Try as it might, the Sri Lankan government can’t quite convince everyone that its soldiers did, indeed, gun down Velupillai Prabhakaran. So a DNA test may be necessary to quell the few remaining naysayers. But how might such a test work, especially considering that Tiger 001‘s wife and daughters are nowhere to be found? Several […]
We hope the vast majority of our American readers are enjoying the Memorial Day holiday outdoors, and thus won’t be reading these words ’til much later. Microkhan, alas, won’t be barbecuing with y’all—this is just another work day ’round here, as the screenplay deadline looms. We’re gonna devote the bulk of today’s energies to that […]
Tags:Hawaii·Herman Perry·India·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·Washington Post·World War II
The holiday weekend’s just hours away, and we’re mighty spent from a long week of writing and tending to Microkhan Jr. So we’re gonna outsource this week’s Bad Movie Friday to the late Richard Jeni. His target? The egregiously awful Jaws: The Revenge (aka Jaws IV). As Jeni rightfully points out in his routine, there […]
Tags:aviation·Bad Movie Friday·Jaws IV·movies·Richard Jeni·sharks
One of the greatest research challenges we faced while writing Now the Hell Will Start was the paucity of primary source material describing day-to-day life for African-American GIs. Enlisted men were discouraged from keeping diaries, literacy rates were low, and post-war archivists too often ignored black contributions to the Great Cause—an unholy trifecta for historians […]
Tags:Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·World War II
With our compadre Ta-Nehisi thinking deep thoughts and WEFUNK providing our daily soundtrack, hip-hop’s been on Microkhan’s brain all week—yes, even more so than usual. And the question we’ve been asking ourselves is what, exactly, separates the wheat from the chaff in the land of lyricism? Is it pure mastery of metaphor? Yeats-like poetic timing? […]
Delaware’s future as the new Vega$ East may well hinge on the microstate’s supreme court. A “sports lottery” law was recently passed, but the specifics of how it’ll work are still unclear. Yesterday, the Home of Tax-Free Shopping’s most learned judges heard arguments from two parties: Those in favor of single-game betting, and those who […]
For the second installment of our nascent First Contact series, we’re gonna hit the layup and blog about this classic culture-clash documentary. A prized Microkhan correspondent and former New Guinea resident summarizes the film with far more acumen than we could ever manage: Basic story is that the initial European settlements in Papua (south side […]
Tags:anthropology·Australia·First Contact·Mick Leahy·mining·movies·New Guinea
An American scholar digs into the sort of debauched Mongolian feast that, alas, we’ve only had in our wildest dreams: Sheep fat! Stuffed beef intestine! Goat’s head! Petrified curds, harder than jawbreakers! And, of course, buuz. I ate them all, these foods that not so long ago had my fork shaking. Two bottles of vodka […]
Okay, we’ve got a spare second while Microkhan Jr. roams about the Sandman’s domain, so it’s time to dash off today’s installment of NtHWS Extras. Our focus today is on the cartoon art of World War II—not the stuff from the homefront op-ed pages, but rather the quasi-humorous strips meant to bolster troop morale. The […]
Tags:Bill Mauldin·cartoons·Cpl. Gee Eye·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·World War II
Apologies for the slow start today. As previously mentioned, Microkhan is solely in charge of Microkhan Jr. this week, due to the missus being off in Los Angeles hawking her fine, fine lingerie. Factor in the screenplay and our primary paying gig, and you’ve got a recipe for utter chaos and exhaustion. As a small […]
The Sri Lankan government is sadly adept at squelching journalism, which makes the crowdsourced Groundviews a truly precious gem. Proudly calling itself “Sri Lanka’s first and only citizens journalism website,” Groundviews provides a rare English-language peek at the mood on Colombo’s streets. The site has been in peak form as the nation’s civil war has […]
We’re gone for the day’s remainder, crashing on a Wired deadline. So we’ll leave you with the clip above from Werner Herzog’s classic Aguirre, The Wrath of God, which recently re-blew our collective mind. The final shot, in which the camera circles around the megalomaniacal conquistador’s monkey-infested raft? Beyond brilliant. Read about the real Lope […]
Tags:Aguirre the Wrath of God·conquistadors·Klaus Kinski·Werner Herzog
Today’s NtHWS Extras installment will have some modern flavor, as we look at one of the planet’s most obscure—and potentially most lethal—territorial disputes: The Sino-Indian tussle over Arunachal Pradesh, where a fair chunk of Now the Hell Will Start is set. The enormous Arunachal is arguably India’s most remote province, populated largely by tribal groups […]
Tags:Arunachal Pradesh·China·India·lithium·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month·Tibet
Wall Street certainly didn’t have a monopoly on moral decay during the run-up to Depression v2.0. There was also some jiggery-pokery going down in the Heartland, albeit of the modest seven-figure variety: A man convicted in what prosecutors said was North Dakota’s largest farm fraud case has lost another appeal of the government’s attempt to […]
“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 […]
