We’re diehard Indianapolis Colts fans, and thus tend to hate the Denver Broncos with a fiery passion normally reserved for plague rats, ex post facto laws, and Jean-Bédel Bokassa. But we’re eternally fascinated by sports fans who undergo tremendous physical discomfort in the name of supporting their side—there is something beautifully transcendent about the practice, […]
Tags:Barrel Man·football·religion·sports
The graph above shows the roughly quarter-century trend in America’s per-capita fat consumption. To our great non-surprise, we’ve became rather fond of gorging on foodstuffs that we know to be deleterious to our waistlines, though we’re heartened to see that we’ve recently pulled back somewhat from the Popeyes-related brink. Perhaps this trend has less to […]
We’re eternally fascinated by athletes whose skills are so spectacular, the powers-that-be of their respective sports feel compelled to change the ground rules in order to preserve some modicum of fairness. (See: Wilt Chamberlain and the widening of the lane, the recent “Tiger Proofing” of golf courses.) Now something similar is going on in the […]
We need this afternoon to focus on a secret major project (to be discussed openly in this space soon, or so we hope). Wish us luck in trying to mimic the awesome, borderline hypnotic productivity of the Adept Quattro s650H, without which the world couldn’t be suitably awash in Kit Kats.
Tags:Adept Quattro·candy·robots
The advent of electronic media has apparently done little to diminish the use of propaganda leaflets during wartime. Over the first six weeks of the Iraq War, for example, the United States Air Force dropped 31.8 million leaflets, primarily geared toward encouraging conscripts to surrender and oil workers to resist scorched-earth orders. This June 2003 […]
Tags:Cambodia·Malaysia·military·propaganda·psychology·Vietnam·World War II
We recently stumbled across the tale of the Choctaw code talkers, who were briefly employed by the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. Upon learning of their role in the conflict, we immediately wondered why the United States military opted to use Navajos rather than Choctaws during the wider war that followed a quarter-century […]
Tags:Choctaw·cryptology·language·Native Americans·Navajo·World War I·World War II
A Thursday comment thread led us to unearth a true Web gem: an English translation of the Ruhnama, the textbook authored by the late Saparmurat Niyazov, better known to the world as the megalomaniacal dictator Turkmenbashi. The tome was infamously the only source of history and philosophy instruction for pupils during Turkmenbashi’s ruinous reign, a […]
Tags:dictatorship·education·Ruhnama·Turkmenbashi·Turkmenistan
On one of our first-ever dates with the Grand Empress, we were smitten by the depth of her hostility toward The Loss of Sexual Innocence, arguably the most annoying, self-consciously bizarre film ever committed to celluloid—and thus prime fodder for the return of our semi-beloved Bad Movie Friday feature. Now, don’t get us wrong—we sorta […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·Mike Figgis·movies·The Loss of Sexual Innocence
We’ve heard surprisingly little debate about the Meat Industry Hall of Fame‘s inaugural class. The same folks who spent years droning on about the pass-catching virtues of Art Monk have uttered nary a peep about whether Paul Engler deserved enshrinement in his own version of Canton. And why no wailing and gnashing of teeth over […]
Tags:food·Frank-a-Matic·handball·meat·Meat Industry Hall of Fame·Ray Townsend·sports
We’re just absolute suckers for any song that shouts out both Paul Newman and Rick Cerone. A highly recommended gem from the same Diamond D album that gave us the classic “Sally Got a One-Track Mind”.
Tags:Diamond D·hip-hop·music·Rick Cerone
Believe it or not, the whole of journalism’s history has yet to be put on the Web. And so we found ourselves at the New York Public Library last week, manning a microfilm reader in search of tidbits from the early 1970s. In the course of panning past endless panels from newspapers of yore, we […]
Most authoritarians these days know better than to go the Papa Doc Duvalier route and declare themselves president-for-life. The occasional sham election does wonders in terms of keeping off the international heat, especially if your country is an important source of gas or bauxite. But Nursultan Nazarbayev seems to be seriously considering bucking the trend, […]
Tags:animals·birds·dictatorship·Houbara Bustard·Kazakhstan·politics·Russia·Winter Olympics
A secret major project beckons, so we’re off to deal for a spell. To fill the void, please enjoy this sequel of sorts to that excellent “SAS in Malaya” video that we posted a few days back. The scene this time is strife-torn Angola, but the same jaunty atmosphere remains. And if this is your […]
As the once-sparkling metropolis of Dubai flounders, it’s worth revisiting Johann Hari’s eerily prescient, deeply disturbing take on the city-state from earlier this year. There are lots of nasty anecdotes contained therein, but none more depressing than the fact that the United Arab Emirates still imprisons debtors, a practice abandoned in the United States during […]
We’ve been thoroughly enjoying The A.V. Club‘s week-long “Best of the ’00s” series, including today’s installment on top cinematic performances. The site’s writers certainly did the right thing by including Samantha Morton’s star turn in Morvern Callar, one of our favorite movies of all time. The ending sequence, shown above, never ceases to create a […]
Tags:Lynne Ramsay·Morvern Callar·movies·music·Samantha Morton
Upon being presented with the map above, the first question that pops to most minds is, “Why is the incarceration rate in the United States so absurdly high?” But given our proclivity for the esoteric, we now find ourselves wondering, “Why is the incarceration rate in Indonesia so darn low?” There is certainly no single, […]
Tags:crime·Indonesia·law·prisons·witchcraft
We shudder to think how PETA might react if the organization had access to Lahore’s bustling camel market, which buzzed with more activity than usual in the runup to Eid al-Adha: The camel traders who brought camels from different cities of southern Punjab and Sindh were sold like hotcakes on Friday evening. The traders too […]
