Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

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“We Got Robots, We Got Cavemen, We Got Kung Fu…”

October 8th, 2010


In order to round out a gestating Wired essay, I spent a good chunk of this past week drumming up examples of celluloid robots. One invaluable resource that I relied upon was this excellent Wikipedia entry, which mentions a number of B-movie ‘bots that vanished from my memory banks. Perhaps the most laughably cheesy of those humanoid machines is Mandroid, the star of this week’s Bad Movie Friday honoree: 1986’s Eliminators.

The trailer above really speaks for itself, and comes highly recommended. (Also worth two minutes of your time: this motorcycle battle scene, which culminates with a clever manipulation of laser physics, followed by a fat dude’s promise of revenge.) But if you’re in an office where video is verboten, just check out this fine review. My favorite snippet:

Somehow, with an entire globe to search, Mandroid finds Col. Hunter, only to discover that it is Denise Crosby. Hunter is a robotics whiz, and recognizes most of Mandroid’s outfitting as derived from her work. She has also created an odious little sub-Black Hole droid that bleeps like R2-D2, flies around, and can turn into a cartoon that zips about at a Speedy Gonzales clip. Hunter patches up the Mandroid, and they set out for Mexico.

Once there, they must find a guide, as the Mandroid’s memory chips were shot up. Hunter does this by striding into a bar and saying, “I want the toughest guide in the place,” which sets off a monumental bar fight. The actual winner of the fight is a diesel dyke named Bayou Betty, but she is coldcocked (so to speak) by wily lovable rogue Harry Fontana (Andrew Prine, in a role which cries out for Tim Thomerson). In the trip down the river, they must not only deal with the vengeful Bayou Betty, but the Overweight Head Thug and his Raul Julia Clone.

Additional Eliminators fun fact: the Mandroid was played by tobacco heir Patrick Reynolds, who has since turned against the sot-weed in dramatic fashion.

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Promises, Promises

October 7th, 2010


The federal government is becoming increasingly zealous about deporting convicted criminals who’ve completed their sentences. That official enthusiasm has led to some interesting legal conundrums, such as this case of an oil worker down in Texas:

A descendant of the Lipan Apache tribe who was convicted this summer of re-entering the United States after being deported was sentenced Wednesday to 14 months in federal prison.

Erick Ricardo Bonilla, 32, an oilfield worker who had lived in Odessa for six years before his arrest, will likely be deported after he is released, defense attorney Justin E. Weatherly said.

Bonilla’s mother had a green card, but Bonilla was born in Juárez, Mexico, “by accident,” Weatherly said. At trial, Weatherly argued that even though the federal government does not recognize the Lipan Apache, Bonilla should be allowed to live in the United States under the promise of “perpetual friendship” outlined in an arcane treaty between the Lipan people and the Republic of Texas.

The treaty in question, signed in January 1838, can be read here. The defense attorney’s argument is obviously novel, and one must have some sympathy for Bonilla give the federal government’s extremely poor track record of fulfilling its treaty obligations with Indian tribes. However, the real legal question is whether the federal government was bound to honor treaties made by the Republic of Texas after the unusual Ordinance of Annexation in 1845. I’m guessing that annexation voided all of the defunct Republic’s diplomatic efforts, which means that Bonilla’s lawyer can only get an A for effort.

But would the case be different if the Lipan Apache were federally recognized? The tribe has been vying for such recognition for an awful long time, but it’s a tough row to hoe:

Historically, tribes have been granted recognition through treaties, by the Congress, or through administrative decisions within the executive branch. In 1978, the Bureau of Indian Affairs established a regulatory process for recognizing tribes. The current process for federal recognition, found in 25 C.F.R. 83, is a rigorous process requiring the petitioning tribe to satisfy seven mandatory criteria, including historical and continuous American Indian identity in a distinct community. Each of the criteria demands exceptional anthropological, historical, and genealogical research and presentation of evidence. The vast majority of petitioners do not meet these strict standards, and far more petitions have been denied than accepted. In fact, only about 8 percent of the total number of recognized tribes have been individually recognized since 1960.

One potential stumbling block for the Lipan Apache: Due to warfare with the U.S. Army, the ranks of the Lipan Apache were reduced to less than 20 members by 1885, and they were all prisoners of war. Proving lineage from such a small ancestral group will be tough.

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The Jueteng Economy

October 6th, 2010

Filipinos can certaily be forgiven for having mixed feelings about jueteng, their nation’s equivalent of the ol’ numbers racket that used to flourish on these shores. After all, jueteng helped bring down the government of former President Joseph Estrada, who was later convicted of having close ties with the underworld characters who operate the lotteries. And so when officials periodically announce fresh crusades against jueteng, as happened just weeks ago, there are always millions of Filipinos who support the endeavor—especially those with strong allegiances to the Church, which has a long track record of opposing gambling in all its forms.

Perhaps there is a way to stamp out jueteng for good, but the current strategies seem doomed to fail. The main new tactic calls for state-sanctioned lotteries that offer slightly larger payouts than their illegal counterparts. But a Filipino business journalist argues that a different approach is needed—one that educates the wagering masses on the basics of odds:

An illegal, unregulated, and unsupervised operation allows the operator to rig the results and control how much he takes in and how much he pays out. The illegal operator can, for example, arrange a manipulated result that will allow him to pay out to the winning numbers only 30% of the total amount bet. That means 70% stays with the operator. Even with bribes paid out for “protection” up and down the line, that makes for a lot of profit. One should also not overlook the fact that the taxes and license fees that will have to be borne by a legal jueteng operator may even exceed the payola of an illegal one.

A truly serious attempt to eradicate illegal jueteng requires the serious use of textbook market forces: The market demand for legal jueteng must be boosted and the market demand for illegal jueteng must be dampened. Essentially, this means making bettors voluntarily choose to place their bets with a legal (licensed) jueteng operator rather than with an illegal one. Making this happen and thus increasing the demand for legal jueteng entails a consumer-type marketing and advertising approach that makes the betting public acutely aware of the advantages of patronizing a legal operation. This would involve an information and education campaign that will tell of how the illegal game is rigged, how a rigged game cheats the bettor, and how the bettor can have higher expected profits from a fair, unrigged, and supervised numbers game.

A noble plan, but there’s one big problem: the Filipino public has little faith in their government’s honesty, and thus the ability of regulators to ensure that legal lotteries adhere to their posted odds. Jueteng will thrive as long as gamblers trust their cousin on the corner more than a suit-wearing bureaucrat from Manila.

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A Queen’s Edge

October 5th, 2010


Scrambling to prep for a key interview and finish a Wired essay, so just a quickie this morning. The clip above features the coolest drummer ever to brush a cymbal; the snippet below reveals how a young woman named Courtney Larkin was able to triumph in this year’s Miss National Peanut pageant:

On Monday, Larkin was still relishing the National Peanut Festival victory and the fact that she was able to finish in the top five in the pageant subcategories of verbal skills, evening gown and peanut knowledge.

She said her best friend’s father is a peanut farmer, and that connection helped her learn ahead of time some of the things she needed to know for the peanut knowledge competition. That inside track gave her extra confidence as she studied the peanut facts she and the other contestants were given to prior to the quiz.

It is a travesty, of course, that the peanut knowledge questions are not online.

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“War Has Been a Very Efficient Schoolmaster”

October 4th, 2010


One of Microkhan’s top Alaskan correspondents recently alerted me to the existence of Project Facade, one of the eeriest and coolest art projects to be found on The Tubes. The endeavor is tough to describe in a pithy sentence or two, so please bear with me as I try: Project Facade is one artist’s attempt to create visual interpretations of the plastic surgery techniques pioneered by Sir Harold Gillies during World War I. Many of the resulting items are phantasmagoric uniforms that are decorated with before and after pictures of soldiers who underwent Gillies’ knife, as well as stitched surgical notes taken from Gillies’ files.

The project got me thinking about one of the few upsides of war: the development of advanced medical technology and techniques, which always outlast the quarrels that cause violent conflict. That was especially true during World War I, as detailed in this engrossing read from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. There are tons of great nuggets strewn throughout, such as the fact that the mortality rate from femur fractures was an astounding 80 percent before doctors figured out how to minimize the occurrence of sepsis. But anyone who’s kept track of the current battle over vaccinations must take special note of the following anecdote:

As late as the last decade of the 19th century typhoid was still causing 5000 deaths annually, and in the Crimean War it had caused greater mortality than the war itself. Colonel Sir Almroth Wright began trials using vaccines made from killed typhoid bacilli on himself and the military surgeons at the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley…Wholesale inoculation of British troops was attempted in the South African War but due to bitter opposition from influential persons less than 4% of the soldiers received the vaccine. As a result of this blunder the Army had some 58 000 cases of typhoid and about 9000 deaths.

During the whole of the Great War there were 7423 British cases, with 266 deaths, in an average strength of 1 200 000…In January 1916 records showed a British death rate from typhoid 31 times higher among the unprotected. In June 1916 the ratio had increased to 50 to one, a fact brought home to the public by a popular medical journalist of the time. Goodwin made the point in 1919 that inoculation was still voluntary in the British Army and that in 1914 the efforts made to persuade the men to have it were met by “the production of the page of a certain daily journal which strongly advised against inoculation.” He goes on to state: “I think it says something for the persuasive powers of our eloquence and for the intelligence of the British soldier that we were able to overcome this most pernicious advice, and that 98% of our Army were inoculated against the disease.”

I’m curious if anyone knows of other major medical advances that were developed during wartime, in order to keep as many soldiers on the battlefield as possible. (Or, at the very least, to keep those soldiers confident that relatively minor wounds wouldn’t permanently disable them.) One that immediately pops to mind, which I touched on briefly in , is how doctors at the 20th General Hospital in Ledo, India, conducted pioneering heart-bypass experimentation on stray dogs during their rare free moments.

Oh, and the image at the top of this post? It’s a German train-car disinfection machine. Much more effective than a generous hand washing, apparently.

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After Vega$

October 1st, 2010

Scrambling to catch up with a pile of work after a rough trip back from Nevada—funny how an overly large and inconsiderate seatmate can really ruin an otherwise uneventful flight. So no polymathism today; in its stead, please check out The A.V. Club‘s recent take on Death Wish 3, the subject of last week’s Bad Movie Friday entrant. This line pretty much sums it all up:

Everything abhorrent about Death Wish—its inner-city stereotyping and casual racism; its embrace of lawlessness and righteous bloodletting; Paul’s rancid transformation from naïve, bleeding-heart liberal into gun-toting angel of vengeance—gets blown up to such a grotesque degree that no sane person could mistake its world for the real one. It’s like a paranoid right-wing small-towner’s vision of what the big city is like: a gang-infested war zone, lorded over by the cast of Breakin’.

The piece also note that the author of the Death Wish source material rejected the films, on the grounds that they celebrate the sort of vigilantism he was trying to condemn. Check out an interview with him here; he points out that the entire spirit of the first film was altered by a single directorial choice.

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Emerging from the Desert

September 30th, 2010


I made it through my Vega$ trip without having to set foot inside a Pawn America storefront, so I consider the trip a success. Voyaging back to Microkhan world headquarters today, so please enjoy the vintage Atari ad above as I hurtle through the air at upwards of 500 miles-per-hour. Catch you tomorrow.

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Roboscrews

September 29th, 2010

One of my current projects is a think piece about robots, specifically those that may soon be charged with carrying out morally weighty duties. That line of inquiry has led me to delve into the history of robot prison guards—or, perhaps more accurately, robots that were briefly purported to be the prison guards of the future. Such plans have obviously never come to fruition, but the Denning Sentry apparently came close to making the penitentiary rounds back in 1985, when this admiring piece appeared in Popular Science:

Southern Steel Co. of San Antonio, Texas, the country’s largest maker of prison bars, beds, and other detention-facility hardware, has ordered 600 copies of Denny; eight of these, destined for prison duty, are now undergoing advanced testing. Denning is also building robot sentries with slightly different capabilities for another private security firm, and still others to patrol factories.

A Denning Sentry can detect, within a 150-foot radius, the presence of anything or anybody that shouldn’t be there, the company claims. Its swiveling head contains microwave and infrared (IR) sensors that can detect people as well as smoke. In future editions the head will also contain sniffers that can smell the faint ammonia aroma of a human body.

Needless to say, the Denning Sentry never fulfilled its promise: its maker, Denning Mobile Robotics, went bankrupt in 1993, though it experienced a brief revival shortly thereafter thanks to Australian robotics guru Allan Branch. The problem does not seem to have been handwringing over the moral issues raised by putting robots in charge of human, but rather because the Sentries cost way too much—about $110,000 in Reagan-era money, not including maintenance. An entry-level human guard, by contrast, runs just $22,010 in today’s dollars.

There doesn’t seem to have been much consideration given to the potential for robot prison guards since the Denning Sentry’s flameout. But I have to think it’s a natural next application for the technology once SUGVs evolve a bit more. Let’s hope folks stop to ponder the moral dimension to that usage—I have to wonder if human guards will be more willing to employ violent measures if they’re operating a robot from a remote location, rather than actually walking the prison floors.

(Image via SPAWAR)

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The Magnificient

September 28th, 2010


Given my longstanding fascination with North-East India, one of the primary settings for my 386-page labor o’ love, I’ve been following Mary Kom’s boxing career for a good while now. The 27-year-old mother of twins just won her fifth world championship, a feat that earned her a true hero’s welcome in her native state of Manipur—a welcome that included a fat one million rupee reward, courtesy of the Manipuri government. The BBC recounts how Kom, nicknamed “Magnificient Mary,” first came to don the gloves:

“When I was small, I was very interested in fighting – karate, kung fu and boxing. I used to always watch action movies, all the Jackie Chan movies,” [Kom] says breaking into peals of laughter.

She grew up in the Manipur countryside amidst lush green paddy fields with mountains swelling in the distance. Her parents still work in the fields, as she once did.

It was a tough upbringing in a state hit by a violent insurgency. Even our presence brought soldiers out from the neighbouring army base…

“She never told us she’d taken up boxing,” her father Tonpa tells me.

“We only found out when we read in the papers of her success in a local competition. In fact, I didn’t really want to encourage her to become a sportsperson because I thought it would cost a lot of money, more than we could afford.”

One striking thing about Kom’s celebrity is that she has been embraced by the BJP, India’s fundamentalist Hindu party. This despite the fact that Kom, like many Manipuri’s, is a devout Christian who credits Jesus for all of her pugilistic success. A little big-tent pushback against the cow-protection machinations of the rival Congress party, perhaps?

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Sweatin’ to the Goldies

September 27th, 2010

I’m Vegas bound this morning, to work on a dynamite Wired piece that’s currently occupying my creative front burner. As is always the case when I journey out to Bugsy Siegel’s desert dream, my thoughts have recently turned to the ways in which folks work the angles in pursuit of wealth. Most of these schemes involve the manipulation of human beings, and thus require their perpetrators to have an innate understanding of psychology. But there are also some great scams that are more suited to crooks versed in the physical sciences. My favorite bygone example dates back to the days when American coins were actually composed of precious metals, a fact that made them ripe targets for so-called gold sweaters—that is, criminals who specialized in shaving off minute traces of gold from coins, thereby slowly accumulating fortunes at the expense of the unsuspecting public. A 1910 New York Times report broke down some of the sweaters’ primary techniques:

One of the most insidious methods of “sweating,” and perhaps the most difficult of all to detect, is the electroplating method. The gold coins are placed in a chemical bath and part of the gold is detached by electricity and deposited on some other object. In this way the gold is removed with perfect evenness from all part of the coin. The letters and general design or the milling may be slightly dulled in the process, but only as it might be from general wear and tear. The lightness of the coin will be detected by the scales at the Treasury, but in the meantime such a coin may pass from hand to hand for a long time without arousing suspicion.

Another baffling method is to split the coin and remove the gold from the inner surface. The hole is then filled up with some baser metal, so that the weight will be the same, and the two sides are then welded together. It is possible to take one dollar’s worth of gold or more in this way from a $20 gold piece. If the work be skillfully done it is impossible to detect such a coin by its weight, and the only clue will be some flaw in its milling.

With the economy still in a major funk and gold prices near $1,300 an ounce, I wonder if this is a scam that’s ripe for a comeback. La Cosa Nostra might want to look into hiring some out-of-work chemists to sweat away gold from the new $1 coins. Though I would, of course, like to know the math on the break-even point for such a scheme. The fact that I can’t calculate that number in my head is precisely why I’ll be avoiding the blackjack tables this week.

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This is What Underrated Looks Like

September 24th, 2010


While drinking my birthday bottle of Lucky 13 the other night, the Chubb Rock classic above suddenly came over loud-and-clear on the latest WeFunk show. It reminded me how this heavyset artist rarely disappoints, especially when cuts from his golden age waft across the sonic transom. But perhaps what’s most impressive about Rock is his dedication to making music a lifelong pursuit, rather than a youthful cash-in:

To me, the whole thing is being creative. There are many writers out there who are not really that familiar with hip hop who can come up with a fly chorus, can come up with lyrics that can pass, and they can even sell a million records. But I’m thinking that, in music, you wanna be like Paul McCartney. You know? That’s what I’m into. I saw his birthday on TV, thirty-something years of doing music. You ain’t gonna do thirty-something years of music on gimmicks.

Granted, McCartney has his $1.07 billion fortune to get him through the stretches of creative fallowness. And the good folks in GWAR might offer a sharp counterpoint to Rock’s claims regarding the limited power of gimmickry.

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Just Rats in a Maze Market

September 23rd, 2010


Think about the place where you regularly buy your groceries. After you pass through the sliding-glass door, how do you make your way around the premises? Perhaps you believe you take this path due to habit or preference, but odds are you’re nudged in one direction or another by the store’s physical layout. Some supermarket’s make it so that you naturally circle the place in clockwise fashion; others opt for a design that encourages, if not requires, anti-clockwise navigation. Which approach is likelier to produce a happier shopping experience?

This is a topic of ridiculously fierce debate in the industry, and one that may soon be settled by our ever-deeper understanding of the way in which neurotransmitters affect human behavior in subtle ways. A pair of German researchers use just such expertise to make a pro-clockwise argument here:

Most shops guide customers through the store in an anticlockwise direction. This is generally justified by the fact that costumers are for the most part right-handed. However, neurophysiological research suggests a different explanation for this turning preference–-the hormone dopamine, which is responsible for locomotion in space. The higher the dopamine concentration on the left side of the brain, the more consumers’ attention (and consequently their locomotion) is focused on the right side. In a clockwise-orientated shop, customers will therefore frequently glance at the shop’s interior. It has further been suggested that shoppers also have a general orientation towards the walls because of security reasons of the shops as this makes them feel secure; this leads them to notice products on the left-hand side of aisles. Taken together, these two tendencies enable customers to remember more products in a shop with a clockwise layout, which in turn gives them a more positive attitude toward the shop. By contrast, in a store with an anti-clockwise layout, both tendencies concentrate on the right-hand side.

If this take holds water, does that mean the Brits have been right about driving on the left all these years?

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Dress Your Gang in Acrylic and Wool

September 22nd, 2010

My dad once had this chocolate-brown cardigan he’d wear on the rare occasions that the Los Angeles mercury dipped below 65 degrees. It had big knobby buttons and a thick rolled collar, and it generally made him look like the friendly postmaster of some microscopic English village. As a result, I have long associated button-up sweaters with a certain kind of geniality.

But had I brought that attitude to the streets of Chicago during the 1960s or ’70s, I might have paid a terrible price. That’s because the gangs of that era made their allegiances known through the donning of tricked-out cardigans. One of the wire services got into a lather over the practice back in ’75:

On a given day in major cities, gang members can be seen mingling on a street corner, a front lawn or in a school yard, “stylin'” their embroidered $50 sweaters or just “representin'” their gang…

Most of the larger gangs boast a sophisticted organization which stretches down to the 9 and 10-year-old peewees, up to the midgets, juniors and full-fledged members.

“The peewees don’t get to vote at the meeting, but they play the game,” Ross explained. “They carry the guns, the dope. The older members are making money off these kids, selling ’em guns, sweaters, drugs and spray cans of paint.

A student of Almighty Gaylords history offers an ungrammatical primer here:

The first sweater that were worn with 2 colors would have to be from a white club, as there were more white clubs then Latino clubs back in the day, most clubs back in the 60’s mimicked high school mascots and colors, case in point Spartans, Viking, Panthers, Counts.. High school sweaters all had 3 strips, hence one of the oldest white clubs Gaylord’s I would have to say made there sweaters like that. I don’t really know where the colors Blue and black came from, but I also know that the Latin Kings from the 60’s were the first to have Chops on there sweaters. The late 60’s witnessed an explosion of Gangs and sweaters. If you have a sweater with this tag on it more then likely it’s from the late 60’s really 70’s. There were only a few knitting mills that made sweaters back in the day: New Era, Southside knitting mills, Logan Knitting Mills, Collegiate, Ma & Pa Book store and of course Chicago Knitting Mills.

The gangs’ insistence on donning such garments may seem quaint in retrospect, but make no mistake—blood was shed over those sweaters.

In 1981, the Chicago police started arresting anyone they could find who was wearing a gang sweater. The ACLU filed suit to stop the practice, but the damage was done—gang members figured out that going relatively incognito was the much smarter course of action. As a result, the bygone gang sweaters are now collector’s items—a patch alone fetches big money on eBay. Though some youngsters are lucky enough to inherit them from Dad.

More vintage gang sweaters here and here. And you gotta love how the Imperial Gangsters weren’t afraid to show their feminine side.

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Think Think Think

September 21st, 2010


In a pensive mood today, as I mark another revolution ’round the Sun while simultaneously grappling with some tough decisions. At times like these, I often ask myself, “What would Genghis do?” But then I watch the clip above, which quotes the Great Khan pretty much verbatim, and I’m reminded that I can find little intellectual solace in that coping strategy.

So what is really best in life, and how to achieve it? Gimme 24 hours to think on that one, and I’ll loop back to y’all in the morning—not with an answer, but rather with another polymathic post about criminal couture. Thanks, as always, for your forbearance.

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Eternal Students at Bovine University

September 20th, 2010

According to the criteria laid out by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his celebrated Four Freedoms speech, life is a mixed bag for millions of Indian cows. On the plus side, they are not confined to grim facilities that exist solely to turn their bovine inmates into hangar steaks. But though free-roaming Indian cows are spared the fear of the slaughterhouse, they rarely live in the lap of luxury—food and medical care are in short supply, and those weakened by these deprivations may be spirited off to tanneries by humans who value survival over religious obligation.

Politicians are now making a show of demonstrating their sensitivity to the cows’ plight, especially in the state of Punjab:

The Punjab government has announced the setting up of a cow protection cell in the office of the director general of police (DGP).

An official at the Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal’s office said Sunday that the Punjab government had ordered to establish a cow protection cell in the DGP office.

The cell will be manned by an officer not below the rank of inspector general (IG) in Punjab police.

The article does not explain precisely why Punjab’s cows require police protection. Nor does it mention just how many cows can expect to be housed at the central police station—I’m guessing that only a lucky handful will enjoy the department’s hospitality.

What is clear, however, is that the decision in Punjab reflects a nationwide trend—a revival, of sorts, of the cow protection movement that was integral to India’s early calls for independence. A cow commission dedicated to bovine welfare is now active in Haryana, while the Karnataka government is getting serious about ending the slaughter of all cattle.

Does this trend signal growing strength for the BJP, the political party most closely identified with Hindu fundmentalism? Or is this a case of parties like Congress co-opting a broadly popular BJP issue in order to slice off some voters who are up for grabs?

Whatever the case, I can’t wait to post video from inside Punjab’s cow protection cell. Let’s hope they set up a webcam.

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“There’s Only One Law…His!”

September 17th, 2010


Nights on the road can get a little dull when you’re traveling solo for work—you end up spending a lot of time alone in your hotel room, eating bad food and watching bad TV. But occasionally the Fates show you a little mercy, by offering up some unexpected entertainment. Such was the case during my recent Arizona trip, during which I was able to pass a few joyful hours wrapped up in AMC’s “Bronson Week,” a celebration of the greatest Lithuanian-American action star in Hollywood history.

The movie marathon came along at just the right time, given that I’m currently working on a project about Central and Eastern European immigrants who worked in the coal mines during the early part of the 20th century. (Charles Bronson’s dad was just such a miner; the family name is actually Buchinski.) But more important, the series provided me with excellent fodder for this week’s installment of Bad Movie Friday: the ultra-violent slab of cinematic dreck known as Death Wish 3.

This movie suffers from what I like to call “The Warriors Effect.” After Walter Hill’s classic flick, a whole generation of directors tried to create shabby-chic villains who were equal parts killers and fashion plates. But the director of Death Wish 3, whose previous credits had included Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood, didn’t have the chops to mimic Hill’s neat trick. Instead he gave us one of the most laughably artificial gang leaders ever, Manny Fraker, who sports a reverse mohawk guaranteed to strike fear in no one. An IMDb reviewer neatly sums up the movie’s over-the-top nature:

Hoodlums throw grenades through windows, old men are set on fire, ordinary women fire double-barreled shotguns at punks, cops run through the streets shooting at thugs perched on windows and rooftops who fire back using semi-automatics, this is the universe DW3 takes place in. Eighties cheese (complete with eye-of-the-tiger-ish synth score) meets Bosnia Herzegovina. And it’s supposed to take place somewhere in East NYC. You know it is an outrageous all-out-war action extravaganza you’re watching, when Bronson fires an anti-tank, anti-personnel, armor-piercing rocket launcher inside a living room.

Yet Death Wish 3 also makes me a little sad, due to this factoid I dug up from the book Bronson’s Loose:

The movie was called Death Wish 3 instead of Death Wish III because recent marketing surveys had determined that the average moviegoer could not read Roman numerals.

Does that mean I should’ve titled my thousandth Microkhan post something other than “M”?

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The Tug of Tradition

September 16th, 2010


Should you ever wish to rile up a gathering of firefighters, to the point that punches may get thrown, bring up the notion that red is a dreadful color for fire engines. You can maximize your irritation factor by citing the work of one Dr. Stephen Solomon, an optometrist best known for proposing that fluorescent lime green is the best color for emergency vehicles. Such an eye-catching color, Solomon argued, forces even the laziest eye to pay attention, thereby minimizing collisions between ordinary vehicles and fire trucks or ambulances. Red, by contrast, just doesn’t slap around the oculars with enough force, especially late at night.

Solomon’s work helped nudge many fire departments across the nation to opt for lime-green engines during the 1970s and ’80s. But that trend may now be reversing itself, thanks in large part to a 2009 FEMA study that questioned whether visibility was as important as familiarity:

Whatever the specific color, research performed for this report suggests what is more important is the ability for drivers to recognize the vehicle for what it is. The use of a standardized color or paint scheme for certain types of vehicles may be helpful in this regard. An example is the ubiquitous “yellow school bus” prevalent throughout the United States. These vehicles are instantly recognizable and likely promote immediate behavioral responses by surrounding drivers. Similarly, U.S. Postal Service (USPS) or other mail/delivery trucks painted in a standard color may also prompt drivers to behave in certain ways (i.e., expecting multiple stops at any time). Following this principle, it is a common belief that people are more likely to identify red with a fire apparatus than other colors, regardless of the conditions.

In other words, because we all grew up learning that fire engines are red by definition, opting for another color scheme—however visually jarring—may not yield any better results than maintaining the status quo.

This has been music to many firefighters’ ears, as there has been widespread dissatisfaction with the lime-green trucks—not because they don’t work, but rather because many firefighters prefer the traditional red. It’s considered more macho and more elegant, and its backers have gone to great lengths to discredit the efficacy of lime green—some have even suggested (baselessly) that Dr. Solomon had a financial stake in a commercial lime-green pigment.

But is the switch being made too soon? The man behind the Ambulance Visibility Blog (yes, it exists) believes that red proponents have been too quick to interpret the FEMA study as a complete validation of their traditional choice. (Check out his take here.)

I’m struck by the lack of concrete evidence on either side of the debate. One thing that is clear, though: Those who embrace red do so largely for emotional reasons. Their professional identities are intricately linked to their jobs’ trademark color; to change that is to mess with who they are.

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The Full Plate

September 15th, 2010


Apologies, really thought I’d have time to write today. But it’s nearly 8 a.m. here in northern Arizona and I’m several notches less than prepared for a mammoth day of reporting. Thanks, as always, for your forebearance—all will be back to normal by Friday, if not earlier.

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By the Time I Get to Arizona

September 14th, 2010


Heading to the rural Southwest this morning for work, so please absorb this dreamy slice of soul as I zoom through American airspace. Back tomorrow, motel WiFi willing.

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Give Us Your Cheap Labor

September 13th, 2010


There’s a classic scene at the beginning of The Godfather II in which young Vito Andolini passes through Ellis Island’s immigration line. It is there that, due to an immigration officer’s carelessness, he is given the mistaken surname of Corleone, which is actually the village of his birth. Moments later, frightened young Vito is informed that he must spend a long stretch in confinement, due to the fact that he is suffering from tuberculosis. The whole process takes mere seconds, as the officers have no time to waste—there are thousands of others waiting their turn. (The haunting scene that follows can be viewed here.)

That sliver of near-perfect cinema long led me to believe that Ellis Island officials were fairly assiduous about picking out diseased turn-of-the-century immigrants. But the truth was apparently quite the opposite:

The procedure was intimidating, and, indeed, between 1891 and 1930 nearly 80,000 immigrants were barred at the nation’s doors for diseases or defects. Yet the vast majority were allowed to enter the country—on average, fewer than 1 percent were ever turned back for medical reasons. Of those who were denied entry, most were certified, not with “loathsome and dangerous contagious diseases,” but with conditions that limited their capacity to perform unskilled labor. Senility (old age), varicose veins, hernias, poor vision, and deformities of the limbs or spine were among the primary causes for exclusion. That so few of the more than 25 million arriving immigrants inspected by the PHS were excluded sets into bold relief the country’s almost insatiable industrial demand for cheap labor.

There was actually nothing really “medical” about the medical examinations endured by Ellis Island immigrants. The conventional wisdom at the time was that every disease had obvious physical symptoms, which trained doctors could spot in a flash. But while new arrivals at Ellis Island were only given a quick once-over, immigrants coming to the U.S. from the south and west were subjected to much more invasive inspections—solely because of racial prejudice:

Non-Europeans faced more considerable medical obstacles to entry at the nation’s Pacific Coast and Mexican border immigration stations. At Texas border stations, PHS medical inspectors stripped, showered, disinfected, searched for lice, and physically examined large groups of immigrants. All second- and third-class Asians immigrants arriving in San Francisco endured a physical exam similar to that conducted along the Mexican border in addition to routine laboratory testing for parasitic infection, which required detention at Angel Island for one or more days. Disease, health officials argued, was not so easily “read” in the “inscrutable” Asians, particularly the Chinese.

An excellent gallery of Angel Island photographs can be found here. And testimony from former detainees here.

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Death to Acer

September 10th, 2010


I’m writing this post while recovering from a bout of Hulk-like rage, brought about by the sudden death of my Acer Aspire 3810T’s screen. I should’ve known this would happen when I first removed the laptop from the box—the cover instantly struck me as having the strength of tin foil. Thankfully, I had a D-sub cable handy, and am thus able to get a modicum of morning work done while jacked into the clan’s TV. But I need to make an afternoon trek down to J&R Music and Computer World to get myself another laptop. Any recs from the realm? Budget is a major concern, alas, as are size and weight. And I am allergic to bloatware.

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Casketville

September 9th, 2010


I’ve recently been reading up on the history of the Blackstone Rangers, the gang whose criminal entanglements contributed greatly to the post-1965 increase in Chicago’s homicide rate. In the course of my research, I started wondering about how the Rangers’ impact on the Second City compared to that of Al Capone’s organization. I had long assumed that Prohibition had caused a brief yet astronomical uptick in Chicago’s homicide rate, but it turns out that I was a bit mistaken—though death-by-violence was more common during Prohibition, the increase was nothing compared to what happened throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

For all its notoriety during the 1920s, in fact, Chicago wasn’t even one of the dozen most murderous American cities during the heyday of Capone. In those years, the murder capital of America was a place I would never have expected. A 1926 New York Times broke the bad news to denizens of northeast Florida:

“Our murder record for 1925 is the worst we have thus far experienced,” says Frederick L. Hoffman, consulting statistician of the Prudential Life Insurance Company of America, in an article in the current issue of The Spectator, an insurance journal.

“Preliminary statistic for seventy-seven American cities,” he goes on, “indicate an increase in the murder death rate from 10.8 per 100,000 in 1924 to 11.1 per 100,000 in 1925…

Jacksonville, Florida, had the highest homicide rate in 1925, Mr. Hoffman says. The rate was 72.3 per 100,000, as compared to 58.8 in 1924.

In other words, Jacksonville’s 1925 homicide rate was more than double what Chicago’s was at its violent peak. And things got even worse the following year.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find a good explainer on why Jacksonville was so lethal in the 1920s. But there are some data points worth considering, starting with the fact that the city was a major point of entry for Caribbean rum smugglers, many of whom bribed local authorities to look the other way as they went about their business. Perhaps just as importantly, the city had a terrible track record of tackling homicide cases involving black victims, particularly when a white perpetrator was the main suspect; it wasn’t until 1926 that the local courts convicted a white resident for the murder of a black man. (In general, Jacksonville has what might be politely termed a complicated racial history.)

It’s also worth noting that of the 15 American cities with homicide rates above 20 per 100,000 in 1927, 11 were located in the South. (The non-Southern murder capitals were Kansas City, Detroit, Sacramento, and—believe it or not—Pueblo, Colorado.) Was this because of economic underdevelopment, which in turn deprived law enforcement of vital resources? Or was there a sociological explanation, perhaps having to do with uniquely Southern notions of honor and revenge? Remember, the South was also where the vast majority of lethal duels occurred during the first half of the 19th century, until religious leaders started equating dueling with suicide.

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M

September 9th, 2010


According to the nifty WordPress counter, this is my one thousandth post on Microkhan. Unlike the last time I hit such a significant milestone, there shall be no navel-gazing—in part because I’m too busy working on an afternoon post about Prohibition-era crime in northern Florida. But let me just say thanks to all who’ve stuck around to support this ongoing endeavor. There have been plenty of moments when I’ve been tempted to shutter the project. I’m glad that I’ve managed to resist those urges, and I’m elated to still be sharing my natural curiosity with y’all on a daily basis.

More good polymathism to come over the next one thousand posts—promise. Maybe I’ll even finally see fit to revive such dormant Microkhan institutions as The Bulletproof Project and (dare I dream?) First Contact.

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Far More Than a Footnote

September 8th, 2010


Focusing on various paying gigs today, so just a quick music clip to tide y’all over. The above is Segun Bucknor’s brief appearance in the excellent Ginger Baker in Africa; he’s the man in the lime-green vest behind the dancers. With Comb & Razor provides some much-needed background on the largely forgotten Afrobeat pioneer here:

As a student at the venerable King’s College, Bucknor sang in the choir, and at the age of 15 he got the chance to play and recorded with highlife bandleader Roy Chicago’s Rhythm Dandies dance band. By 1964, highlife was becoming old hat for post-independence Nigerian youth; a Beatles-aping quartet called The Cyclops had inspired a wave of high school rock & roll bands. With three school friends (including future esteemed photojournalist Sunmi Smart-Cole) and played mostly covers of popular pop and rock songs. The following year, he left the band to study liberal arts and ethnomusicology at New York’s Columbia University, and it was during his three-year sojourn in the US that his imagination was captured by a sound that had heretofore not made much of a splash in Nigeria–soul music, particularly the music of Ray Charles.

What I love most about Bucknor is the fact that he eventually chucked the music biz for a career in…journalism. Talk about the road less traveled…

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Teach a Man to Fish

September 7th, 2010

The last time that Microkhan checked in with Jimmy “Rasta” Lusibaea, he had just found the Lord after a lifetime of sin. The former head of the Malaita Eagles Force (MEF), the Solomon Islands’ most feared militia, Lusibaea had spent years defending his peoples’ turf against ethnic rivals. The MEF was once so powerful that it managed to kidnap the nation’s prime minister. No mere armchair general, Lusibaea was celebrated for his battlefield feats of derring-do, which once included the very A-Team gambit of outfitting a bulldozer with a .50-caliber rifle and then burrowing the makeshift tank into an enemy’s fortified bunker.

Lusibaea vowed to leave all that violence behind when he was saved, but he apparently is not done with public life. He is, rather, now a part of the Solomon Islands government—albeit in a post that doesn’t immediately appear to take full advantage of his talents:

The new cabinet in charge of the Solomon Islands includes a former logging industry businessman as forestry minister and a fisheries minister facing murder charges…

Former militant Jimmy Rasta Lusibaea, a leader of the Malaitan Eagle Force during ethnic tensions in the country before 2003, now holds the fisheries portfolio.

Mr Lusibaea has served a stint in prison and is facing charges of murder. His case is set down for November.

I am not entirely unsympathetic to the dilemma faced by new Solomon Islands prime minister Danny Philip, who put together this cabinet. After so many years of turmoil, the nation doesn’t have a huge pool of executive talent to draw from, and men with power on the streets do need to be rewarded for offering their political support. Furthermore, Lusiabaea could always make good on the threat he issued last February:

“There’s enough guns to start again…A rebel group don’t need 10 guns. When they walk through the town with their powerful weapons, we count them off – that’s my gun, that’s my gun, that’s my gun. If we kill, we get it. That’s how we build our armoury.”

The real trick here is to convince the likes of Lusibaea and other newly minted ministers to hand over day-to-day operations to competent officials—and, of course, to keep their hands out of the till. But I get the sense that the “stick” of an independent judiciary will be necessary to ensure that the cabinet doesn’t drag the Solomon Islands down a kleptocratic path. And that particular branch of government has historically proven the hardest to build.

(Image via the Sunday Star Times)

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Live Spot in Brooklyn

September 6th, 2010

Though I find myself laboring on Labor Day, I sincerely hope that you have avoided a similarly wretched fate. And if you live in New York City, I hope you’ll carve out some time tomorrow evening to swing by Brooklyn’s Union Hall to check out a rare live appearance by your humble narrator.

I’ll be participating in the latest installment of Adult Education, which bills itself as “Brooklyn’s favorite useless lecture series.” This month’s theme is the ever-cheery “War,” which means I’ll be presenting the tale of Pvt. Herman Perry, the man at the heart of my 386-page labor o’ love. Rest assured that this will be no mere reading, but rather a multimedia spectacular replete with images guaranteed to melt your ocular receptors. An example that was left on the cutting-room floor accompanies this post—a couple of American soldiers displaying a Burmese tiger they caught on an off-day. As I describe in the book, such tigers were a constant menace to the men building the Ledo Road. As a colonel from the 45th Engineer General Service Regiment wrote in his diary in June 1944:

Tiger killed soldier in Warazup. Next night badly mauled another soldier and next night killed native—animal apparently forced to dry ground a/c the flood.

There are, of course, few tigers left in the jungled hills that line the Indo-Burmese border. And those that remain are evidently face a new threat in the form of a Burmese businessman with ties to his nation’s ruling junta.

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Matti Nukes Adrift

September 3rd, 2010


Of the many death-defying sports that I’ve grown to admire over the years, few astound quite like elite ski jumping. Perhaps it’s not until you witness the sport in person that you really get a sense of just how bananas it is: TV can’t do justice to the true height of those hills, nor the vast distances that the competitors cover in the air. Given that I didn’t strap on a ski ’til late into my teens, and that I have occasional nightmares about getting swept over the Cliffs of Moher, I can imagine no other sport that I’d be less likely to try. My hats off to the men and women who earn their keep as ski jumpers.

Perhaps the greatest of these athletes was Matti Nykänen, a four-time Olympic gold medalist from Finland. At his youthful peak at the Calgary Games, “Matti Nukes” was nothing short of dominant—a human being who seemingly had been placed on this Earth to bridge the gap between man and bird. (Watch him at his finest here.)

But since retiring from the sport, Nykänen has revealed himself to be a deeply flawed individual. The Guardian recounted the champion’s sad decline earlier this year:

Before long, Nykänen was approached by a group of businessmen bent on transforming him into a recording artist: the initial brief was for the world’s best ski-jumper to record an album with the world’s worst, Eddie the Eagle. In the event, Nykänen’s first album, a compendium of perky Scando power pop, was released in 1992 and sold more than 25,000 copies. Plans for international endorsement deals were scuppered, however, by Nykänen’s complete inability to speak any foreign languages, leaving him thrashing around as the biggest fish in a familiar Nordic pond.

Beset by financial problems, Nykänen worked briefly for a premium-rate phoneline dispensing celebrity relationship advice; the equivalent in this country of calling up Live Genuine Essex Housewives and getting Paula Radcliffe on the phone. With a sense of clanging predictability, he was then jostled into the foothills of public office, only for the party built around him for the 1995 parliamentary elections to collapse at the last moment. From there it was a short step to his debut working as a striptease act in a restaurant (Nykänen claims to have retained his dignity by never appearing fully naked) and meeting sausage manufacturers Tapola with a view to finagling a sponsorship deal.

Instead, Nykänen fell in love with Tapola heiress Mervi Tapola, marrying her for the first time in 2001, then divorcing and marrying her again three years later. In the event, marriage has hardly proved a balm to Nykänen’s flailing private life (in all he has had four wives, and two children). In October 2004, he was found guilty of aggravated assault for a bizarre knife attack on a family friend: Nykänen stabbed his victim for besting him in a traditional Scandinavian finger-pulling contest – a game of linking middle fingers across a small card table and attempting, on the referee’s whistle, to yank your opponent out of his seat and over to your side. Then, four days after his release from prison, he was arrested again for attacking Tapola, and sentenced to another four months.

Alas, like so many famous athletes before him, Nykänen keep burning through his chances: He is now headed back to prison for 16 months, for yet another vicious attack on his wife.

When someone of Nykänen’s great physical accomplishment botches their post-career life so terribly, I find it tough to understand. Here is a man who was able to handle some of the most intense pressure in the world, and succeed marvelously. Yet ordinary tasks such as money management and human relationships seem beyond him.

There are a variety of potential explanations, ranging from the emotional immaturity of those who spend their formative years practicing a sport for 12 hours a day, to depression that stems from the removal of one’s longtime reason for being (i.e. to win competitions). Whatever the case might be with Matti Nukes, I do sincerely hope that he gets his act together during his forthcoming stint behind bars. Perhaps he needs tougher love than the Finnish penal system tends to offer.

Update Apparently there is a 2006 film about Matti Nukes, the title of which apparently translates as Matti: Hell is for Heroes. If any Finnish-speaking readers have seen this, please advise. (Related: Do I have any Finnish-speaking readers? If I do, that will totally make this blog enterprise worth all the effort.)

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Back in the Bunker

September 2nd, 2010


Sorry, but today’s all about tackling a major project, rather than scooping out a small portion of my brain to share with you good people. Please content yourself with the high-brow electronic music above, as well as the following snippet of anti-jazz hysteria from the April 11, 1921 edition of the Chicago Tribune:

Home was handicapped. No saxophones or trombones; the best he could find to smite was a bloomin’ lyre. Nero was restricted to a Stradivarius.

Both made their mistake, it seems, for jazz, we learn, is the brand of racket which best suits the destructive motif. It is Bolshevized Wagner, Carrie Jacobs Bond in a Soviet tune.

In short, jazz is wicked. Dr. Frank E. Morton, acoustic engineer for the American Steel and Wire Company and a leader in the music trades convention which is to be held in the Drake hotel next month, says it’s the black sheep of the melody family.

“Jazz,” he said last night, “expressed hysteria and incites to idleness, revelry, dissipation, destruction, discord, and chaos. It accords with the devestating, volcanic spirit that has burst forth over the world in the last six years…

“Make music virile. Put red blood into it. Associate it with two-fisted men who do things. Keep away from the jazz abominations. Restore the orderly harmonized organization of industrial and social life with good music. Bring back ‘Home Sweet Home.’“

Dr. Morton, consider yourself fortunate that you shed your mortal coil before the advent of sinister-clown hip-hop. I very much doubt you would have had the fortitude to endure the sonic experience.

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The New Quicksand

September 1st, 2010


One of my Slate editors recently made waves with this sharp piece about the cultural demise of quicksand. The gunky stuff, so infamous for ensnaring characters in movies (including The Beastmaster’s beloved ferrets), no longer scares the youth of today. Perhaps this is because kids now realize that quicksand’s lethal potential was always overstated, and that their odds of perishing in a pit of viscous mud are positively nil.

So what should replace quicksand in the corner of the American imagination reserved for nightmares? I’d like to humbly suggest grain, specifically corn. That’s because the threat posed to humans by mountains of grain is very real—and, unfortunately, becoming more dire with each passing year:

Based upon the cases documented to date, no fewer than 38 grain entrapments occurred in 2009.

Disturbingly, the trend for this type of incident, unlike many other types of farm-related injuries and fatalities, is not improving. Between 1994 and 2002, the five-year average decreased from a record of 29.2 recorded entrapments per year to 18.8 (the lowest since 1987). Since 2002, however, the five-year average has increased steadily to 28.4 incidents per year in 2008 and 31.2 in 2009 which is an increase of nearly 66%.

As in past years, it should be noted that this summary does not reflect all grain-related entrapments, fatal or non-fatal that have occurred, due to the lack of a comprehensive reporting system and a continued reluctance on the part of some victims and employers to report partial entrapments where extrication was required but no public report was made.

Based upon the ratio of non-fatal to fatal incidents documented in Indiana over the past 30 years, which has had an aggressive surveillance program to identify these events, the total number of actual cases could be 20-30 percent greater nationwide.

So what’s causing this worrying uptick in grain entrapments? Perhaps it’s our growing thirst for corn-based ethanol:

There continues to be a direct relationship between out-of-condition grain and a greater probability of entrapment.

The domestic corn demand for ethanol has resulted in the largest build up of storage capacity across the Midwest in history. These factors will result in more corn being stored for longer periods of time than in past years and possibly an increased potential for grain entrapments unless there is a change in current work practices.

There’s a small silver lining here, which is that a lower percentage of grain entrapments are now fatal than in years past. For that, credit the advent of grain rescue tubes, one of the most underrated agricultural gadgets on the market today.

Should you wish to minimize your chances of falling victim to grain, I suggest that you heed the advice offered here. And if you do find yourself buried in corn, just do your best to relax and breathe. Do not, under any circumstances, try to eat your way out of your predicament—even the great Crazy Legs Conti, one of the most revered competitive eaters on the planet, insisted on popped corn when attempting to chew free from a sarcophagus.

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Landing on Planet Mercury

August 31st, 2010


Unlike everyone’s favorite intergalactic MC, I am not bio-enhanced. And that means I must occasionally steal a day to focus on a single project, rather than multitasking as if I’d been blessed with multiple brains. Today is such a day, which means no meaningful Microkhaning ’til after the next sunrise. Apologies, and hope y’all understand.

I will leave you, though, with a bit of beer history. There was apparently a time when Meister Brau was marketed as a classy beverage, a campaign bolstered by the brand’s wise decision to enlist the services of gorgeous chanteuse Barbara McNair. Yet this was before Miller purchased the brand in the early 1970s, and turned it into a product for imbibers whose pockets contain only a few spare nickels. As a result, Meister Brau is now but a shell of its former self—and borderline toxic for anyone who dares toss it down their gullet. The reviewers over at Beer Advocate pull no punches:

Only consume this ice cold. Doesn’t taste like much of anything at ~35 degrees F or lower. If it warms, it becomes face wincing bad, as the flavors of corn grits, cooked cabbage and wet cardboard seep in. Things only go downhill from there. Bitterness is there for the whole ride, with a weighty metallic flavor that’s bolstered by the beer’s fizz. Finishes clean if ice cold. If not, residual flavors of metal and corn grits linger for far too long in the mouth.

Still, it sounds better than Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer.

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