Jack Thompson really is still alive...

[A Black Falcon]

Turns out he's played Counter Strike. Woot... Though statistically speaking, is it really a surprise?

In high school. There was no sign that he ever played games in college (none of his roommates mention it, etc), and he was a senior, so it seems he stopped some years back, most likely...

But yes, making unsubstantiated claims is the media's specialty! For instance...

Cho has one picture where he's holding a hammer, right? He's South Korean, right? Well, in the South Korean film "Oldboy" (which I never saw, but I know some people here did), there's a scene where the guy kills some people with a hammer... so that was his reference, of course!

Proof? None. Not that it's needed for it to be reported.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04...verywhere/

One such observation, posted on The Lede last night, compared a photo sent to NBC by Mr. Cho with a poster from a South Korean movie. While we were trying to identify what may have been the inspiration for a single image — of Mr. Cho wielding a hammer — one reader saw an “underlying message” that “Koreans make weird and violent movies which inspire other Koreans like Cho to fly off the handle.” (Other comments can be found below).

Of course, we don’t know yet if Mr. Cho ever saw the film “Oldboy,” and even if he did, the film “is not real,” as another reader points out. With Mr. Cho expressing so many other reasons for his shooting spree, it is hardly time to start blaming movies.

One thing is sure: it’s pretty easy to find other men with hammers, using a quick Google image search.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04...inia-tech/

The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, “Oldboy,” seems dark enough to merit at least some further study. Following is The Times’s plot summary:

The film centers on a seemingly ordinary businessman, Dae-su (the terrific Choi Min-sik), who, after being mysteriously imprisoned, goes on an extensive, exhausting rampage, seeking answers and all manner of bloody revenge.

In a Times review, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film’s “body count and sadistic violence” mostly appealed to “cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome.”

A Virginia Tech professor, Paul Harrill, alerted us of the similarity between images in the hope that it would shed some light on what led Mr. Cho to kill 32 on Monday before turning the gun on himself.