Piece Of Art

The Sunday Times of London's correspondent interviews Loren Coleman, suicide prevention consultant and author, with the cluster of youth self-inflicted deaths in Wales on her mind. The situation must be put in context to bring it into focus. In the January 27, 2008 issue of The Sunday Times , Kathy Brewis writes a thoughtful article, "Suicide: a teen’s way to instant fame," which details what she discovers from young people and adults about the Bridgend suicides. Here are selections from the Brewis Times essay: Suicide is far from painless, both for the people who do it and for the ones they leave behind. The cluster of seven suicides in Bridgend, south Wales, has left scores of grieving relatives and friends and the rest of us stunned at the thought that these young people – some pictured partying just days earlier – could take their own lives. Disturbingly, the town’s teenage population seem less surprised by the tragic events. Below a steady drizzle, a group of tee...

Columbine references, six involved in the plot, the hijacker's name, a book on 9/11: Interesting new details have been released about the hijack plot uncovered on January 22, 2008. Recall, this is the one in which the jet was allegedly set to crash into the Lafayette Cajundome. Christopher Zunino Accinelli, 16, of Novato, California, is the youth who was arrested with the plot to hijack a jet from Los Angeles to Nashville. One reported plan was to then fly the airliner into the "Hannah Montana" concert at the Lafayette Cajundome in Louisiana, scheduled for Friday, January 25, 2008. The teen told law-enforcement officials that six other persons with bombs were involved in the plot. According to a report in the Washington Times , officials said they also found aerial maps, a tome about the September 11 terrorist attacks, and a laptop computer with locations circled on a map. Law-enforcement officials also searched the boy's home in Novato, and said they found a mock c...

Hannah Montana, Lafayette, Southwest Airlines: The strange suicidal hijacking scenario unfolding in Nashville seems hard to believe. Perhaps it is too weird for the FBI. But on January 5, 2002, Charles Bishara Bishop, 15, crashed a plane into Tampa's Bank of America Building, in a copycat of the 9/11 attacks. Bishop died by suicide during that event. It can be done. A sixteen-year-old boy was arrested by FBI agents for plotting to hijack a plane as part of his own bizarre suicide bid, as reported on January 25, 2008. FBI spokesman George Bolds said the teenager was removed Tuesday night (January 22, 2008) from Southwest Airlines Flight 284 by authorities at Nashville International Airport and found with "suspicious" items (handcuffs, rope and duct tape in his bag). The juvenile was alone and suicidal. He remains unidentified. A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the teen's juvenile status, said the boy was from Novato, Califo...

The Welsh countryside is being visited by dampness, darkness, and death. The spirit and happiness of youthful hope is being snuffed out. When I wrote my book Suicide Clusters for Faber and Faber (Boston and London) in 1987, few people accepted the reality that suicides clustered. By the time The Copycat Effect came out in 2004, it was taken for granted that suicide clusters existed and do happen. This week the media began to report on a highly active cluster happening in Wales, in and around Bridgend, a former coal mining community of 40,000, and today the site of a well-known prison. The death toll went to seven with the latest suicide occurring this Wednesday, when Natasha Randall died by hanging. In addition to Randall, six men between the ages of 17 and 27 have also been found dead in the area. Authorities have ruled three of the cases to be suicides; the others are under investigation, but suicide is suspected. [See the update at the end, regarding a possible new count of 13 d...

Musing on the Twilight Language. Sometimes, I must blog about the Fortean and the anomalistic, as it applies to current events. In the classification of fairies, Celtic folklore discusses the good and the bad fairies. Sometimes, the fairypath leads to many unfolding dark clown revelations. Two of the most prominent categories, derived from Scottish folklore, are the division into the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court. William Butler Yeats, in Irish Fairy and Folk Tales , further divided them into the Trooping Fairies and the Solitary Fairies. These categories are generally applied to any fairy-type creature, from elves, pixies and brownies to ogres and giants. ~ as noted in "Classification of Fairies" in Wikipedia. Of course, you can take or leave my thoughts on the twilight language. But sometimes it can reveal an intriguing stream of consciousness or a quicksand of foggy thoughts, I suppose. Fairies, for example, link events and places with a sense of wonder and myste...

Did HAL 9000 go nuts and try to kill everyone? Are Terminator robots evil? Thinking about such questions was important to Chris McKinstry and Push Singh. The similar self-inflicted deaths of Chris McKinstry who created a database called Mindpixel, and Push Singh who was responsible for a database called Open Mind Common Sense has left many unanswered questions in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community. McKinstry died in Chile and Singh died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. David Kushner has written a remarkably detailed new essay in Wired , entitled "Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?" about the mystery surrounding their lives and suicides. (Thanks to Patrick Huyghe for bringing this interesting article to my attention.) In 2006, the two AI genuises killed themselves using an unusual but almost identical method. McKinstry had unhooked the gas line from his stove and connected it to a bag sealed around his head. He was dead at the age of 38, with Ja...

The trenchcoat, propane, and various other hints align this incident as another Columbine death cult copycat. The individual involved wrote his note as if he would not survive the event. The Associated Press is detailing this school incident of January 9, 2008, thusly: Pa. Students Jump Attacker; 3 Stabbed By MICHAEL RUBINKAM Associated Press Writer READING, Pa. (AP) -- Eighth-grader Tim Hauck said he knew by the enraged look on his friend's face that the other teenager meant to hurt as many people as he could. The 13-year-old, wearing a dark trench coat and listening to his MP3 player, burst into an English class Wednesday morning and began slashing at students with a knife, flipping desks, throwing books and lighting firecrackers. Police said he had come to school with a propane torch, gasoline and lantern fluid, and left a note for his mother that said: "Mom, I'm so sorry. I love you. Goodbye." Three students suffered relatively minor stab wounds in the attack a...