Richmonda, Virginia’s DJ Carlito specializes in digging up vintage, totally random vacation films and setting them to music. We’re absolute suckers for all things Romanian, so the above clip is a fave. But also check out Carlito’s found footage from Tunisia in 1967—not to mention this Indonesian propaganda flick from the heyday of (we think) […]
Tags:1960s·DJ Carlito·Indonesia·movies·Romania·travel·Tunisia
During out all-too-brief sojourn in St. Cloud, Minnesota, we caught wind of James Leroy Iverson’s release from North Dakota’s Missouri River Correctional Facility, after serving 40 years for a pair of 1969 murders. Iverson was, in fact, North Dakota’s longest-serving inmate, and thus a man unaccustomed to 21st-century living. What has shocked him the most […]
Tags:economics·energy·fossil fuels·James Leroy Iverson·North Dakota·prisons
By the time these words go live, we’ll be en route to beautiful St. Cloud, Minnesota for a whirlwind work trip. Odds are we won’t have a chance to blog while on the road, so no fresh posts for the next couple dozen hours or so. Take a break, enjoy some vintage Nas, and we’ll […]
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 […]
Tags:bearer bonds·Beverly Hills Cop·crime·Die Hard·drugs·Hans Gruber·Mexico·money·movies·Texas
Look, we’re big enough Mongolian monarchs to admit when we’ve goofed. And that’s exactly what appears to be the case with last week’s Bad Movie Friday post about the 1982 Marc Singer vehicle The Beastmaster. We riffed about Singer’s apparent refusal to save the life of the ferret that had just helped pluck him from […]
Tags:animals·Bad Movie Friday·errata·ferrets·Marc Singer·movies·rodents·The Beastmaster·TV
Many moons ago at the Bronx Museum, we caught a great bit of satiric video art entitled Why Cybraceros?. We’ll let the artist himself, Alex Rivera, explain the riotous concept: In his second film, Why Cybraceros? (USA 1997), Rivera sarcastically imagined a future in which migrant farm workers (or Braceros) could work in America, but […]
Tags:Alex Rivera·art·Bronx·Bronx Museum·comedy·Cybraceros·immigration·museums
We find ourselves in full agreement with The Economist‘s argument against America’s draconian sex-offender laws, which prescribe too-harsh punishments for youthful blunders and other crimes unlikely to be repeated. But we were struck by this passage from the polemic, which would seem to undercut the magazine’s case: A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, […]
Whatever you may be drinking this weekend, please plan on pouring a little out for the heroic ferret in this classic The Beastmaster clip. We have no idea why Marc Singer’s character, supposedly a Dr. Doolittle-like friend to the animals, doesn’t try and help his rodent savior. But that’s just one of the many eternal […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·ferrets·Marc Singer·movies·rodents·The Beastmaster
We’ve long assumed that antivenins were stocked in every hospital pharmacy, so that snakebite victims need only worry about getting medical attention in time. But, alas, that’s really not the case at all—even mainstream antivenins such as CroFab must often be shipped in to address specific cases, and rarer remedies are getting increasingly hard to […]
Tags:animal attacks·antivenin·Canada·Florida·medicine·Ontario·snakes
Once in a while, we receive a comment that merits bumping to the front page. Such is the case with an anecdote just appended to this April post, in which we wondered about the fate of Charles Manson’s children—particularly Zezozose Zadfrack Glutz, the product of his carnal union with Susan Atkins. A reader chimed in […]
Tags:Charles Manson·crime·cults·Susan Atkins·Zezozose Zadfrack
There are two salient factoids that we’d like to pass along about the song above: 1) This was the first hip-hop 12-inch we ever purchased, from the Music+ retail store on Ventura Boulevard. (Don’t look for it—much like the Electric Banana, it’s not there anymore.) We were so enamored of the tune that we recorded […]
The entertainment conglomerate behind Dumbo also recognizes that elephants aren’t always sweethearts—especially when too many pachyderms are competing for too few resources. And so Disney’s top veterinarian has spent the past few years traveling the globe, making sure that elephant populations stay within reason. His method? Straight-up surgical: Wildlife officials in several countries are considering […]
Tags:Disney·elephants·medicine·Swaziland·wildlife management
With the Chinese town of Ziketan locked down on account of pneumonic plague, it’s worth looking back at a similar incident from 15 years ago: the Surat plague of 1994. The Indian city ended up recording approximately 5,150 cases of pneumonic plague, which resulted in a shade under 60 fatalities—by no means a major epidemic, […]
Tags:bubonic plague·China·India·Italy·pneumonic plague·public health·Renaissance history·Surat plague
Apologies for the dearth of posting today. We’re hip deep in a pair of major projects right now, and we spent way too much time sorting through murder-for-hire data this morning. Now we’re off to cold call a bunch of Mexican scientists, who will doubtless chortle at our ugly Spanish. Wish us luck, and please […]
Tags:maritime·submarines
Bloggers are lazy? Microkhan chortles at that stereotype. We just wrapped up a long morning of analyzing FBI data, all in the name of furthering The Murder Project, our ongoing effort to assess the state of today’s contract-killing marketplace. And today’s verdict does not exactly lift our hearts. As mentioned previously, the only reliable pricing […]
Tags:crime·FBI·Nina Shen Rastogi·statistics·The Murder Project
We can’t say we ever watched more than 90 seconds of an Arena Football game, so news of the league’s imminent demise didn’t exactly make us cry hot, salty tears. But 22 years is a long time for an upstart pro-sports league to make it—the likes of the USFL could only dream of achieving such […]
Yesterday we looked at the economic benefits of the Philippines’ divorce ban. In doing so, we noted that while legal splits are certainly uncommon over there, they’re certainly not unheard of. Filipinos who want out of bummer marriages must opt for an annulment, which is ostensibly tough to obtain. But as is usually the case […]
In keeping with our vow to consume lots of classic flicks while banging out Draft Two of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, we launched into the uncut version of Das Boot. We hadn’t seen the movie in about a decade, so we’d largely forgotten about its splendor. It’s tough to imagine a better […]
Tags:Das Boot·engineering·maritime·movies·submarines·William Bourne
So we’re back to working hard on the screenplay, trying to bang out a second draft by (gulp) August 28th. To get in the right frame of mind, then, we’ve started watching a bunch of cinematic classics that have resided too long on our “must see” list. Chief among these was Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, […]
Tags:Akira Kurosawa·Japan·movies·Now the Hell Will Start·Stray Dog·Tokyo·World War II
Since the writing game puts food on our table, we currently have a somewhat complicated relationship with Google Books. Try as we might, we’ve yet to figure out a way we’ll be able to avoid starvation in a world where the sweat of our brow gets given away for free. Yet those concerns fall by […]
Tags:California·Emperor Norton·Mexico·San Francisco·Sandman·U.S. history
In response to our recent string of posts regarding the “Natural Rate of Divorce”, a commenter asked an interesting question: how might an examination of the situation in the Philippines shed some light on the topic? The Philippines, after all, is the only nation in the world, apart from the Vatican, where divorce continues to […]
Tags:divorce·immigration·Overseas Filipino Workers·Philippines
