A great piece out of small-town South Carolina on an alleged attempted murder that turned out to be nothing of the sort. The “victim,” Pearl Brown, wasn’t very detailed oriented, and that was ultimately her undoing. She probably should have researched the link between head trauma and amnesia a bit more, a line of inquiry that might have led her to conclude that she couldn’t …
Tags: · amnesia, crime, fur-bearing trout, hoaxes, psychology, South Carolina
Last week, the long discussion spurred by this post led one of our most trusted readers to offer this startling factoid:
Bizarre note: there was a cocktail in the 40s and 50s called the Mickey Slim that was made with gin and a pinch of DDT.
Sure enough, The Tubes abound with mentions of this lethal-sounding tipple. The ostensible recipe is here , along with a caveat to try …
Tags: · alcohol, DDT, fur-bearing trout, Mickey Slim, public health, urban legends
Last night, we got in a brief discussion with a pal regarding the Hollywood history of bearer bonds . These arcane financial instruments played a key role in at least two cinematic classics from our younger years: Beverly Hills Cop , in which Eddie Murphy’s pal foolishly steals some “German bearer bonds” from a drug dealer, and Die Hard , where they were hidden deep within the …
Tags: · bearer bonds, Beverly Hills Cop, crime, Die Hard, drugs, Hans Gruber, Mexico, money, movies, Texas
We’ve recently been toying with the idea of self-publishing a book, but can’t quite seem to get over the feeling that such a maneuver will result in a disastrous labor-to-pay ratio. That said, we’ve been heartened to learn that putting out one’s own book is no longer the sole domain of conspiracy theorists and frustrated poets. The great Yaphet Kotto has joined the trend …
Tags: · 1980s, books, James Bond, Kill Bond, Live and Let Die, Midnight Run, movies, Philippines, Yaphet Kotto
We’re off to deal with the federal government, so we’ll outro with one of the greatest stunts in cinematic history: the crocodile jump from Live and Let Die . As amply shown above, no fancy CGI or other tricks were used in the making of this scene—croc farm owner Ross Kananga (nee Heilman) actually jumped from snout to snout to snout a grand total of five times. (That third …
Tags: · crocodiles, James Bond, John Cazale, Live and Let Die, movies, Ross Kananga, stunts
After a week’s hiatus, Bad Movie Friday returns with a vengeance, as well as the most unnecessary use of a rocket launcher ever committed to film (c. the 1:20 mark). The ridiculous clip above is plucked from the 1987 Skinemax anti-classic Hard Ticket to Hawaii , in which several Playboy centerfolds play badass DEA agents. The acting is beyond atrocious; we remain convinced …
Tags: · Bad Movie Friday, Deron McBee, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, movies, Skinemax
Let me start the week by directing y’all’s attention to my latest Wired essay , in which I argue for the revival of a bygone regulation: the requirement that patent applicants submit working models of their inventions. Sound onerous? Yeah, that’s the point:
The abolition of the model requirement [in 1880] was initially a boon to backyard inventors, who often lacked the capital to …
Tags: · innovation, intellectual property, patent models, patents, technology, Wired
On the road for much of today, so start your week off right with a little vintage King Kobra , the rare hair-metal band willing to sacrifice its hair for a worthy cause—in this case, the destruction of Commies. Louis Gossett Jr. kills it in this video, too.
…
Tags: · Cold War, Iron Eagle, King Kobra, Louis Gossett Jr., music
I had to do a double-take this morning when I saw that The New York Times had a (digital) front-page feature on the Freedmen controversy . The question of whether Black Indians deserve tribal membership is something I wrote about six years ago, in a mammoth Wired piece that pondered the role of genetic analysis in this debate. One of the historic details I included in that story is …
Tags: · Cherokees, Dawes Act, Freedmen, Native Americans, racism, Wired
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Hd6Wohi-97w
The greatest to ever do it
I have a heavy writing day ahead: I’m having serious problems with a transition in my lede, and experience has taught me that ironing things out will take a good eight hours. So I’m shirking my Microkhan duties for the day and just tossing up some rare footage of the greatest squash player to ever walk the Earth. …
Tags: · Jahangir Khan, Pakistan, sports, squash, writer's block, writing
https://www.youtube.com/embed/OqFOUioAz6k
Whenever I’m stuck on a writing project—an all-too-frequent occurrence—I usually try to find my way forward by contemplating a single question: How can I shift what I’m trying to say without reaching for cliches? Because a lot of the time, the reason I’m banging my head against the wall is because I’m taking an approach to the …
Tags: · creativity, George Lucas, movies, writing
I am a writer based in the former hat-manufacturing capital of America. I ’m currently a contributing editor at Wired , for whom I write in-depth stories about criminal justice, national security, biomedical research, and sundry other topics. I’m also the author of two books of narrative nonfiction: Now the Hell Will Start , the tale of an American G.I. who went native in …
Tags:
https://youtu.be/gXNAKC–ElI?t=182
Yes, still here, and still curious about those portions of the earth that are most unlike my own. Thus my recent interest in the goings on Heard Island , an uninhabited blob that can lay fair claim to the title “Remotest Place on the Planet.” It’s perhaps best known as the headquarters for the Heard Island Feasibility Test, a 1991 experiment …
Tags: · ham radio, Heard Island, hunting, travel
The title of today’s post could easily be yesterday’s: “Commitment to the Bit.” Because what I find most fascinating about the field of hitchhiker studies is the effort that its practitioners pour into gathering data. I don’t know many social scientists who would throw themselves into their work quite like the authors of “WHO PICKS UP WHOM: The Fleeting Encounter Between …
Tags: · flowers, hippies, hitchhiking, psychology, science, sociology
