My Girlfriend and I Found the Real Hannibal Lecter for Thomas Harris

Last week horror fans discovered that one of the genre’s most notorious villains, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, was based on a real doctor imprisoned in Mexico, whom the author met while visiting the prison as a young man to interview another inmate named Dykes Askew Simmons. Last spring, through my editor, I received a message from Harris, who wanted me to find and identify someone who had been a prisoner in the Nuevo Leon State Prison during the 50s and 60s. For a few moments I thought I’d wind up sustaining an epistolary exchange with Harris like Hannibal held with some of his patients. As I read the note, however, it became clear that I was only needed as a sort of hired detective. His note read [sic]:

I need information about a medical doctor, known in the press as “The Werewolf of Nuevo Leon,” who was a prisoner in the Nuevo Leon State Prison in the late 1950’s and the l960s. I do not know his name. The doctor was convicted of killing hitchhikers in Nuevo Leon, dismembering them and throwing them piecemeal out of his car at night. The doctor saved the life of another prisoner, Dykes Askew Simmons, in the prison when Simmons was shot by prison guards while trying to escape. The doctor also treated poor people for free while he was a prisoner, and had a medical office inside the prison.

Simmons was a Texan convicted in Nuevo Leon in March, 1961, of murdering three young members of the Perez Villagomez family in October, l959. He was sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted to 30 years. He was in the Nuevo Leon State Prison from 1961 until his escape in 1969. The case of Simmons, and probably the case of the doctor, were covered by the newspapers El Norte de Nuevo Leon and El Sol de Nuevo Leon. Two of the El Norte reporters who wrote about Simmons were Ricardo Bartres and Esteban Ardines.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Good read on investigative journalism. I’d totally take these kind of assignments.

Spoiler: his name was Alfredo Ballí Treviño.

#meanwhile #doctorlecter

Amazon Fire TV’s voice search didn’t quite get me.

#amazon #firetv #startrek

Unraveling the Pollinating Secrets of a Bee’s Buzz

In many cases, these flowers lure an animal with the reward of nectar. As the pollinator sips the plant’s sugary liquid, it gets covered in pollen. It then travels to another flower in search of nectar and delivers the grains.

But 20,000 plant species — including familiar ones like tomatoes, potatoes and cranberries — strike a different deal. They offer pollen itself as food. These flowers don’t simply put the protein-rich pollen out for any animal to eat, however. They keep it tucked deep inside special tubes.

Only bumblebees and certain other insects can get this pollen out. In every case, the method is the same: the pollinator grabs the tube with its jaws and starts vibrating hundreds of times a second.

“It has to hold on, because the vibrations are so strong that otherwise it could come flying off the flower,” says Mario Vallejo-Marín of the University of Stirling in Scotland, who recently co-authored a review of this behavior in the journal Current Opinion in Plant Biology.

#bees #flowers

More Inappropriate Vintage Ads For Children.

#advertising #funnies

Good morning from the toadstools, peeps!

#photos #garden

Poor spider. He looks terrified.

#funnies #videos #spiders

For art’s sake! Photoing neighbors with zoom lens not a privacy invasion

An artist who hid in his apartment’s shadows and deployed a telephoto lens to photograph his neighbors through their glass-walled apartment is not liable for invading their privacy, a New York state appellate court has ruled.

The appeals court called it a “technological home invasion” but said the defendant used the pictures for art’s sake. Because of that, the First Department of the New York Appellate Division ruled Thursday in favor of artist Arne Svenson, who snapped the pics from his lower Manhattan residence as part of an art exhibit called “The Neighbors.”

#arts #legalnews

Train tracks through bicycle spokes.

No trespassing at the airport.

#photos #bikes #trains

The Godfather of Clickbait - The New Yorker

TThe death of Vinnie Musetto, a former editor at the New York Post who wrote the famous headline “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,” has already attracted quite a few notices, including complimentary pieces in the Times, the Guardian, and the Post itself. Vinnie, whom I got to know a bit when I worked at the Post for a couple of years in the early nineties, would have been happy about that. An aging hippie who wore his hair long, dressed in black, and, in the later part of his career, also reviewed movies, he saw headline writing as an art form, albeit a rough-and-ready one.

As Tim Hill pointed out in the Guardian, the “TOPLESS BAR” headline wasn’t Vinnie’s only masterwork. He was also responsible for “KHADAFY GOES DAFFY,” “500LB SEX MANIAC GOES FREE,” “I SLEPT WITH A TRUMPET,” and, his personal favorite, “GRANNY EXECUTED IN HER PINK PAJAMAS.” I’m not sure all of these made it onto T-shirts—the “HEADLESS BODY” headline certainly did—but they evoke a New York, and a media world, that has long since disappeared.

Or has it? In a way, the sorts of headlines that Vinnie wrote anticipated the headlines we now see on the Internet. Vinnie’s efforts were often better—as were those of other talented headline writers at the Post. But, in combining succinctness, irony, and absurdism, the Post’s headlines fashioned a model that editors at popular Internet news sites, in their never-ending efforts to attract clicks, often seek to emulate.

#meanwhile #literature

Peeps, here’s your birthday jam…

#nowplaying