The Machinery of Night

He's Everywhere! He's Everywhere!

You remember the Tourist Guy, the fellow whose picture was supposedly snapped at the WTC just seconds before the plane hit. And you probably remember that he started popping up everywhere---near the Hindenberg, on the Titanic, in Ford's Theater...

Well, now he's surfaced again:

The famous oil painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River was vandalized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, allegedly by a former museum employee who glued on a computer image depicting a fake view of the World Trade Center attack.

...

...[T]he computer image glued onto the painting showed a phony photo of a man standing at the trade center with a jet flying toward it.

The story does not explicitly say that it was that particular fake photo of a man standing at the WTC while a jet flies toward it, but the odds are high that it is.

The painting was saved by the crack conservation SWAT team, apparently, and suffered only a slight loss of dignity.

The perp was a former security guard at the Met. If I read the story right, the vandalism took place on the 19th. The guy gave them the slip that day but returned on the 23rd, when he was captured. I think it's safe to say that he is not painting with a complete palette.

By the way, I didn't realize that the real Tourist Guy had been identified long ago. He's a Hungarian named Peter, who made up the picture and sent it to his friends, and from there it escaped into the wild.