In honor of this blessed holiday, let’s give a shout-out to a president who rarely gets a lick of recognition (save for in the occasional Simpsons parody). Zachary Taylor was neither a disaster nor a titan of governance; he was, instead, sort of like presidential Muzak, a banal and utterly forgettable Whig whose most notable […]
Because it’s Friday, and because I’m fascinated by all things Mongolian: An illustrated guide to barbecuing marmots. It’s all about the rocks in the stomach, apparently. (h/t Mstrmnd)
And so Depression v2.0 has claimed another victim near-and-dear to Microkhan’s heart: Midway Games. Sumner Redstone left the company high-and-dry in December, selling his 87 percent stake for a measly $100,000—plus another $70 million in debt. All the news stories have talked up Midway as the developer of the Mortal Kombat franchise. But the tear […]
Wired “Senior Maverick” Kevin Kelly writes a touching ode to Amish hackers. The German-speaking denizens of Lancaster County may eschew modern conveniences, but they’re still plenty tech-mad. A key passage on a jerryrigged electrical system in an Amish woodworking shop: The boss takes me around to the back where a huge dump-truck-sized diesel generator sits. […]
Tags:Amish·gadgets·hackers·technology·Wired
Back in the late ’90s, I got really into a band called Golden, featuring members of Trans Am as well as a young, pre-Mars Volta Jon Theodore. I last caught them at a Mercury Lounge show some ten years ago; I distinctly remember getting whapped in the face by a meathead’s twirling t-shirt. Since then, […]
Tags:Benga·Extra Golden·Kenya·music
On the heels of yesterday’s YBM Magnex post, let us now cast our fraud-seeking eyes southward toward Colombia, where 700,000 small investors have apparently lost everything in a blatant Ponzi scheme. The scam’s architect is David Murcia Guzman, who claims he’s a) misunderstood and b) a champion of the poor. Sounds like a regular Rod […]
As the husband of a lingerie designer, I’m accustomed to being surrounded by bra-and-panty images pretty much 24/7. My daily existence, in other words, could not possibly be more un-Iranian. Because as shown above, that nation’s censors make sure that no one gets a peek at non-family flesh. This photo comes from the must-see Flickr […]
The main character in my (*knock on wood*) next book began life as a child coal miner, circa 1905. So I’ve recently taken a keen interest in accounts of what it was like to toil in the pits back then, especially for workers well shy of their tenth birthdays. You will be completely unsurprised to […]
Does having an unusual first name make you more prone to anti-social behavior than being a Tom, Dick, or Harry? And is there perhaps a rival study concluding that an unusual name makes you stronger? Were there are a lot of kids named “Genghis” back in early 13th-century Mongolia?
Tags:Genghis Khan·language
I moved away from my native Los Angeles at the tender age of 17, and I’ve never seriously considered moving back. Great town, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve always felt my future lay elsewhere—Dublin, Dee Cee, and now (for the past decade) Gotham. That said, this site makes me crazy nostalgic for my hometown. […]
Tags:food·Los Angeles·tacos
From Foreign Policy, a list of insurgencies that refuse to die. They forgot a biggie, though: The New People’s Army, the military branch of the Communist Party of the Philippines. They’ve been waging their futile war since 1969, which makes the group older than the Tamil Tigers (1975) or Peru’s Shining Path (1980). This sad […]
Tags:insurgencies·Peru·Philippines·Shinging Path·Sri Lanka·Tamil Tigers
It comes as no surprise that the FBI is swamped with financial fraud cases nowadays. I knew this day of reckoning would someday come while watching The Real Housewives of Orange County on JetBlue a few years back. No financial system that could support such in-your-face opulence could possibly be on the up-and-up. (I remember […]
The dreaded Africanized honey bee has finally made its way to southern Utah, specifically the two counties that border Arizona. About time, considering that Utah agricultural authorities have been expecting to find such bees since 1999, when the “killers” first showed up in neighboring Nevada. So it took the bees a full decade to cross […]
Violent yuckiness in the skies above Siberia. This sort of collision will become slightly more common as older satellites go “rogue” due to neglect. You can bet that companies such as Sirius and EchoStar are double-checking their disaster plans tonight. This may be history’s only satellite-on-satellite mashup, but there have been other accidents in orbit. […]
Tags:satellites·space
…celebs missing fingers. The Tony Iommi story is one of my favorites, since the sausage-factory accident helped contribute to his trademark sludgy sound. (To compensate for his altered anatomy, Iommi detuned his guitar three half-steps down.) Didn’t realize that Boris Yeltsin had been careless with a grenade, though.
This New York Times story is mostly about M.I.A.’s pro-Tamil sympathies, and how they’ve affected her rep back in her native Sri Lanka. (M.I.A.’s family was forced to flee to Britain due to her father’s political activities.) But the kicker touches on cricket, when a Colombo-based musician observes that ethnic differences tend to disappear on […]
My son’s first birthday was on Sunday, so I just took him to the pediatrician for his one-year checkup. At the end of the appointment, I was handed a sheet detailing the main hazards that kids like Maceo face: Tylenol tablets, shade cords, plastic bags, etc. Useful advice, for sure. But why didn’t the doc […]
Muzak Holdings, the company responsible for turning the reprehensible “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” into part of the cultural canon, has filed for Chapter 11. Too many of its retail clients have gone belly up in recent months, plus satellite radio was chipping away at its milquetoast market. The news brought to mind this […]
Since my Latgalian is tragically rusty, I can’t say for sure that the title of this post is, in fact, a vulgur term for anus. But according to the good folks over at YouSwear.com, u’kstapuc’e is precisely the word you should invoke upon being cut off by an aggressive driver in Daugavpils. More Latgalian curses […]
Tags:language
No self-respecting country can do without an airline, and North Korea is no exception. The Hermit Kingdom’s lone commercial carrier is Air Koryo, founded in 1954 (as the less melliflously dubbed Choson Minhang CAAK). Alas, the airline’s destinations appear to be fairly limited; you can charter flights to Bangkok, Macao, or Sofia, but the normal […]
Tags:aviation·North Korea
With the 30th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution upon us, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is back in the news. How does a run-of-the-mill cleric become an ayatollah in the first place? Here’s the scoop, which I unearthed during my days as Slate‘s “Explainer” columnist. Two key tips: Study hard, and work on your rep.
Track-and-field records tumble with alarming frequency nowadays, but Yuriy Sedykh’s hammer-throw mark is a rare exception. The Ukrainian-born athlete set the world record back in 1986, while wearing the Soviet hammer-and-sickle on his uniform. Sedykh competed for another 17 years after that triumph, but he never again came within a meter of that legendary throw. […]
I was researching the arms trade the other day when I came across this amazing tale from Nigeria. It involves a fisherman-turned-arms-smuggler, who was ensnared not by the police, but rather by a celebrated vigilante named Alhaji Ali Kwara. Turns out that Mr. Kwara has been a rather busy man of late, personally arresting ten […]
A compendium of supreme artery cloggers. For the record, I’ve had the deep-fried Mars bar. Not sure I’ll ever be man enough for the Mega Pizza, which features pigs-in-blankets in lieu of crust. (h/t Joel)
The political turmoil in Madagascar is getting ugly. An ultra-shady land deal may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Tags:corruption·Madagascar
Every once in a while, the toxic weed jatropha pops up on my radar screen. Last year, it was as a balm for desperate poverty; now it’s being touted as the jet fuel of tomorrow. Color me the deepest shade of skeptical. And for God’s sake, don’t eat the stuff.
According to the Feds’ latest threat assessment, there are as many as 520 outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) operating in the U.S. But only five are menacing enough to get called out by name in the report’s appendix—the usual suspects (e.g. Hell’s Angels, Bandidos), plus a more obscure group known as the Sons of Silence. Uncle […]
How do you know when you’ve finally stumbled across the jungle mansion of V. Prabhakaran, leader of the Tamil Tigers? Peek in his closet: The suspicion that Prabhakaran was frequenting the place was further confirmed by the fact that the troops came across an expensive Marks & Spencer shirt of 42 1/2 cm size, which […]
Ahoy, and welcome. The blog’s subtitle—“Daily polymathism since the Year of the Ox”—really says it all. The goal here’s explore the myriad topics that get too little play among my fellow bit-stained wretches. You can thus think of this site as the 1980s-era UPI wire meets Granta 62 meets a tragically overeducated, gin-soaked barfly on […]
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