“Harrowing” is probably the only word to describe the above trailer for Burma VJ, a new Danish film that consists largely of illicitly shot video of the 2007 protests. As we know from first-hand experience, Burma is one of the toughest reporting gigs around, which makes the proliferation of disruptive media all the more important […]
A lighthearted pox on Harry Truman for coining the phrase “The buck stops here.” Our problem isn’t the sentiment itself, but rather the way it’s been glibly abused over the years. Countless beseiged executives have uttered those four words, only to go right on scapegoating when their situations inevitably worsen. Ever the skeptic, Microkhan reaction […]
Screenplayin’ and parentin’ for the day’s remainder, so we’re gonna leave you with a follow-up to last week’s Bad Movie Friday winner, the seminal Hard Ticket to Hawaii. This particular scene does not feature unnecessary use of a rocket launcher, but it does teach us all a valuable lesson: When a stranger asks you to […]
We’re not ashamed to declare ourselves total stats geeks, which means we’re always curious about the stories behind Big Important Numbers. And occasionally in our mathematical wanderings, we come to realize that some of those Numbers are a heckuva lot less revealing than they’re cracked up to be—batting average, for example, or Gross Domestic Product. […]
Tags:Depression v2.0·economy·George Packer·housing starts·statistics·The New Yorker
Since the missus is gone and we’re dealing with Microkhan Jr. all by our lonesome, we’re gonna post today’s NtHWS Extras installment a bit earlier than usual. Don’t worry, there are non-book goodies to follow today—but those are more easily written when the kid is napping. Today’s focus is the poet laureate of the Ledo […]
Tags:Mattachine Society·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·poetry·Smith Dawless·Stanford University
We cut our journalistic teeth on the information security beat, which means we’ll always have a soft spot for great hacker yarns (such as this one). Sometimes, of course, the greatest break-ins don’t start with port scans, but rather with a more archaic form of trespass. Such was the case at an anonymous company that […]
Once again we’re pressed for time as the screenplay calls, so today’s NtHWS Extra will be yet another visual quickie. The illustration at right, of a Konyak Naga chest tattoo circa 1923, comes courtesy of the great J.H. Hutton, arguably the great dean of Naga anthropology. Hutton did several tours up in the Indo-Burmese hills, […]
Tags:Add new tag·headhunting·J.H. Hutton·Nagas·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·tattoos·Verrier Elwin
Apologies for failing to ease your case of the Mondays with today’s offerings so far—first corruption, then civil war. So we’re gonna try and make it up to y’all with the video above, featuring several of the gnarliest dunks ever committed to digital memory. They come courtesy of Guy Dupuy, a man who views Romanian […]
When we went to bed last night, we were all set to kick off the week’s blogging with a “Where’s Prabhakaran?” post. But during our all-too-fleeting stay with the Sandman, the Tamil Tigers leader’s fate became widely known. Contrary to expectations, Prabhakaran did not end it all with a bite of cyanide, but rather (at […]
Tags:Mahinda Rajapaksa·politics·Prabhakaran·Sri Lanka·Tamil Tigers
After 42 years at the helm of Gabon, President Omar Bongo appears to be easing his way out the door. The official reason is declining health, but Microkhan finds it odds that Bongo seems to have taken ill after a French court lowered the investigative boom, in response to a complaint by Transparency International. The […]
Tags:corruption·France·Gabon·Libreville·Omar Bongo·Stutz·Transparency International
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 […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·Deron McBee·Hard Ticket to Hawaii·movies·Skinemax
Today’s installment of NtHWS Extras is gonna have a past-is-prologue feel, as we look back at Japan’s alleged narcotics profiteering during World War II. We’re accustomed to hearing plenty about the Taliban’s reliance on narco-dollars, but Japan’s wartime opium production is now largely forgotten. At the time, however, American politicians were fond of harping on […]
Tags:Afghanistan·drugs·heroin·Japan·North Korea·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·opium·Taliban
While Microkhan fully supports the idea of physical autonomy, this case in Minneapolis skeeves us out to no end. A 13-year-old boy suffering from Hodgkin’s disease is fighting for his right to avoid chemotherapy, in favor of a homeopathic alternative. Unfortunately, that alternative seems to be peddled by a man who strikes us as nothing […]
We’re so far behind on the screenplay it ain’t even funny, so we need to jet early today and focus on revising Act Three’s supremely clunky dialogue. We’re thus gonna leave you with a somewhat oddball NtHWS Extra: The promotional trailer for Madlib’s absolutely essential Beat Konducta in India. Yeah, it may seem like a […]
Tags:India·Madlib·music·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month
During our time in Ireland, we never ceased to be mystified by the venom spewed toward Travellers, perhaps the Emerald Isle’s largest ethnic minority. For starters, we had a tough time differentiating Travellers from their countrymen, although our Irish comrades never seemed to fail at the task. Alas, many of those comrades were barkeeps, and […]
Tags:boxing·crime·Ireland·Travellers
Though it’s still siphoning money from Uncle Sam’s coffers, the general consensus is that Yucca Mountain will never emerge from its bureaucratic coma. So what’s next? Microkhan is glad you asked: For the moment, the only real option is to leave the waste where it was created, encased in metal cylinders and stowed in concrete […]
We’re swamped with Wired reporting duties for the remainder of the day, so today’s NtHWS Extras installment must once again be a visual quickie. The photo above depicts several African-American GIs enjoying rickshaw rides in Calcutta, the only Indian city with a nearby rest camp willing to accept black soldiers. White American officers, by contrast, […]
Tags:Calcutta·India·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·World War II
For reasons best left unsaid, Microkhan found himself watching Bundesliga highlights yesterday evening. Not a bad time at all, but the Germans’ post-goal celebrations really disappoint. The whole running-toward-the-crowd-with-spread-arms thing is almost wholly lacking in imagination, and does little to express the pure joy of athletic genius. This got us thinking about the celebratory dance […]
Perhaps our favorite passage in all of American literature can be found on the last page of The Great Gatsby. No, not that celebrated last line about boats fighting the current. Rather it’s the snippet located a few paragraphs before the end, in which Nick Carraway waxes rhapsodic about Dutch explorers: And as the moon […]
Tags:Alaska·anthropology·Captain James Cook·Dena'ina·First Contact·John Webber
Step one: Join the Hells Angels. Step two: Rat everyone out to the Mounties. Step three: Profit, to the tune of $2.5 million. More on Canada’s “Operation SharQc” here. With the Hells Angels leadership in disarray, it may be their sons who start to step up.
Tags:Canada·crime·Hells Angels
We have to jet downtown for an evening of semi-responsible alcohol consumption, so today’s edition of NtHWS Extras will be exceedingly brief. It consists, in fact, of little more than the cartoon at right, which Microkhan discovered in the archives of the United States Army Military History Institute. It comes from a scrapbook donated by […]
Tags:covert operations·Kachin Rangers·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·OSS Detachment 101·World War II
A veteran caver has a theory about the scourge of White Nose Syndrome. Meanwhile, farmers are starting to fret. Nature’s bug zappers are a lot cheaper than pesticides.
America’s sky-high divorce rate is often cited as a prime example of our moral decay. But how many other nations avoid such matrimonial chaos only through the maintenance of draconian laws? Microkhan would like to direct your attention toward Uganda, which has recently experienced a surge in divorces. The culprit seems to be the repeal […]
Microkhan’s in the midst of a vintage programming kick, and so we’ve inevitably turned out thoughts to Logo in recent days. We have incredibly fond memories of clustering around a battered Tandy in the early 1980s, to watch our school’s lone computer-proficient teacher demonstrate how simple commands could push a turtle-shaped cursor around. We’ve been […]
Tags:gadgets·Logo·programming·technology
In today’s installment of NtHWS Extras, we’re gonna revisit one of Microkhan’s very favorite topics: headhunting. Perhaps the most famous anthropological study of the practice is Renato Rosaldo’s Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974. The Ilongot, who inhabit the Filipino island of Luzon, are peculiar in that they don’t preserve their captured heads as keepsakes. Rather, they discard […]
Tags:anthropology·headhunting·Ilongot·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·Philippines
Last night, Microkhan finally got around to completing the Stanley Kubrick circuit by watching Paths of Glory. Suffice to say that the film is a potent reminder of the World War I’s absolute ghastliness; we can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to be an 18-year-old lad in the trenches, ordered to venture […]
Tags:Britain·France·Paths of Glory·psychology·shell shock·Stanley Kubrick·World War I
The handsome logo at right belongs to Zeya Shwe Myay FC, one of eight teams that will soon compete in Burma’s National League Cup, the nation’s first-ever professional soccer league. Matches kick off this coming Saturday, with the early money on Mandalay’s Yadanarpon FC as the prohibitive favorite; the team is owned by a drinking-water […]
Tags:Burma·corruption·National League Cup·politics·Sagaing Division·soccer·sports·Zeya Shwe Myay
Microkhan has to jet downtown to beg The Man for affordable health insurance (prognosis: grim), so no Bad Movie Friday this week. But we’ve got the next-best thing to reward you for a work week well-done—Manimal, dude, Manimal. How Microkhan loved this cheese back in his grade-school days, and how we wept when NBC unceremoniously […]
An appreciable slice of Now the Hell Will Start takes place in the Ledo Stockade, an United States Army prison in North-East India. The place was known for the casual brutality of its guards, several of whom had worked as chain-gang supervisors back in Uncle Sugar. The stockade’s abysmal conditions play a key role in […]
Tags:Japan·Ledo Stockade·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·prostitution·South Korea
