What Makes A Killer?

This is a story out of Canada and involves a bus, 37 passengers, one of whom is a killer, and one is a victim. What makes this story interesting is the location of the crime and the complete randomness that seems to permeate it.

The killing was a frenzied attack that resulted in multiple stab wounds, a beheading, and the allegations of flesh eating. The allegation of flesh eating would seem to be true as it was made by a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who was on the scene at the time and relaying information back to other officers.

The RCMP have since issued a statement saying it was aware that the radio transmission had been leaked to the Internet and said that the tape itself was "operational police communications and not meant for public consumption". I am not sure that a pun was intended here.

RCMP officers responded to a call on a remote stretch of the TransCanada Highway near Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, after reports of a killing on a Greyhound bus travelling from Edmonton, Alberta to Winnipeg, Manitoba were reported.

The killer, Vince Weiguang Li, is alleged to have killed Tim McLean. An official identification has not been released but friends and family of McLean have identified him as the victim. McLean's death was as violent as it appears random. Li hacked off McLean's head after a frenzied stabbing attack that involved dozens of stab wounds. Witnesses are saying that they were alerted to the attack by a blood-curdling scream, presumably from the McLean. Most of the passengers were sleeping or watching a movie having just re-boarded the bus after a short break.

What is truly weird about the attack is that the alleged killer, Li, is being spoken about as a kind down to earth man without any previous indications that he was prone to this kind of violent rage. By all accounts he was a simple paper delivery man looking to better his lot in life.

I wonder what makes a seemingly nice person all of a sudden turn into a violent flesh-eating killer?

This is no doubt worthy of further research.

Gordon Ramsay & Hell's Kitchen

Reality shows provide us with many WTF moments and Gordon Ramsay (a world class chef) and his show, Hell's Kitchen, probably move close to the top of the WTF list after this one. Ramsay is probably as well know for his outrageous expletive-filled outbursts at anyone who angers him, and perhaps because his brother was arrested in Bali on a drug charge, as he is for anything else.

So, the story goes like this. One of the contests, Matt, was preparing a pancetta to stuff a quail and in the urgency to get it ready he accidentally slices of the top of his thumb. Now, the thumb unfortunately falls into the pancetta while Matt flees the kitchen scene to get some attention to his now shorter thumb.

The show must go on, so the other chefs take over, fry up the pancetta, stuff the bird, and then feed it to Ramsay. Reports say that the other chefs were not aware of the thumb slicing incident and not wanting to get on the wrong side of the host carried on as they would. Ramsay though was aware of what had happened and let things go on with the following exclamation, "Oh God - finger pancetta."

What is interesting here is that Ramsay then went on to sample the dish and gave it the thumbs up. I guess this is pun intended. A touch of cannibalism may be?