Ever since reading Robert Sullivan’s Rats, I’ve become convinced that the furry little banes of urban sanitation will someday rule the world. They are like land-dwelling versions of the dreaded zebra mussel, adept at turning a minor incursion into a full-blown invasion before any Homo sapiens are the wiser. And once they’ve conquered a piece of territory, they’re oh-so-difficult to expel—though, granted, not impossible, as evidenced by our recent triumph on Alaska’s Rat Island.
With five species of bird found nowhere else on earth, Henderson Island – part of the Pitcairn group – is one of the richest wildlife islands in the world. However, non-native Pacific rats are threatening the future of several of these species. In particular, the rats are killing and eating 25,000 seabird chicks each year, including those of the Henderson petrel – a seabird with its only known breeding sites confined to the World Heritage site, which shares its name.
Plans are afoot declare war on the rats, but heavy weaponry is required—namely a fleet of helicopters capable of evenly coating an entire island in poison. Given Henderson’s remote location, that will likely mean calling in the MV Baldur, the region’s pre-eminent anti-rodent ship, which is essentially the pest control world’s version of an aircraft carrier.
Yes, there are large ships especially dedicated to large-scale rodent eradication. But given the rats’ ingenuity, it should be long before a deckhand on one of these missions is forced to utter those memorable words: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
A Wired deadline just snuck up on me, so off to hit the keyboard. In my brief absence, please check out this excellent history of Tenor Saw, the dancehall legend who never made it to his 23rd birthday. The singer’s violent demise remains one of music’s great unsolved mysteries:
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Tenor Saw was found dead on the side of the road in Houston after a performance he put on in August of 1988. The official cause of death was hit-and-run, not a rare occurrence in Houston to be sure, but the sudden murder of a superstar certainly warranted more scrutiny than the Houston police afforded Tenor Saw’s.
Suspicions among reggae listeners immediately fell on Nitty Gritty—the story was a drug deal gone bad—but the friends’ closest confreres deny that there was any animosity between the two. Nitty Gritty and King Kong both recorded tribute tracks in the years following, in part to protest their innocence in the murder. (Nitty Gritty was himself murdered a couple of years later in a Brooklyn record shop. The NYPD unsuccessfully pinned his shooting on his dancehall rival, SuperCat.) Sugar Minott, for his part, has insisted in interviews that the Houston club promoters beat Tenor Saw to death, to avoid paying him.
Rare live footage of the late Tenor Saw here and here.
The case against former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré appears to be as damning as they come. Like many of the twentieth century’s great monsters, Habré was fairly assiduous about documenting his regime’s brutality; according to this essential dossier, he received over 1,200 personal memos regarding the torture of dissidents, many of whom were eventually murdered and buried in mass graves. Habré was also not shy about committing atrocities against Chad’s ethnic minorities, who suffered through mass arrests and extrajudicial killings throughout the 1980s.
Yet more than a decade since calls first arose for Habré to face justice, and despite the pleadings of august figures, the deposed dictator has yet to face trial. He remains under house arrest in Senegal, which years ago vowed to prosecute Habré instead of shipping him off to the International Court of Justice in Belgium. The latest reason for the delay? A squabble over money:
Senegal had said it wants all $38 million of the trial’s proposed three-year budget up front. It includes money to bring witnesses to Dakar and a third of the budget to reconstruct a courthouse, which some in the international community have deemed excessive.
That proposed trial budget is currently being negotiated. A delegation from the European Union and the African Union visited Senegal this spring, and a new draft of the trial budget is expected at the end of this month and could be finalized later this summer.
Though my eyes bulged a bit at the $38 million demand, it actually isn’t as outlandish as it sounds. War crimes and genocide trials tend to be absurdly expensive, largely out of the organizers’ tendencies to spend lavishly. In Cambodia, for example, the recently concluded trial of Comrade Duch was marred by accusations that the court padded its staff with scores of civil servants who earned up to $5,300 a month—over 50 times the average income for a government employee. And the overindulgence is not limited to Cambodia:
Cambodia isn’t the only court that has faced money problems due to a lack of accountability or financial controls, says Michael Johnson, the former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia who was also involved in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Chamber. He says the Bosnia court—eight courtrooms and about 400 defendants—is running about $10 million to $11 million per defendant. But other courts such as Rwanda—purely an international court (not a hybrid local/international as in Cambodia)—ran about $30 million per defendant; Sierra Leone was also high. In East Timor, another hybrid court came out at about $10 million per defendant, but critics say it ended up with a standard of justice that did not meet international criteria. “There is a real lack of accountability within the administration of these systems,” says Johnson, who favors a special adviser to monitor and cut costs.
Alas, there probably isn’t any meaningful way to cut these costs without poisoning the judicial process. The courts know that the work they’re doing is of great interest to nations with deep pockets, all of who are loathe to criticize the tribunals they’ve spent millions funding. To do so would call into question those courts’ legitimacy, and risk undermining the whole enterprise. And so when the viability of the international justice system is at stake, the millions that end up building ornate courthouses and fattening up civil servants is just the cost of doing business.
During my guest stint over at Ta-Nehisi’s place last week, a commenter reminded me of my all-time favorite Otto von Bismarck quote: “Politics is the art of the possible.” The unsmiling German statesman may have meant that all successful negotiations must end in compromise, but I’d like to think he also had faith in politics’ ability to tease out technological innovation. Politicians are useless without the means to communicate with the masses, of course, and so they must constantly be on the lookout for new methods of spreading their messages. And that is where the geeks take over.
That is precisely what happened in Jamaica in 1949, shortly after the introduction of universal adult sufferage. For the first time, politicians were forced to address mass gatherings, a task that could only be accomplished with the aid of amplification technology. The main beneficiary of this development was a Kingston radio geek named Horace Leslie Galbraith, who had spent World War II in Britain working as a radar technician. Upon his return to Jamaica, he was the island nation’s pre-eminent electronics expert, and was thus enlisted by politicians to build 25-watt amplifiers that could be run off 12-volt car batteries—the only reliable means of ensuring that one’s voice could be heard while standing atop a car in front of thousands of onlookers.
“From the early thirties to the fifties there were exclusive clubs in Kingston with live orchestras led by George Moxey, Redver Cooke and Mapletoft Poulle, amongst others, which were patronised by the St Andrew well-to-do. For us ordinary people there were no live orchestras but, instead, large homes on Victoria Avenue, upper King Street and elsewhere, where they hired a radio phone with popular 78rpm records and the patrons paid from two to five shillings entrance fee,” Galbraith recounted.
“But the music from the scratchy 78rpm records at a radio phone dance was very poor and could only be heard by about 20 people. The sound quality needed to be improved. The music had to be enhanced — less noise, more clarity, “rounder” bass, voices to be brought out — and more power was needed. Having built the 25 watt amplifiers, I was sure I could build a better amplifier to improve our radio phone dances and set out to do so,” he stated.
Admitting that his trailblazing amplifier exceeded his expectation Galbraith concluded, “This first, ground-breaking model was sold to Tom Wong and was used to start his sound system called Tom the Great Sebastian. Within a few months there were sound system dances all over Kingston at various lodge halls, open air lawns and anywhere that could hold a crowd of 100 people and up. We supplied amplifiers to sound systems all over Kingston and the country parishes. Among the sound systems we supplied amplifiers to were Nicks, Prof, V Rocket, Hoshue, Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd (Downbeat) and many others all over Jamaica.”
Galbraith probably didn’t foresee how sound systems would eventually grow into Goliath-sized stacks, nor go mobile atop bikes. But such things did eventually become possible, and it all loops back to some politicians’ yen to get elected. Smart guy, that Bismarck. Though he looks like he could probably have used more hugs.
Amputations accounted for roughly three-quarters of all battlefield surgeries during the Civil War, which meant that artificial limbs were much in demand after the bitter conflict’s end. Captain Ahab-style wooden stumps were an easy fix, but they tended to severely curtail a man’s productivity. Fortunately for the shattered nation, then, a Massachusetts linguistics professor named George B. Jewett enjoyed dabbling in prosthetics whenever he had a spare moment. His great innovation, patented just months after the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox, was a novel artificial leg that featured something truly remarkable: a self-oiling mechanism, which allowed the limb to maintain maximum flexibility despite inclement weather or owner neglect.
Jewett’s company, headquartered at the corner of Park and Tremont Streets in Boston, did a brisk business with the Union’s former enemies, as states below the Mason-Dixon line launched public programs to supply veterans with artificial legs. North Carolina led the way, though some recipients of the state’s largesse were careful not to rely too heavily on their Jewetts:
It became the first of the former Confederate states to offer artificial limbs to amputees. The General Assembly passed a resolution in February 1866 to provide artificial legs, or an equivalent sum of money (seventy dollars) to amputees who could not use them. Because artificial arms were not considered very functional, the state did not offer them, or equivalent money (fifty dollars), until 1867. While North Carolina operated its artificial limbs program, 1,550 Confederate veterans contacted the government for help.
One Tar Heel veteran, Robert Alexander Hanna, had enlisted in the Confederate army on July 1, 1861. Two years later at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Hanna suffered wounds in the head and the left leg, just above the ankle joint. He suffered for about a month, with the wound oozing pus, before an amputation was done. After the war, Hanna received a wooden Jewett’s Patent Leg from the state in January 1867. According to family members, he saved that leg for special occasions, having made other artificial limbs to help him do his farmwork. (One homemade leg had a bull’s hoof for a foot.) The special care helped the Jewett’s Patent Leg last. When Hanna died in 1917 at about eighty-five years old, he had had the artificial leg for fifty years.
I’d be curious to know whether Jewett’s invention had any influence on the celebrated Jaipur foot, another prosthetic innovation that has done wonders for economic development.
Thanks for putting up with the spotty posting last week, as I struggled to keep up with the hectic sked over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ realm. Did my best to cross-post when I could, but I’ll admit to lazing out a bit—which is why you’re getting Bad Movie Friday on a Monday. (All the background on the dreadful Michael Dudikoff vehicle Cyberjack, aka Virtual Assassin, available here.)
Fear not, I’m on the blogging case—and now without the royal “we” for good, having recently become convinced that the trope hasn’t aged well. Let me catch up on the e-mail backlog and deal with assorted other tasks, then I’ll be back here discussing rodent eradication, North African kidnapping, and 19th-century Irish banditry as soon as humanly possible. Stay tuned.
Growing up, Jack London was high atop my personal literary pantheon. The first time I read “To Build a Fire”, it absolutely rocked my world—I mean, who knew you could have a story in which the protagonist’s death-by-freezing could be portrayed in such a sweet manner? (That closing vision of “the old-timer on Sulphur Creek” still slays me to this day.) While it may be a stretch to say that I became a writer because of London, I certainly remember thinking to myself that I wouldn’t mind following in his ink-stained footsteps.
So imagine the terrible emotions I felt many years later upon seeing Unforgiveable Blackness, a documentary about the life of boxing champion Jack Johnson, in which London is revealed to have harbored some seriously twisted racial notions. (The clip above is only the tip of iceberg.) The boxing doc led me to look into London’s other writings involving race, particularly his 1911 novel Adventure, a book that doesn’t mince words in portraying the denizens of the South Pacific as less than fully human. So while scholars may forever debate the depth of London’s racism, and whether the likes of “The Yellow Peril” were actually anti-racist works in slight disguise, I’ve read enough to make my decision: The hero of my youth was not the sort of bloke I’d like my son to admire.
But does that mean I should also prevent my son from reading “To Build a Fire”, a story that doesn’t include the slightest whiff of London’s racial views? That’s a tough question, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot in light of Mel Gibson’s recent meltdown. As I listened to those tapes of Mad Max going genuinely mad, one of my first thoughts was, “How might this affect the love I have for Apocalypto?” In other words, how does one deal with finding out that one of your most beloved artworks was created by a man or woman whose personal behavior is (or was) odious?
The A.V. Club tackled this topic yesterday, at least in part. Much of the essay focuses on the issue of how artistic intent should factor into one’s enjoyment of the finished product. But the writer, Tasha Robinson, also delves into the question of whether or not we should let an artist’s gross personal failings affect the way we process their creative output:
I acknowledge that there are some excellent reasons to be aware of an artist’s opinions or real life when approaching their work. Hypocrisy is a big one—it’s hard to take Mel Gibson’s avowed, public devotion to religion (and his mega-successful religious film The Passion Of The Christ) seriously given his apparent private behavior. And I can similarly understand people not wanting to financially support work by a creator they consider reprehensible; I have no argument with people who refuse to see new Polanski movies because they don’t want to support the luxurious lifestyle of a rich fugitive from justice. Boycotting an artist due to personal reservations may mean you miss out on some great art, but if it keeps your conscience intact, it’s a valid personal choice. And on top of all that, some people may just want to avoid work where they know the creator had a purpose and a message in mind and is actively going to try to sway people with it, as with Lewis’ Narnia books, or John Travolta delivering Battlefield Earth as a testament to his own Scientology. (Yes, there are many other reasons to avoid that film. Don’t get distracted here.)
The essay ends with a good point: Art is (theoretically) eternal, but artists all wind up in the grave sooner or later. As a result, we should probably realize that there’s an important distinction between the two, and that art ultimately exists independently of the human mind that gave it to the world. Extending that logic a bit more, you could even say that art is akin to an artist’s child, and so we shouldn’t blame the progeny for the sins of the parent.
But if you don’t buy that reasoning, what’s the rule of thumb for determining when an artist’s reprehensible personal behavior is permitted to interfere with your admiration for their work? For starters, let’s face it, many great artists are or have been incredible jerks—though certain sins (such as spreading racial hatred) are obviously less forgivable than others (treating subordinates like dirt comes to mind). And do we give certain artists a free pass because they couldn’t help being products of their age? I have no doubt that John Milton didn’t exactly believe in the whole brotherhood-of-man thing, at least in the modern sense, but should I really let that color my perception of Paradise Lost?
So, throwing two big questions to the splendid commentariat: Have you ever fallen out of love with an artist you once adored, simply because you discovered that he or she was an execrable human being in real life? And for the parents in the crowd, how do you feel about your kids reading the classic works of writers who you wouldn’t want to break bread with?
I’m usually averse to attending egghead confabs, but I’d certainly make an exception for the upcoming Inaugural Rastafari Studies Conference, which will mark a half-century since the publication of the first academic treatise on the religion. Like all young faiths that manage to outlive their founders’ generations, Rastafari is now grappling with important questions regarding its future course. For instance, how does a messianic religion deal with inconvenient historical realities? And can a faith that once rejected human government as hopelessly wicked ever settle into a peaceful symbiosis with existing institutions?
If there’s a model for the Rastafari movement’s future, it may be the Quakers–a comparison first made in the classic 1966 paper The Rastafarian Brethren of Jamaica:
The early Quakers were not looked at with more misgivings by a society which saw them as coming “from the very rabble and dregs of the people,” as individuals who differentiated themselves from more sober citizens by their odd appearance, the peculiar nature of their devotions, and their habit of quaking and trembling when filled with the “spirit.” Seventeenth-century Quakers, like present-day Rastafarians, did not modify their beliefs when confronted by a hostile society, often used highly abusive language, and employed similar martial metaphors of pitching tents, drawing swords, and making ready for battle against the enemy. Rastamen would have understood George Fox’s concern in walking around Licthtfield shouting at the top of his voice, “Woe to the bloody city!”
A few hundred years later, of course, the Quakers are anything but bizarre–in fact, they count among their ranks a fair number of elites (Richard Nixon!), and the image of the friendly Quaker has become an American archetype.
I think it’ll take quite some time before a major American university adopts a Rastafari mascot. (Okay, okay, it’ll never happen.) But Rastafari has already gotten over the hump by surviving well past Haile Selassie’s rather anti-climactic demise. The question now is whether its adherents want to continue to define themselves as perpetual outsiders, or revise their theology to build the proverbial bigger tent.
I had to engage in a bit of uproarious guffawing upon reading this brain-dead take on New York’s long-awaited shift to no-fault divorce. The writer pleads for Governor David Patterson to veto the bill, using that tried-and-true “won’t somebody please think of the children!” logic lampooned so memorably on The Simpsons. Yet she conveniently ignores two key facts. First, as I recently discussed on Microkhan, there is zero evidence of a correlation between the adoption of no-fault divorce and higher divorce rates over the long-term; in fact, according to this paper (PDF), no-fault laws may actually lead to lower divorce rates.
More important, critics of liberalized divorce laws start with a false assumption: That in an ideal world, no marriage would end in divorce. But you know what? People and circumstances change over time, and a certain percentage of marriages are better off ending rather than limping along ’til death ends the sad charade. Marriages only benefit society when they free their participants to engage in productive endeavors; no societal good can come of partnerships in which the lion’s share of energy is devoted to jealousy and bile.
There is, of course, a downside to making divorce too easy, as such policies encourage impulsive splits. But my sense is that lawmakers the world over have generally erred on the side of caution when relaxing divorce laws, which partly explains why splits have recently been nosediving from the U.S. to England to Spain to Saudi Arabia.
True, the global divorce-rate trends are partly attributable to the lackluster economy, as well as the fact that people in the developed world are marrying later than ever. (It should come as no surprise that folks who get married before they’re full-fledged adults tend to get divorced a lot.) But there’s also something to be said for our species’ wonderful capacity for processing complex information. Immediately after divorce laws are relaxed, there is usually a brief spike in the divorce rate, as people rush to take advantage of their newfound freedom. But experience quickly teaches them that hasty divorce can have serious consequences, both fiscal and emotional, and society learns to treat the institution with the appropriate respect. And that’s something that intellectually honest conservatives should applaud, given that personal responsibility is one of their big hobby horses. Instead, many of them plead with government to keep saving unhappily married people from themselves. Curious, that.
There’s probably a lesson to be learned here about how other much-debated social reforms will inevitably play out over time. But I’ll leave that to the learned commentariat to discuss.
I know y’all spend a lot of time talking about superheroes, given Ta-Nehisi’s lifelong predilection for Spider-Man, Batman, and various members of the Marvel mutant universe. As a former comic-book nerd myself, who hopes that his cherry copy of Uncanny X-Men #266 (first Gambit appearance!) will someday fund his son’s education, let me add to the conversation by turning your attention toward an all-time favorite site: The International Catalogue of Superheroes, a thorough online compendium of what your peers in Chile, India, and Sweden were reading during their formative years.
There’s a lot of characters to learn about here, from Cat Claw (by far the sexiest heroine from Tito-era Yugoslavia) to the Dutch version of Spiderman (who is disconcertingly slim). But the site isn’t just a smorgasbord of comic-book factoids; it also provides some important lessons on how trends in superhero backstories change over time, and what those changes can tell us about shifts in politics and society.
Take, for example, the case of Super Hrvoje, which loosely translates as “Super Croat.” It is no accident that this Croatian version of Captain America made his debut right as the Balkans were disintegrating in the early 1990s:
As a young boy, Hrvoje and his parents move to Germany, to avoid Yugoslavia’s communist regime, which they didn’t agree with it. However, the Yugoslavian secret service, UDBA, found and assassinated his parents, so Hrvoje became an orphan at young age. He was than taken in by the family of his best friend, Stjepan, and continued to live with them in Germany, in safety. Years later, in the early 90s, Stjepan was in Croatia on an archaeological dig. He discovered an ancient stone-man statuette and a legend surrounding it. The legend spoke of a champion who was orphaned by those who spilled the blood of innocents on the ancient land, and who would defend the land from the attackers. Stjepan immediately recognised his friend Hrvoje being described in the legend, so he sent him a message in Germany to come to Croatia. Hrvoje arrived just in time to find his friend left for dead after being shot by Yugoslavian invaders occupying the excavation site. Stjepan lived long enough to tell Hrvoje about the legend and give him the statuette. Hrvoje then tracked down the Yugoslav army forces in the region and transformed into a stone-man for the first time, becoming Super Hrvoje.
The character apparently had a Serbian counterpart, Super Srbin, who was basically a violent Superman rip-off. I somehow doubt that Jerry Siegel would approve.
In response to Ta-Nehisi’s introductory post yesterday, a treasured commenter brought up the idea of doing a non-fiction recommendation thread this week. As fate would have it, I’ve long been planning to use this space to champion a few of my favorite off-the-radar non-fiction gems. Let me now start doing so in such a way that y’all will hopefully be inspired to join in the exercise.
Late in my own narrative non-fiction yarn, Now the Hell Will Start, I make a half-hearted attempt to tackle what I term a “riddle of existence”: how people from similar circumstances, even the same families, often end up walking such different paths through life. The tale that inspired me to go on that brief philosophical tangent was “The Lives of Brian Cathcart,” published in Granta 85. (There’s a truncated version here, though I highly, highly recommended reading the whole shebang.) It is written by a man who usually makes his living exploring science, but in this instance decided to investigate a monstrous crime. The lede just slays me—one of the most haunting I’ve ever had the good fortune to read:
My name is Brian Cathcart. I grew up mainly in Northern Ireland. My father was headmaster of a secondary school and my mother taught English. I come from Protestant stock, though I have no religion myself. I studied history at university. I remember the Troubles starting, the war in Biafra, the Beatles.
His name was Brian Cathcart. He grew up in Northern Ireland. His father was headmaster of a secondary school and his mother taught English. He came from Protestant stock, though he had no religion himself. He studied history at university. He remembered the Troubles starting, the war in Biafra, the Beatles.
Two Brian Cathcarts, then: lucky boys, with their clever parents and their educations, both of them raised on what was the privileged side of Northern Ireland’s communal divide. What is the difference between them? Chiefly, now, that the second one is dead. Do you ever look at a drunken man on the street, swaying and shabby, with no focus to his eyes and a can of lager in his hand, and think to yourself: why him, why me?
I won’t give away the rest of the story, except to say that it affected me so deeply that I actually sought out Cathcart and dropped him an adoring e-mail. His gracious response gave me a buzz akin to that of a Reagan-era NKOTB fan receiving a handwritten note from Jordan Knight.
So, now let me open it to the throng: Who can recommend some excellent narrative non-fiction that tackles the question of how fates diverge? The Other Wes Moore is a natural here, and it’s on my to-read list for an upcoming trip out West. But suggestions certainly needn’t follow the “follow your doppelganger” model of both that book and “The Lives of Brian Cathcart.” Have at it, splendid commentariat.
Sorry to start this gorgeous summer day on an exceedingly somber note, but it’s time to talk suicide.
I’ve written a lot about this topic, primarily from a public-health angle. Despite all we’ve learned about human psychology over the past several decades, we seem unable to make much of a dent in America’s overall suicide rate, which has remained remarkably stable over the past half-century. In fact, the rate of suicide attempts seems to have gone up over that time period; the rate of successful attempts has most likely held steady due to advances in emergency-room medicine. (Sparsely populated states such as Montana often have high suicide rates because people live so far from ERs.)
So, aside from offering psychological intervention at the right time, what’s the best strategy for helping people who are sorely tempted to take their own lives? Historically, the greatest declines in suicide rates have come about due to changes in the availability of methods. Take, for example, what happened in Great Britain (paywalled):
The availability of specific methods of suicide affects secular trends. This is of particular importance with respect to gassing. Prior to 1905, gassing accounted for a negligible percentage of all suicides. However, there was a rapid increase in suicides by gassing in the early 20th century and it became the most commonly used method of suicide in the 1930s in women and 1950s in men, before declining after the 1960s with the changes in domestic gas supply from coal gas (high carbon monoxide content) to natural gas (low carbon monoxide content).
Britain’s suicide rate plummeted by roughly 40 percent after the switch to natural gas. And it slid several more percentage points starting in the early 1990s, after the introduction of catalytic converters reduced the toxicity of vehicle emissions, and therefore made suicide-by-tailpipe a lot tougher.
The big difference between the U.S. and Britain, of course, is the availability of firearms, which are lethally efficient when compared to such methods as hanging, pill ingestion, or wrist slitting. (56 percent of male suicides and 31 percent of female suicides in the U.S. involve firearms.) And while trigger locks may be able to prevent some cases of teen suicide, there really isn’t much that can be done to suicide-proof a .38 owned by an adult intent on ending it all.
And so the mystery remains: How do we reduce America’s suicide rate, which has barely budged for 50 years? The natural answer is to address the underlying causes, such as desperate economic circumstances and poor mental health. But if we were intent on launching a 10-year crusade to reduce the national suicide rate by, say, 30 percent, what sorts of (relatively) quick, affordable fixes could we marshal? Will bridge barrier and signs work, for example, despite some recent evidence to the contrary?
Readers with serious public-health chops, this is your time to shine. Please chime in.
I’m eternally fascinated by great artists who seemingly fall off the face of the Earth. Many disappear because they lose battles against their demons, but others simply decide to change paths and opt for stability. Bettye Swann certainly falls into the latter category, as detailed in this excellent 2005 piece from Las Vegas City Life:
Dressed in her church clothes, Swann brings me what looks like a blue plastic lunch box containing maybe a dozen photo negatives and the original sheet music to her 1967 Top-20 pop hit “Make Me Yours.”
And that’s about it.
“OK,” I say, trying to hide my disappointment.
“I know,” she says, apologetically. “Over the years, when somebody would ask me for something, I didn’t feel like I needed to keep everything. I could just sing if I wanted to hear it. It’s not a life-or-death thing for me. The only time I worry about not having kept it all is when a journalist calls me up.” She shrugs. “Besides, I’m constantly writing. I never stopped writing, and I never stopped singing. Music has its power when used in the right way.”
By “the right way,” I assume she means for the purposes of celebrating Jehovah. For the last 25 years, Swann has been a devout Witness. “So why did you quit the music industry anyway?” I ask, as I check to see if the digital voice recorder on the table is still working.
Swann sighs, then looks out the window. “I love music and I love people,” she says, finally. “But I hate show and I hate business. I couldn’t feel it, the show or the business.”
As someone who desperately wants to be admired and respected for their creative output, it’s tough for me to fathom the gumption it takes to chuck it all. Maybe Swann made a mistake by refusing to share her talent with the world past 1980. Or maybe she just enjoys a level of wisdom that those of us saddled with egos will never know.
There’s controversy brewing in southern Mississippi, where Jackson County recently approved a hog-dog bay. That’s an event in which a hunting dog corners a boar in a pen, to the ostensible delight of onlookers. To those who oppose the practice, it comes perilously close to an interspecies take on dogfighting; to its fans, it’s simply a regional spin on rodeo. (Want to decide for yourself? Here’s some video.)
Though the hearings on the bay brought out tons of heated emotions from animal-welfare advocates and hog-dog bayers alike, the outcome was never really in doubt. That’s because the sport is actually enshrined in Mississippi’s state code:
(2) It is unlawful for any person to organize or conduct any commercial event commonly referred to as a “catch” wherein there is a display of combat or fighting among one or more domestic or feral canines and feral or domestic hogs and in which it is intended or reasonably foreseeable that the canines or hogs would be injured, maimed, mutilated, or killed.
(3) It is unlawful for any person to organize, conduct or financially or materially support any event prohibited by this section.
(4) The provisions of this section shall not apply to any competitive event in which canines trained for hunting or herding activities are released in an open or enclosed area to locate and corner hogs, commonly referred to as a “bay event,” and in which competitive points are deducted if a hog is caught and held.
As supporters of hog-dog baying readily admit, accidents do happen. Yet is that risk reason enough to ban the activity?
Given my affection for meat, I always feel morally unqualified to tackle animal-welfare quandaries. I’m a confessed city slicker, so I’ll probably never grok the pleasure to be had in watching a dog chase a hog. But does baying’s policy of preventing bloodshed make it no more immoral than standard rodeo events? (I won’t draw the mixed martial arts comparison, because human competitors have a lot more choice in the matter.)
I’m seriously on the fence about this, so hoping the learned Microkhan commentariat can chime in and assist.
In certain precincts of Albania, where familial ties still mean everything, minor grudges have a way of spiraling seriously out of control. Take the the sad case of the Morevataj clan, which has been embroiled in a decade-long blood feud thanks to a drunken spat that ended in murder. According to the Kanun, the 15th-century legal code that still governs certain aspects of Albanian society, vengeance for such a crime can be exacted not only on the perpetrator himself, but on any of his male relatives, regardless of their age. As a result, thousands of Albanian boys must live in total seclusion, lest they be gunned down while heading to school or playing soccer in the street.
So how is the Albanian government dealing with these blood feuds? In part by accepting the harsh reality:
The Albanian government has taken steps to curb blood feuds, imposing severe penalties for retaliations, and funding the “Second Chance’ schooling programme, where children who are in isolation get home tuition. The five boys in the Morevataj clan have a governess who visits three times per week, and have made good progress. But while some want more state funding for governesses and mediators, others say that simply entrenches recognition of the Kanun, when the real priority should be building up the government justice system.
When I first read about Second Chance, it didn’t make sense. The program basically amounts to a tacit endorsement of the blood-feud system, correct? But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to see it as a prime example of smart short-term pragmatism. So often, we let our idealism cloud our ability to help those most in need of assistance. Because we recognize the cruelty of the circumstances that landed them in dire straits, we resolve to change those circumstances in the most dramatic fashion possible. But that’s almost always easier said than done.
The American parallel that immediately pops to mind is needle-exchange programs–we know they work from a public-health standpoint, but they’re still widely opposed by those who will accept nothing less than an addiction-free society. A lovely goal, perhaps, but not something that should drive day-to-day policy, which must deal with human beings as they are, not as we want them to be.
No one disputes that the blood-feud system has become a drag on Albania’s development, much as the cocktail of petty squabbling and stubborn pride ruins communities the world over. The long-term goal should obviously be to extinguish the Kanun’s approach to venegance. But that dream doesn’t do much good for the Morevataj boys right now. And unless the impoverished Albanian government can suddenly prove itself able to guarantee those kids’ security, Second Chance is probably their best shot at achieving some small measure of normalcy.
In the name of holding our blogging cards close to our chest, so that next week’s TNC guest stint is something special, we’re gonna be taking you straight into Bad Movie Friday on this lazy summer morn. Some of our closest friends would argue that Avenging Force doesn’t deserve a place in the schlock pantheon, given Michael Dudikoff’s excellent performance and the sharp Reagan-era spin on The Most Dangerous Game. (Spoiler: It’s man.) But while Avenging Force certainly has its moments, it pales in comparison to the derviative-yet-superior Surviving the Game, which contains the best Gary Busey monologue ever committed to celluloid. Also, the hunter in the leather mask is a wee bit over the top.
Worth $19.95 (about $39 in today’s money)? You be the judge.
Apologies for the dearth of posting both today and this week, but we have solid excuses: we’re still doing press for the Alcoholics Anonymous piece (as evidenced by the above clip from today’s The Brian Lehrer Show), and we’re saving our choicest cuts for next week’s guest stint over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog. Yes, we’ve been called up from the blogosphere’s equivalent of Single A ball all the way to the majors. Hope you’ll follow us over there starting on Monday, and forgive our forthcoming dropping of the royal “we”—something about it just won’t vibe with Coates’ more intimate tone. For a week, then, we will not be khans, but rather simple farmers on the intellectual steppe, doing our best to fill incredibly massive shoes. Keep your fingers crossed that our nerves won’t get the better of us.
It would take a rock-hard heart not to be moved by the plight of the Iroquois national lacrosse team, which has been frustrated in its efforts to attend the world championships in England. The team’s members hoped to travel on passports issued by their tribal government, but the British have refused to recognize the documents—despite the State Department’s written assurance that the athletes will, indeed, be let back into the United States.
Though we sympathize with the Iroquois, they really shouldn’t have been surprised by the treatment they’ve received. The State Department has long warned tribal passport holders that they travel abroad at their own risk, and that the American government is hesitant to do anything on their behalf should they be denied entry into a foreign country. In fact, the United States appears to consider tribal passports roughly on par with those issued by the notorious World Service Authority, which has been ginning up worthless travel documents for decades. We have to wonder if the Iroquois authorities were well-aware of this fact before attempting to send its lacrosse team to England—a planned test of the legal viability of the government’s passports, perhaps?
The other possible explanation is that the Iroquois were simply ignorant of their passports’ generally unwelcome nature the world over. If so, that ignorance might stem from the fact that certain tribal members have the right to cross an international border at will: the U.S.-Canada border, the immigration policies of which continue to be affected by the Jay Treaty of 1794:
Nothing in this title shall be construed to affect the right of American Indians born in Canada to pass the borders of the United States, but such right shall extend only to persons who possess at least 50 per centum of blood of the American Indian race.
Our own take is that the Iroquois may have a legal argument for the validity of tribal passports, but that they will find it difficult to press those claims in international forums as long as their documents lack biometrics. In this security climate, governments are understandably skittish about setting precedents in which they accept passports that are partially handwritten.
By the time this post goes live, we’ll be sitting in a dentist’s chair, getting our teeth scraped and sandblasted for the first time in well over a year. We’ve consumed vast quantities of dark coffee and sugar over that period, so we expect a very rough experience. Considering our natural fear of dentists, we go into this experience with heavy hearts. Please, think good thoughts for us.
The armed forces obviously have to deal with a lot of requests from Hollywood, which is why the various military branches all have entertainment liaison offices. If your forthcoming production is supposed to depict military personnel, or you want to film on a base, you need to go through an elaborate clearance procedure that occasionally ends in tears. According to this compilation (large PDF) of weekly reports from the Air Force’s entertainment liaison, for example, you’re unlikely to get the green light if your TV show includes scenes from the Playboy mansion. (Sorry, aspiring producers of Gumball 3000.)
Yet as the reports reveal, entertainment liaisons aren’t just passive recipients of applications. Like any PR department worth its salt these days, they also reach out to filmmakers in the hopes of placing products. Take this tidbit, regarding the Air Force’s aspirations to piggyback on Agent 007:
“CASINO ROYALE”· (Sony/Columbia Studios) – While in London for filming of “Flight 93” we met with the new James Bond feature film director Martin Campbell at Pinewood Studios. During the visit we discussed our services and what the Air Force can bring to this major feature film. Mr. Campbell was receptive and we’re hoping to highlight a weapons system or Air Force mission in the next Bond film. We worked with Campbell previously on a project, not yet produced, titled “Night Witches.”
This makes us wonder if the military has any hard evidence regarding the correlation between film placements and recruiting numbers, or if they’re just operating on instinct. If a 17-year-old sees a really snazzy weapons system in a movie, is he or she really more likely to consider a career in the Air Force? Or would the money invested in these efforts be better used to offer inducements such as better signing bonuses? We hope we won’t have to write a FOIA request in order to find out.
One of the creepiest things about Burma’s ruling junta is its insistence on creating the trappings of prosperity, even as the vast majority of the nation grapples with desperate economic circumstances. Take the recent Yangon Auto Show, which followed the Western blueprint to a T with scantily-clad models draped across shiny new vehicles. Yet the cars on display were little more than symbols of Burma’s foolish economic policies, which stress self-sufficiency to an absurd degree:
Ko Sai, the owner of Myanma Arrman (Strength) Automobile Manufacturing Company, said Chariot automobiles, jointly manufactured by Japan’s Mitsubishi and China’s Tang Fung companies, have been imported for sale by the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited (UMEHL) and Myanma Arrman.
“It is just like the Suzuki model manufactured by the Ministry of Industry No. 2. We bought car parts from factories in China and then reassembled them in the Shwe Pyi Thar industrial zone in Rangoon. Nice design and reasonable price attracts the customers,” Ko Sai said.
He said the Chariot MVP car comes in three price ranges: 63 million kyat (US $63,000), 58 million and 53 million.
Yes, you read that right: the cheapest Chariot MVP retails for more than most Mercedes-Benz C-Class cars, largely because Burma’s trade laws bar the import of most fully assembled vehicles. And the government is serious about preventing the smuggling of cars across the border with Thailand, punishing miscreants with instant confiscation. Never mind that this policy is apparently killing valuable trade and driving up food prices—all that matters to the junta is that the nation’s vehicles can plausibly carry the “Made in Burma” tag. Madness.
We’re in the process of trying to find an insightful passage to read at a pal’s forthcoming wedding. (Suggestions welcome, by the way.) It’s taking us much longer than anticipated, in large part because we keep getting sidetracked by old favorites we’ve discovered while ransacking our overstuffed bookshelves. Case in point: Lawrence Wright’s Saints and Sinners, a collection of profiles of larger-than-life religious figures. Upon finding the book, we immediately flipped to the passage that is etched into our memory, from the beginning of the chapter on Satanist/showman/charlatan Anton LaVey. Wright describes a dinner with LaVey and Blanche Barton, which he quickly mars with a hilarious faux pas:
“What dressing would you like on your salad?” the waiter inquired.
“Bleu cheese,” I said.
LaVey and Barton exchanged a look, then returned to their menus. Unknowingly, I had just failed the LaVey Salad Dressing Test. According to The Satanic Witch, his guide for lovelorn sorceresses, “dominant masculine archetypes [like LaVey] prefer sweet dressings, such as French, Russian, Thousand Island,” because the smell resembles the odor of a woman’s sexual organs. Bleu cheese, on the other hand, is “reminiscent of a locker full of well-worn jock straps.” It is suitable, really, only for wimps, homophiles, and submissive females. LaVey ordered the twenty-two-ounce porterhouse steak, rare.
We reckon that it’s for the best that LaVey was cremated after his death in 1997. Otherwise, he would be constantly spinning in his grave due to the soaring popularity of Buffalo Wild Wings.
As we pound away at day-job matters this afternoon, please take a moment to enjoy our favorite X-Clan track above. We’ve taken the liberty of fast-forwarding past the esoteric sermon that precedes the actual music. But if you’d like to learn more about the concept of, er, “white kryptonite,” by all means, please rewind.
We encourage you to click on the photo above to get a better sense of the Christophe Colomb‘s truly gargantuan size. The recently christened cargo ship is one of the world’s largest, capable of carrying over 13,300 containers of goods. That’s more than six times the size of most container ships, which typically top out at 2,000 TEUs.
The Christophe Colomb is apparently a harbinger of things to come in the shipping industry, where companies are increasingly keen to order so-called “post Panamax” vessels. This trend is going strong despite the global economic crisis, which has caused average shipping rates to take a nosedive (as tracked by the ever-useful Baltic Dry Index).
We’re not well-versed enough in shipping minutiae to question the industry’s yen to expand carrying capacities even as demand slows. But we are fascinated by the issue of how that yen will affect us landlubbers. Post Panamax ships and their ilk aren’t just too big to fit through the Panama Canal, thereby complicating the trip from Asia to our Eastern Seaboard; they’re also too massive for many old standby ports, which will have to be dredged to keep pace with the seaborne goliaths. On top of that, ports that had the foresight to upgrade their container cranes now have the edge, since unload times are critical to preserving margins with shipping rates so low. The move toward ever-bigger ships will thus force a reshuffling of the maritime order, as ports blessed with deep water and forward-thinking management eclipse those that rested on their laurels.
The upshot is that the situation is looking especially rosy for Rotterdam, one of the world’s deepest water ports. The vogue for colossal container ships should be a boon to the city’s fortunes; count on Feyenoord going on a player buying spree in the near future.
Today’s expedited spy swap in Vienna brought to mind an even more dramatic trade: the 1962 exchange that brought downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers back home, and sent “Rudolf Abel” back to Moscow to live out his days as a KGB trainer.
Yet there was a third person involved in that sensational Berlin swap: Frederic L. Pryor (pictured), a grad student who the Soviets threw into the deal at the last moment. Pryor had ended up in East German hands after making a grave-yet-understandable error in judgment:
Pryor said he had been studying foreign trade in the east European Communist countries when he entered east Berlin on Aug. 25 to hear a speech by Walter Ulbricht.
When he entered east Berlin, he said, he was carrying with him a copy of his doctoral thesis containing figures and reports on east European Communist trade. It was confiscated.
Several months worth of blindfolded interrogations ensued, until the East Germans and their Soviet masters realized that Pryor really was an economics geek. The thesis was never returned, but Pryor had fortunately made a few copies before departing for East Berlin. Amazingly, the finished thesis is currently available for public perusal, though not in easily accessible digital form. We’d encourage Professor Pryor to post it on his site, so future historians can better understand what made him a footnote to Cold War history.
At the end of Wednesday’s post about one of the least heralded pioneers of refrigeration, we noted that the “ice lobby” had been instrumental in frustrating John Gorrie’s dreams of freezing water via mechanical means. This notion struck us as rather humorous since we can scarcely think of a less valuable commodity these days than ice, available at our local bodega for roughly 20 cents a pound. Yet as an astute commenter pointed out, naturally harvested ice was once so highly prized that New York City had its own fabulously wealthy “Ice King”: Charles W. Morse. A fair chunk of his story is told here:
The ice supply of New York came from the Hudson River and from the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers in Maine, and the greater proportion of the supply was controlled by the Consolidated Ice Company and the Knickerbocker Ice Company. The former did almost all the wholesale and retail business in New York and the latter operated in Philadelphia, Baltimore. On March 11, 1899, Mr. Morse incorporated the American Ice Company under the laws of the state of New Jersey. The stock of the two old companies amounted to $20,000,000, although their property was not worth that amount. The American Ice Company exchanged its stock, share for share, for the stock of the two companies and then issued $15,000,000 more stock. The $35,000,000 was regularly listed upon the New York Stock Exchange…
[Morse] smoothed his way in another direction also. He was a good friend to Tammany Hall; Mayor Van Wyck and his brother and John F. Carroll were all shareholders in the ice company. Pleasant relations with the powers that be is a most valuable asset to an ice company, because it needs pier facilities. A very ice regard even for appearances would have prevented a mayor of the city from being interested in the Morse company, particularly since it was a monopoly. Yet Van Wyck and other Tammany politicians were in on it…
In the summer of 1900, the American Ice Company raised the price of ice in New York from thirty cents to sixty cents a hundred pounds, which caused untold suffering among the poor. The company became known as the Ice Trust and “Ice Van Wyck” was used as a term of reproach.
Morse erred by increasing the price of ice too much, and thus causing widespread public fury that provided a political opportunity for self-styled reformers. An ensuing investigation found that the Ice Trust enforced its monopoly through violence, and the criminal case against Morse helped bring down Tammany Hall as well. And therein lies a classic lesson for blackhearted schemers: it is often better to steal little than steal big.
Also of interest: artificial ice was technologically feasible during the Ice Trust’s heyday, and the finished product was purported to be much cheaper, too. But plans to build ice factories often came to naught because of an urban legend regarding manufactured ice: that it released noxious gases as it melted. We wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Morse was the man behind that bit of scientifically fallacious gossip.
Yesterday’s arrest of a suspect in the long-running “Grim Sleeper” killings was made possible by familial DNA searching—in a nutshell, the suspect’s genetic material wasn’t in California’s database, but a family member’s was. A paper from earlier this year explains how the Golden State decides when such a search is enough to warrant further investigation:
In April 2008, the California Department of Justice relaxed its policies to allow for familial DNA searches and the reporting of results to authorities for further investigation. The policy shift makes California the national leader in familial DNA searching. Unlike other states, California vigorously pursues familial searching as a matter of policy rather than happenstance. California’s policy requires a sharing of at least 15 alleles, additional DNA testing, and a prosecution committee review before the pivot’s name will be released to authorities. But the policy lacks any similar safeguards for the relatives of the pivot who may be implicated by the results of a familial search. California Attorney General Jerry Brown stated that the new policy was warranted because of the rise in violent crime in the state.
Expect a ton of debate on this investigatory technique in the coming days. We anticipate that the positive press stemming from the alleged Grim Sleeper’s arrest will pressure other states to follow California’s lead. And that will inevitably lead to a lot more cases in which innocents are compelled to give up DNA, because their familial connections automatically bring them under suspicion.
This morning’s all about taking Microkhan Jr. to his first-ever swim class, so no meaningful posting ’til a bit later on. The next time you hear from us, our first-born progeny will hopefully have the skills necessary to cross the Chuluut River—or, at the very least, the ability to kick his legs.
As our poor city continues to broil, it’s worth remembering a man who dedicated much of his career to cooling down humanity: the great John Gorrie, who was convinced that an effective ice machine would be key to combating one of the 19th century’s most dreaded diseases:
Dr. Gorrie became convinced that cold was the healer. He noted that “Nature would terminate the fevers by changing the seasons.” Ice, cut in the winter in northern lakes, stored in underground ice houses, and shipped, packed in sawdust, around the Florida Keys by sailing vessel, in mid-summer could be purchased dockside on the Gulf Coast. In 1844, he began to write a series of articles in Apalachicola’s “Commercial Advertiser” newspaper, entitled, “On the prevention of Malarial Diseases”. He used the Nom De Plume, “Jenner”, a tribute to Edward Jenner, (1749 – 1823), the discoverer of smallpox vaccine. According to these articles, he had constructed an imperfect refrigeration machine by May, 1844, carrying out a proposal he had advanced in 1842…
“If the air were highly compressed, it would heat up by the energy of compression. If this compressed air were run through metal pipes cooled with water, and if this air cooled to the water temperature was expanded down to atmospheric pressure again, very low temperatures could be obtained, even low enough to freeze water in pans in a refrigerator box.” The compressor could be powered by horse, water, wind driven sails, or steampower.
Gorrie eventually earned a hard-fought patent for his machine, but investors blanched and he died without making a cent. The article cited above blames “the ice lobby” for frustrating Gorrie’s dreams—presumably the traders who didn’t want their naturally harvested commodity to be one-upped by a manmade alternative. A sad case, but we do love the idea that the ice industry once had enough political muscle to frustrate the march of technological progress. We’d like to know more about the PR tactics they employed.
We stayed up late last night finishing Grounded, an unusual (and excellent) travelogue by our pal and occasional Slate colleague Seth Stevenson. (Check out one of our NFL-centric back-and-forths here.) The book is an account of Seth’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe with his girlfriend, using only surface transportation—no planes, helicopters, or dirigibles. Hilarity and adventure ensue, as does a bunch of juicy local trivia. One of our favorite tidbits is mentioned toward the book’s end, as Seth barrels across the Outback and questions his ability to survive the experience while driving on the left. In doing so, he mentions a historical event that deserves much wider play: H-Day, the early-morning moment in September 1967 when all of Sweden suddenly shifted from driving on the left to driving on the right. The photo above was snapped at 4:50 a.m. on H-Day, as cars switched lanes. They then remained motionless for ten minutes, and started driving again at the stroke of five o’clock. Not a single injury was recorded.
There is something wonderfully Scandinavian about the orderliness of this transition, which the Swedish government prepared for in the most exhaustive manner imaginable. Even the incarcerated were looped into the H-Day plans:
To make sure its prisoners go right when they emerge into freedom, Sweden is including prisons in a massive publicity campaign preceding the nation’s changeover to right-hand driving.
“We have to reach everybody, including handicapped people, foreigners, children, prisoners, and so on,” says Lars Skjoeld, director of the Right-Hand Traffic Commission…
Eight million brochures will be distributed Monday to all Swedish households, hospitals, and prisons…Toys, soda and beer bottles and milk packages are being used to impress everyone that Sept. 3 is H-Day.
This all makes us wonder what H-Day can teach us about Scandinavian exceptionalism. One of the great puzzles for social and political scientists has been to figure out what, exactly, makes the Scandinavian countries consistently top the development tables. There’s certainly no single explanation, but the Scandinavian knack for massive organization probably plays a key role. And that knack seems to involve quite a bit of foresight—it takes a special kind of planning talent to realize that prisoners needed to be brought into the H-Day fold, too. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that these northern nations also have a traditional passion for chess, the ultimate pastime for those who prize vision.
The case against former Chadian dictator 
It would take a rock-hard heart not to be moved by the 
As our poor city continues to broil, it’s worth remembering a man who dedicated much of his career to cooling down humanity: the great John Gorrie, who was convinced that an 
