I toyed with the idea of doing a couple of “Best of…” lists in these waning days of MMX, much as I did last year. But in the course of trying to pull together some worthy candidates from the realms of filmdom, books, and booze, I got to thinking about the criteria I was employing—at […]
Tags:Big Fan·books·Burkhard Bilger·Canada·movies·music·Propagandhi·punk·Sandor Katz·The New Yorker·Winter's Bone
On Christmas Night, the ingestion of too much fine red wine led the Grand Empress and I to spend a pleasant few minutes researching Thrinaxodon, one of the many Therapsids to be found in mankind’s evolutionary tree. We were intrigued to find great disagreement on what this critter looked like; due to a paucity of […]
Can’t believe I’m about to do this, but actually gonna take a few days off starting right now. Big plans for the holiday weekend: ice skating, Staten Island, and Ayinger Celebrator (not necessarily in that order). I leave you with a comically inappropriate snippet from Yogi’s First Christmas, arguably the greatest ursine-themed holiday movie of […]
In the midst of researching an upcoming post on the cigarette economy in prisons, I came across this image of juvenile prisoners in Russia. I was struck by the extreme youth of these convicts, and thus motivated to look a bit more deeply into how Russia handles criminals who’ve yet to become adults. As I […]
Taking a day to wrap up pending projects, so that I can unplug for 96 hours starting on Christmas Eve. Stevie Wonder will see you through; a great remix of this tune leads the latest installment of Microkhan fave Fresh Produce.
Tags:music·Stevie Wonder
The hooded lady above was not a bandit, but rather a New York City detective who worked the 21 Jump Street beat in the early 1970s. Kathleen Conlon earned her gold shield after surviving a scary incident in the Bronx: While working on an undercover narcotics unit, she was dragged into an alley, assaulted, and […]
Tags:Congress·crime·drugs·Joseph Valachi·Kathleen Conlon·Mark McGwire·New York City·police·politics·War on Drugs
I’ve previously written about the odious racism of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, where various peoples from around the world were displayed like zoo animals. For the most part, these folks were asked to inhabit ersatz villages, so that their clothes and customs could be gawked at by paying customers. But some of […]
Absolutely nothing left in the tank today—not even enough mental bandwidth to squeeze out a Bad Movie Friday. Spent the bulk of yesterday recording the audio version of my upcoming Jazz Age yarn, an experience that has given me new respect for voice actors. You try saying “Critics and compatriots rarely stinted on superlatives” without […]
Tags:Group Doueh·music
The fundamental premise of the American economic system is that competition is healthy. By extension, we generally assume that the greatest men and women are those in whom the competitive spirit burns brightest—individuals with “fire in the belly.” These are the people who take play as seriously as work, and thus descend into deep depressions […]
Mere hours away from this killer Wired deadline that’s been vexing me since last week, so please endure one last day of meh-ish posting. There’s only so much mental bandwidth to spare, alas, and most of what I’ve got is currently dedicated to figuring out a way to end this piece. (I’m playing with several […]
Still cranking on this Wired deadline, so I can only offer you a pittance this morning. But what a pittance—a tribute to the Morris Day, a few hours too late to celebrate his 53rd birthday. Aside from absolutely owning Purple Rain, Day is responsible for one of the greatest on-stage gimmicks ever: Checking his reflection […]
Tags:Bez·Jerome Benton·Morris Day·music
Somewhat lighter-than-usual posting these next three days, as I hack through yet another killer Wired deadline—the last major work task of an exhausting 2010. I was tempted to just toss up a few YouTubes between now and Thursday morning, but that wouldn’t be very sporting. So I will instead offer some quick hits about topics […]
Tags:China·religion·satellites·space·Tonga
I distinctly remember the first time I was surprised by a geographical truth that ordinary maps conceal. I was about ten years old, and thought of myself as pretty sharp when it comes to map-related matters. Seeking to impress my pops with my knowledge, I mentioned at the dinner table one night that Maine was […]
Not to tease too much, but I’m getting really excited ’bout this secret project I’m wrapping up. Details to come shortly, I promise—all should be public right after the New Year, if not a little sooner. In the meantime, though, I can only hint at the nature of the yarn: It involves a son of […]
Tags:Belgium·coal·energy·mining·Misère au Borinage·Wallonia·West Virginia
Putting the finishing touches on a long-gestating major project this a.m., so just a quickie before I get back to ironing out some word-choice matters. The graph above comes from the much buzzed-about paper estimating that per-capita GDP in late Medieval England was around $1,000 in 1990 dollars—an estimate that, if accurate, would mean that […]
Tags:agriculture·animals·England·horses·Medieval history·oxen
Whenever my work involves looking at rolls of decades-old microfilm, I inevitably stumble across a handful of tremendous yarns that have been lost to time. Such was the case this past Saturday, as I whiled away the hours scrolling through old copies of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Lazily panning across the pages in search of […]
Tags:crime·Florida·Jacksoville·Lonnie Cross·murder·prisons·religion
Microkhan has a bunch of A-plus material lined up for the coming weeks, including looks at gossip in Borneo, Korean marathoners, chess hustling, and Orissan labor songs. But today’s a wash due to a Wired deadline, so please ease into your Monday with a humble musical offering: New Birth‘s “You Don’t Have to Be Alone.” […]
There was a time not long ago when slapstick comedies like Hamburger…The Motion Picture seemingly occupied half the multiplexes in America. The cinematic formula, arguably pioneered by the much-maligned Police Academy heptalogy, was devilishly simple: Throw a bunch of wacky, hormonally charged characters into close quarters and let physical mayhem ensue. I was squarely in […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·fast food·Flying Lotus·Hamburger...The Motion Picture·Leigh McCloskey·movies
Perhaps I am bucking for a karmic penalty here, but let me take a brief moment to speak slightly ill of the dead. Neutron-bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen, who passed away four days ago, was always a controversial figure, and not just because of his role in the atomic-weapons industry. As previously highlighted on Microkhan, […]
Tags:aging·conspiracy theories·neutron bomb·Pierre Salinger·red mercury·Sam Cohen·weapons
Putting the finishing touches on a soon-to-be-revealed major project this morning, so just a quick slice of sonic grandeur to get your day started. Laugh if you must at this band’s name, but rest assured that many of the finest minds in hip-hop history can see beyond the cheesy psychedelic moniker. The Electric Prunes’ “General […]
Tags:Black Moon·David Axelrod·hip-hop·Madlib·music·The Beatnuts·The Electric Prunes
Try as I might to keep apprised of the political situation in the Solomon Islands, I regrettably lose track of the thread from time to time. Thanks, then, to the commenter who recently showed up to offer his two cents regarding Jimmy “Rasta” Lusibaea, the former ethnic militia leader who had become the Solomon Islands’ […]
Tags:corruption·Danny Philip·Jimmy Lusibaea·politics·Solomon Islands·Steve Abana
The human rays of sunshine above are academics devoted to the study of juche, the nonsensical North Korean ideology that stresses self-reliance above all else. You would think that men and women in possession of advanced degrees would recognize the flaws in an economic theory that denies the basic sociability of our species—or, at the […]
Tags:dictatorship·economics·education·juche·Mongolia·North Korea·pseudoscience
I’ve long refused to travel during the holidays, a stance that makes even more sense in this era of rampant junk touching. I might change my mind, however, if modern air travel bore any faint resemblance to what’s on offer in the Khrushchev-era Aeroflot commercial above. Dancing flight attendants in futuristic pink mini-skirts and white […]
While I enjoy a good sci-fi concept album as much as the next khan, few bands are adept at creating mythologies that measure up to their music. Ziggy Stardust’s backstory has always struck me as prosaic, for example, while the “Red Star of the Solar Federation” from Rush’s 2112 is only a tad less schlocky […]
I spent much of the weekend zipping through The Reluctant Communist, former Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins‘ memoir of the 39 years he spent living in North Korea after walking across the demilitarized zone in 1965. It’s a harrowing read, primarily because it reveals the North Korean establishment to be even more deluded than I’d […]
Tags:books·Charles Robert Jenkins·dictatorship·education·Hitomi Soga·Kim Jong-il·North Korea·The Reluctant Communist
(Cross-posted to/from PLoS Blogs) All the recent chatter over the dangers of professional football compelled me to look up one of my favorite snippets of Greek mythology: the tale of Achilles’ choice, from Book Nine of the Iliad. For those who have only foggy memories of high-school English, the story goes like this: the gods […]
Tags:Achilles·evolution·football·genetics·Leo Tolstoy·mythology·philosophy·sheep·Trojan War
There’s a scene in My Best Fiend in which Werner Herzog reveals what made him believe that Klaus Kinski possessed rare talent. It was a brief moment in a film whose title now escapes me, about a German soldier who is executed for deserting the army to be with his girlfriend. (A Time to Love […]
Tags:Coskun Aral·Klaus Kinski·Lebanon·movies·photography·Werner Herzog
Even by the most conservative estimates, Tonga is the most intensely Mormon nation on Earth. The official estimate is that roughly 15 percent of Tonga’s population belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but Mormons adherent place the figure much higher—typically around 32 percent, and sometimes even higher. This is par for […]
Too sick to offer anything halfway intelligible this morning—to cop a line from Killing Zoe, I feel as if the rest of the world is in a bubble of glass and that I’m rubbing up against it like a bad windshield wiper. As I recuperate, please enjoy the classic Jamaican rocksteady cut above, later made […]
Tags:Jamaica·music·reggae·Sugar Minott
You probably already knew that times were rough in Camden, New Jersey, but this photo essay really drives home the sad reality. In a part of the nation chock full of towns that have seen much better days, the former home of RCA Victor has become the poster child for all that can go wrong […]
