Upon reading this tragic yet all-too-common tale from this morning’s New York Times, we were reminded of our long-held hypothesis that a huge number of homicides would never occur were it not for the ingestion of alcohol. Yet we’ve never really had a good sense of what percentage of killings involve inebriated parties—at least until […]
As we spend today celebrating the 30th anniversary of mankind’s first visit to the Moon, it’s worth noting that America’s space-race triumph was far from pre-ordained. In fact, the smart money circa 1963 would have been on the Soviets reaching the goal first, due to the seldom recognized genius of Sergei Korolev. The man responsible […]
Tags:1960s·Laika·Moon·NASA·Russia·satellites·Sergei Korolev·Soviet Union·Venus
This week’s installment of Bad Movie Friday brings us some serious high-concept nonsense: the 1985 Kurt Thomas vehicle Gymkata, which sought to cash in on the nation’s post-Mary Lou Retton love affair with gymnastics. And what better way than to take a slightly past-his-prime male gymnast and insert him into a limp ninja flick? We […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·Gymkata·gymnastics·Kurt Thomas·martial arts·Mary Lou Retton·movies·sports
A recent rash of moonshine deaths in Gujarat got us thinking about the state’s failed prohibition policy (PDF). While liquor bans may have some discernible impact in isolated villages, they’re doomed to failure in larger regions that are tied to wet neighbors via modern highways. But the black market for legit liquor is only for […]
Anyone who’s ever sampled Thunderbird is unlikely to forget the experience—or, for that matter, to recall it with much fondness. The stuff is the very epitome of bum wine, heavy on the alcohol and the commensurate taste of metallic burning. This detailed review breaks it down for the broke oenophiles in the audience: For all […]
Though the practice of seppuku is virtually synonmous with ritual suicide, it’s worth noting that feudal Japan hardly had a monopoly on ceremonial self-slaughter. The Mayans were also enthusiasts, though the details of their process obviously differed from those of their peers across the Pacific. As this fascinating paper makes clear, the Mayan method involved […]
India’s making a big, expensive stab at determining once-and-for-all whether man can make it rain. (No, not in the figurative sense.) Color us a little skeptical; we’ve always thought that positive cloud-seeding results were often due more to luck than the effects of sprinkled silver iodide. (For the umpteenth time, people, correlation is not causation.) […]
We recently stumbled across the photo above while sifting through the National Archives “Picturing the Century” website, in search of images of child coal miners. Something about the two girls’ sharply differing expressions stuck with us—the one on the left strikes us as the contemplative member of the duo, the one on the right the […]
Talk about one-hit wonders: the above tune, famously sampled in a couple of hip-hop gems, appears to be the only single ever churned out by Lee Mason & His Orchestra. The group is so obscure, in fact, that it’s often not even credited with “Shady Blues”; the song was apparently re-released in the U.K. under […]
A loyal reader recently sent us the above graph, culled from a recent issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The accompanying text only explains what’s obvious to even the untrained eye: as the age-adjusted death rates linked to firearms and motor-vehicle accidents have declined, poison has become an increasingly efficient killer of Americans. Does […]
Tags:drugs·medicine·poison·public health
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the murder of Father Bernard Darke, a Jesuit priest who worked as a photographer for a Catholic newspaper in Guyana. Darke was beaten to death while snapping pictures of an anti-government protest. His assailants were all members of one of the most curious quasi-religious groups to ever grace the […]
Tags:cults·Guyana·House of Israel·Rabbi Edward Washington·religion
We were never the biggest fan of Iron Maiden’s music, with the possible exception of “Prowler” (later memorably covered by the great Trans Am). But we’ve always had a soft spot for the band’s ghoulish cover art, starring a wrinkly, gore-loving skeleton called Eddie. So yesterday, when we saw a fellow Harlemite non-ironically sporting a […]
Depression v2.0 may be rough all around, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more than a few economic winners amidst the widespread misery. You already knew about foreclosure specialists and pawn shops; now cast your jealous gaze toward the folks who operate commercial airplane graveyards, where flailing carriers are stashing the aging jets they can […]
Been meaning to post this Lost Boyz classic for ages, but it took the invention of the Grooveshark widget to provide the necessary technological push. We were definitely latecomers to this whole album, and for years our fandom extended only as far as the remixed version of “The Yearn” (which we actually scooped up on […]
We first fell in love with the oral-history format eons ago, when a copy of Studs Terkel’s The Good War found its way into our grubby hands. Ever since, we’ve rarely passed up the opportunity to comb through typed-up question-and-answer sessions with the sorts of characters who otherwise would be excluded from the history books. […]
Tags:Herman Perry·Manzanar·Now the Hell Will Start·Tule Lake·U.S. history·World War II
As we continue to plow through Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent The Snakehead, we’ve been giving tons of thought to the impact of immigrant remittances. We never cease to be amazed by how much working-class immigrants are able to save and then contribute to the families they left behind—so much, in fact, that some economies become […]
Tags:China·economics·Guyana·immigration·Kyrgyzstan·Patrick Radden Keefe·Suirname·Tajikistan·The Snakehead
After a holiday hiatus, Bad Movie Friday returns with a true gem: 1987’s The Barbarians, starring bodybuilding twins Peter and David Paul (aka the Barbarian Brothers). Though obviously a blatant attempt to copy the then-successful Conan blueprint, The Barbarians attempted to infuse the swords-and-sorcery formula with ample amounts of proto-ironic humor. More often than not, […]
Tags:1980s·Bad Movie Friday·Barbarian Brothers·barbarians·Eva La Rue·movies·Ruggero Deodato·The Barbarians
Cameroon’s Ministry of Trade does not mess around when it comes to enforcing the nation’s new price-control regime: Yesterday, officials of the Ministry of Trade uncovered a clandestine bakery at the Etoudi quarter in Yaounde which uses expired products to produce bread. One of the products that was seized and displayed at the site was […]
There’s an anecdote in Now the Hell Will Start regarding an Assamese tea planter whose arm was chomped off by a Bengal tiger. According to the primary source—a diary kept by an American officer—the trauma of the incident caused the poor planter’s hair to turn white virtually overnight. (The specific time span isn’t mentioned, but […]
Tags:canities subita·hair·medical science·Now the Hell Will Start
We’re on a Wired deadline this afternoon, so we’re gonna outro early with a classic hoops clip: a young Vince Carter absolutely posterizing French center/stiff Frédéric Weis. Yes, we realize you’ve seen it before; trust us, it’s worth a second (or tenth) look, if only for the confused expression on Weis’s face at the end […]
Perhaps due to our early exposure to the Mel Brooks versus Gregory Hines fight scene in History of the World: Part I, we always figured that trident-and-net gladiators—known in Latin as retiarii—were decidedly badass. For years, in fact, we’ve always claimed that, should we ever suddenly be cast back to the year 100 A.D. and […]
The tragic death of former Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair—one of the toughest competitors to ever play the position—gives us a chance to loop back to one of Microkhan’s most dicussed topics: suicide. For those who don’t already know, McNair perished in a murder-suicide perpetrated by his young girlfriend. We’ve long been morbidly fascinated with […]
Tags:crime·football·murder-suicide·Steve McNair·suicide·Tennessee
Yesterday’s riff on Medieval weaponry got us thinking about one of of our favorite Saturday-morning shows of yore: the cartoon version of Dungeons & Dragons. To be totally honest, we were never really big on the game behind the series—guess we suffer from that whole lack-of-imagination thing, and thus needed moving images spoon-fed into our […]
Granted, a 46-year-old exotic dancer in Moorehead, Minnesota, is unlikely to understand the delicate economics of successful extortion. But she still should’ve realized that her scheme to squeeze a North Dakota pastor would end badly if she kept pressing for hush money. Given that she hadn’t picked a wealthy target, Bunny Byington really should’ve kept […]
Tags:Bunny Byington·crime·economics·extortion·Minnesota·North Dakota
In getting up to speed on the Uighur riots in China, we’ve been spending appreciable time delving into the history of the nation’s numerous Muslim rebellions. No 19th-century history of China is complete without an extensive section about these uprisings, which were eventually put down in the most brutal fashion imaginable. We’re particularly enamored with […]
By any reasonable measure, scleral tattooing—that is, the injection of ink into the eyeball—is far from a widespread fad. As far as we can determine, in fact, a grand total of three people have had their corneas inked for non-medical reasons. They are body-modification enthusiasts whose story made a stir on The Tubes two years […]
At first glance, it seems odd that residents of Guayama, Puerto Rico, would object so strenuously to the construction of a new monkey-breeding facility—especially since, as opponents make clear, they don’t have a moral problem with vivisection. They’re instead spooked by the prospect of escapees. “What’s the big deal?” you might ask. After all, it’s […]
Tags:agriculture·Bioculture Mauritius·medical science·monkeys·primates·Puerto Rico
Though we’ve largely shifted over to using the Grooveshark widget when sharing music with y’all, YouTube remains a go-to place for some truly rare cuts. A good case in point is Spanky Wilson‘s “Kissing My Love,” which we recently heard while trolling through WEFUNK Show #246. It’s a great prime example of the sort of […]
Tags:Daptone Records·Gabriel Roth·music·R&B·Spanky Wilson·WEFUNK
So you think Medieval knights were condemned to lug around unwieldy swords, while their Renaissance counterparts bounced around with mere wisps of metal weaponry? Dr. Timothy Dawson believes you’ve been grossly misinformed—a fact he expounds upon at length in one of Microkhan’s all-time favorite publications, the Journal of Western Martial Art: These results show that […]
Tags:history·Journal of Western Martial Arts·Medieval history·Renaissance history·weapons
One of our great journalistic mentors taught us that every saga is about money, at least on some level. That axiom certainly appears to hold true in Xinjiang, the western Chinese province that has suffered through days of deadly riots. As the Financial Times explained last year, Muslim Uighurs are incensed not only with the […]
