The Villains in my Home Town- part 13.

Vlad Dracula. Impaled a lot of people on spikes.


You're a nasty piece of work, said the judge.



Actually he was a murdering rapist, sent down for 'the term of his natural life."
Fletcher is his name, and he has a wikipedia entry. They showed film of the taped off stretch of woodland where the body was found.
"Ken Cox, a forensic scientist from Queensland's John Tonge Institute, gave evidence for the Crown that the probability of finding someone in the community with the exact DNA would be about one in 6.4 billion. Fletcher was subsequently convicted and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, plus the nine years left on his Victorian jail sentence when he was extradited, meaning he will most likely die in jail. The Queensland criminal justice system embraced DNA profiling after his 1998 conviction."
It was a big trial and the picture was syndicated all over the place, so I wish I'd done a better one. It was one of those days I couldn't get comfortable. My markers were all drying up on me, which you can see by the scraping marks in the background. The judge is from a different trial. he spoke out the side of his mouth in that peculiar Australian way.

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The May issue of The Believer has a colossal 6,000 word essay on the Codex Seraphinianus by Justin Taylor (see here for my own short post on the subject)
"It was the last I heard from him. For whatever reason, Serafini did not answer any of the questions I sent to him or the follow-up letter I sent asking if he would prefer to be contacted in Italian.
With the author himself apparently out of the picture, I decided to try and get some art-historical context for the book and its elusive author. I wrote to Arthur C. Danto, art critic for the Nation, and described the book to him. He was intrigued and invited me to his apartment... “
(link via Charlie Orr)

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Ashes of Star Trek's Scotty go missing May 10- Reuters.
" Beaming him up was the easy part: the problem was transporting him back to Earth.
A search team continues to look for a rocket carrying ashes of the actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on "Star Trek," almost two weeks after it hurtled to the edge of space from New Mexico, the company behind the launch said on Thursday.
Remains of the Canadian-born actor, who died two years ago at the age of 85, blasted off from a remote launch site on April 29..."
(link via Michael Evans)

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Craig Thompson starts a blog and confirms a trend.
"Everyone asks when the new book will be out. I’m aiming for 2009 which sounds forever away, but that’s a tight schedule that requires me working almost every day."
The new comic strip model, The 'Graphic novel' requires that the author put himself out of circulation for anything up to a year or three. Missing contact with his fellow beings, he starts a blog.
He then finds the blog much more interesting than making books, and the publisher... oops, didn't mean to go that far.