Piece Of Art

Early on Friday, January 23, an unidentified male assailant, whose face was reportedly painted with black and white make-up, armed with a knife, went on a rampage in a childcare center near Brussels. Sky News said the crèche was attacked by a knife-wielding man wearing black and white facepaint, "like a joker," who is allegedly extremely thin, with red hair. (Update: U.K.'s Independent reporter Vanessa Mock in Dendermonde, noted on Saturday, 24 January 2009, that the man has "his face painted like the Joker character in Batman.") This crèche (French for "daycare") is located in northwestern Belgium. Researcher Theo Paijmans, reporting via email to me, while watching the Belgian media, writes that the death toll is two (2) babies and one female daycare worker fatally stabbed, with 10 children and 2 daycare workers wounded. Early alerts said five people have been killed. Flemish VTM television at first had said three children and two adults have been k...

On this, the first anniversary of the death of Heath Ledger, news of a decapitation, Mason County deaths, and the movie industry's recognition of The Joker are hitting the media. Exactly one year ago today, on January 22nd, Heath Ledger, who played the Joker in The Dark Knight , was found dead in his fourth-floor apartment at 421 Broome Street, between Crosby and Lafayette Streets in SoHo, New York City, on the day of the Full Moon. The link between the Joker and decapitations has already been made on this blog, often. Last night, the horror of a decapitation merged with a familiar location in school violence history. Wednesday, January 21, 2009, police reported a woman was slain on the Virginia Tech campus and decapitated, according to wire services including AP and Fox News. Xin Yang, 22, was killed Wednesday night after arriving at the campus from Beijing on Jan. 8 to begin studying accounting, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said. The first 911 call came into polic...