 32 victims with a handgun and a pistol, and did not seem to reference the film in any of his notes or messages.

A screenplay written by Cho, however, did feature killings with a hammer.

Col. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said investigators had reviewed Cho’s photographs and videos and said he knew of no connection between Cho and the movie.

Tartan Films, which distributed ”Oldboy” in the U.S., said in a statement Thursday: ”To be associated in any way with the tragic events that occurred at Virginia Tech is extremely disturbing and distressing. It is clear from news reports that the individual who perpetrated this heinous crime was deeply troubled. We believe that anyone would find it hard to explain his motives or actions.”

Notorious killers are commonly linked to movies or music. The trench coats worn by the Columbine murderers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were seen by some as reflective of those worn in ”The Matrix.” Some also assigned blame to Goth rocker Marilyn Manson, who later criticized the media in his song ”Target Audience (Narcissus Narcosis).”

The late rapper Tupac Shakur was claimed to have inspired a number of killings, including the murder of four students and wounding of ten others in Jonesboro, Ark. in 1998 by Mitchell Johnson.

One of the earlier examples of pop culture being connected to a mass homicide was the link between the Beatles and Charles Manson, who was captivated by the song ”Helter Skelter.”

Loren Coleman, author of ”The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines,” says that he’s gradually coming to see Cho as a ”copycat of many things,” especially Columbine. In one missive, Cho referred to the Harris and Klebold as ”martyrs.”

”This in-depth analysis of his manifesto and this document, we may get some hints there, but this was a person that was terribly imbalanced,” Coleman said. ”To look for clues rationally in such an irrational document is really a fool’s game.”

Writing for the Huffington Post, filmmaker Bob Cesca dismissed Cho’s ”Oldboy” connection as ”the most ridiculous yet,” and noted many other popular culture references that feature images of a raised hammer.

”It seems like a cop-out, like an easy way out to explain away a tragedy like this,” Cesca said Thursday. ”Clearly I think the primary issue here is mental illness. It could be any number of things that maybe had a small part in this, but to create (a movie) as a trigger is missing the bigger picture.”

Sane people know that these games are not real.

But a few insane people take it to be real.

VT was aware of this insane chap.
But the hot potato was passed around.
32 lives gone. Sad.

Anger of Killer Was on Exhibit in His Writings

By MARC SANTORA and CHRISTINE HAUSER

BLACKSBURG, Va., April 19 ­ More than anyone else on the Virginia Tech campus, it was the professors and students in the English department who knew of the mental turmoil of Cho Seung-Hui.

Where the Virginia Tech police only heard scattered reports of his harassing behavior, and mental health professionals knew of his suicidal tendencies, it was the English department ­ where he was a major ­ that read his writings and saw the images of persecution, revenge and anger that they revealed, many months before he erupted into violence on Monday and killed 32 people, as well as himself.

And those English professors and students appear to have worked harder than anyone to intervene in his life. Trying to balance the freedom needed to be creative against the warning signs of psychosis, as many as eight of his teachers in the last 18 months had formed what one called a “task force” to discuss how to handle him, gathering twice on the subject and frequently communicating among themselves.

On at least two separate occasions they reached out to university officials, telling them as recently as this September that Mr. Cho was trouble. They made little headway, however, and no action was taken by school administrators in response to their concerns.

The students also made their fears known, some even refusing to attend class as long Mr. Cho was there. Others tried to reach out to him.

Ross Alameddine sat a few feet from Mr. Cho for months in a class examining contemporary horror films and literature. Both students were required to keep what were known as “fear journals,” where they chronicled both their reaction to the material covered in class and their own fears.

Mr. Alameddine, according to classmates, made an effort to speak to Mr. Cho on several occasions, trying to draw him out of his closed world and his refusal to interact with other students.

On Monday, Mr. Cho shot and killed Mr. Alameddine.

There is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Cho targeted his classmate, but it is the first time one of the victims has been connected to Mr. Cho before the shootings.

The class they took together was new, offered for the first time last fall. The students studied movies like “Friday the 13th” and read Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft and Patricia Cornwall novels. “We had a whole discussion on serial killers,” said one student, who asked that she not be named because she wanted to avoid a crush of attention from the news media.

Mr. Cho never spoke during the discussion, she said, but he took notes.

The student and Mr. Cho were in another class as well, a small class on playwriting, during which she grew fascinated by him.

“In all honesty, I took a huge interest in him last semester,” she said. “I never heard him speak a word, and I was so curious about him. I actually tried to follow him after class one day, but he got on a bike and I couldn’t keep up. He had a red bicycle.”

In interviews with six members of the English faculty who had Mr. Cho in a class or had been in close contact with him, they described how as early as September 2005 and as recently as September 2006, they found themselves struggling to define the line between a legitimate work of self-expression and one of violent or sick imagery that needed to be restrained.

“Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it’s creative or if they’re describing things, if they’re imagining things or just how real it might be,” said Prof. Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the English Department. “But we’re all alert to not ignore things like this.”

Lisa Norris, an English professor, said that, outside of an explicit threat that was rooted in reality, it would be impossible to have some kind of standard by which to judge whether a student’s work was so alarming as to warrant intervention.

“If the student seems abnormal in his behavior or affect and is writing about violence, then there could be something to worry about ­ particularly if the resolution of the story includes suicide or murder for major characters or otherwise ends in despair,” she said. “It is not necessarily the work alone that raises concern, but the work plus the student’s affect and behavior.”

In Mr. Cho’s case, she was alarmed before he had written a word.

When he signed up for the 10-person workshop she taught this year, Professor Norris was worried that he simply would not communicate, and in September she reached out to one of her superiors, Mary Ann Lewis, the associate dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. She said Ms. Lewis was helpful but had no information about prior problems, including his hospitalization at a mental health facility in 2005. Ms. Lewis said she had no comment on the conversation.

But Mr. Cho’s bizarre behavior was evident to students, faculty and police going back to 2005.

“Nobody took too much notice of him except for that’s the kinda weird quiet kid who never talks,” said Steven Davis, 23, a senior who was in a drama class with him. “Until we read his work. And then it was like whoa, something is off.”

One woman, an English major who was in a contemporary British fiction class with Mr. Cho in the fall of 2005 and who asked not to be identified, said he sent her unsolicited electronic messages after seeing her in class and then looking her up on the Facebook Web site.

Mr. Cho, she said, also stalked another girl in the class, scaring her so badly that she went to the police that December.

That matches the campus police account of a woman who came to them in December 2005, part of a series of events that culminated with Mr. Cho being held for psychiatric evaluation and later released.

She said Mr. Cho knew things about her family that would be difficult to know without serious effort. For instance, he knew what sports her siblings played in high school.

Beyond that, he simply acted strange. On the first day of class the teacher asked everyone to stand up and introduce themselves.

“When it was his turn, he didn’t stand up and he said his name was Question Mark,” she said.

Professor Lucinda Roy, who was the head of the English Department in the fall of 2005, chose to deal with Mr. Cho by removing him from a group class and tutoring him. She also passed along his writing, which she described as “angry,” to both the Virgnia Tech police and the university counseling service.

Prof. Edward Falco, who last semester had him in a playwrighting class, did not make the other students read or critique two of Mr. Cho’s plays that contained violent images and profane language. But he alerted other faculty members, and learned that they, too, had been concerned.

After the shooting Monday, Professor Falco’s students began sending him messages about how they felt guilty for not doing or saying something earlier. Professor Falco responded in an e-mail message, hoping to help put their minds at ease.

“There was violence in Cho’s writing ­ but there is a huge difference between writing about violence and behaving violently,” he wrote. “We could not have known what he would do.”

Definitely a foul mouthed toad.
Listerine would not help.
_____________________________
darkness SINGAPORE // Apr 21, 2007 at 9:02 pm

Dr Dee for a doctor you seem to talk a whole of shit. Perhaps I should take a special interest in your post from now onwards.

Care to give me a haircut and a pedicure?

Dr Dee should shave “darkness” totally bald.