What a couple of days it’s been for the newsfolk here in Vancouver. This afternoon, a small twin-engine plane crashed into an apartment building about five minutes from my home. This evening, a 6-person homicide was found in a home in Surrey. And just in the last couple of days, a very controversial arrest was made in Thailand of a pedophile from the Vancouver area who’s managed to gain international notoriety as the swirl-faced man in digitally altered images depicting him abusing young boys in Asia.

When the shit gets weird, man, it gets weird.

The pedophile– oh, sorry, “accused” pedophile– is an ESL teacher named Christopher Neil who’d travel to Asia both to teach kids English, and I guess when that wasn’t fulfilling enough, to sodomize and rape them.

One of the things I’m huge on is personal freedoms. I’m all about doing what you wanna do behind closed doors, but pedophilia makes me wish public floggings were back in vogue. I say string the fucker up and let us at ’em. A little uncouth, perhaps, but if there’s anything we ought to hold sacred as long as we damned well want in this cynical, strange world we live in, it’s innocence.

Once innocence is lost, it never comes back. Cliche, yes, but true. That’s just the sad reality of what “growing up” means. Sooner or later, illusions are shattered. It happens soon enough for all of us, but when some asshole like Christopher Neil saunters in and ceremoniously strips others of that innocence — whether it’s by force or because some starving kid needs a couple nickels to rub together for his dinner, or, as reports say, $15 to rape ’em underaged — then I say the law needs to answer to it as fast and hard as it can.

Christopher Neil isn’t just your garden-variety pedophile. He’s one that raped at least 12 boys that we know of (but the speculation is that’s just a starting figure… the guy tried to enter the priesthood here in BC, but even the Catholic Church wouldn’t take him. Wowzas! Worked with cadets here in Canada, and did a little teaching, too… Investigations are ongoing). He then digitally altered his face in images he proceed to posted on the internet. Interpol finally was able to extrapolate an image from his mangled files, and pasted them worldwide in an attempt to find out who the hell he was. Vive le Photoshop!

Thing is, we don’t know the extent to which he violated these kids. One would have to hazard the guess that it had to be pretty severe in order for Interpol to take such a vested interest in this one guy.

Well… Imagine Vancouver’s pride to find out this internationally hunted fugitive is one of our own. My, aren’t we lucky.

Like I say, I think it’d be a banner day out if we’d string him up on the Art Gallery steps and allow the masses to flog him, but I hear tell that’s considered cruel and inhumane. Hmm. Well, like the people say, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander, right?

No worries, though. There’s always prison showers. I imagine the Thai ones have a certain exotic flavour but I bet when you get past all that international variety, a prison shower’s a prison shower, right? Tsk.

Welcome to crime fighting in the digital age, people. It’s nice to know some of the bad guys actually do get caught.