One of the first “heavy” books we ever read was Hedrick Smith’s The Russians, which came out at the height of the whole “Evil Empire” period. Before cracking open Smith’s honest investigation of daily life in the U.S.S.R., we imagined that Moscow resembled a vast outdoor version of the Death Star, absolutely devoid of color or joy. The Russians drove home a point that now seems obvious, but was tough for a 12-year-old to grasp amidst the mid-1980s hysteria: a nation’s politics, no matter how odious, can never define its people.
Ever since, we’ve been fascinated with the pop culture of the late-period Soviet Union. So we couldn’t resist posting the clip above, of a popular exercise show that taught the comrades how to shape their buns and thighs. If you’ve got a spare minute or two, stick around for what follows—a propaganda film that tries to depict the United States as a vast wasteland of decadence and murder. We have no idea what the narrator is saying, but we’re pretty sure he doesn’t approve of Las Vegas.
As long promised, we’re finally bringing back The Bulletproof Project, our series on mass movements that instructed their followers that magic could counteract modern weaponry. Today’s entry is one we’ve been researching for ages: Northern Rhodesia’s Lumpa Church, a messianic Christian movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s headed by a woman named Alice Lenshina (pictured at right).
Much has been written about the Lumpas since they suffered greatly at the hands of the Northern Rhodesian military during a 1964 suppression campaign. In fact, there is an ongoing debate in the nation (now familiar to y’all as Zambia) regarding whether or not then-president Kenneth Kaunda should be tried for war crimes. Though we have no doubt that Kaunda’s forces behaved barbarously when confronting the Lumpas, Lenshina deserves blame for filling her followers’ heads with the idea that a verbal incantation could render the immune to bullets. We’ll let a 1964 dispatch from Time fill you in on Lenshina’s charismatic ways, as well as her tragic insistence that those who believed in her could become invincible:
Alice, now a plump 40, founded her cult among Northern Rhodesian tribesmen eleven years ago, after having—so she claimed—died and risen from the dead. As the story goes, the rapid spread of her fame dates from the day she ordered her followers to strip naked during a violent rainstorm. She said she would cleanse them of sin, but those beyond redemption would be struck dead by a bolt of lightning. According to the legend, no sooner had she spoken than lightning struck a nearby tree, killing two. As the story of the “miracle” spread, Alice’s following snowballed; at one time it had as many as 75,000 adherents, though its membership has dwindled since.
She wins her converts with a doctrinal haggis of African witchcraft and Christian teachings she learned from Church of Scotland missionaries. Alice condemns adultery, polygamy, drinking, smoking, singing dirty songs, dancing for fun. The rallying cry of her followers is “Jericho,” a word that she guarantees will protect them from death by turning bullets into water…
The magic word was not much help in last week’s fighting, touched off when a teen-age Lumpa was thrashed by his uncle, a Kaunda man, for playing hooky from school…From the capital of Lusaka, 450 miles to the southwest, came 2,000 soldiers and police to restore order. The troops surrounded the Lumpas’ headquarters of Sione, named for the Biblical Zion, demanding immediate surrender. Instead, the fanatical Lumpas charged, brandishing spears, axes and ancient rifles. “Jericho!” they yelled, doubtless expecting a damp spray in return. Not water but lead was the soldiers’ reply, and soon 65 Lumpas lay dead, 50 wounded.
To her credit, Lenshina surrendered soon after the incident described above. She would spend much of her life’s remainder in Zambian prison, while her followers retreated to the Congo, where some still live and worship to this day (though they’ve redubbed their organization the New Jerusalem Church).
We highly recommend you check out this archive of contemporary news accounts, though all are obviously taken from government sources sympathetic to Kaunda. The president was always careful to note that he didn’t object to the Lumpas faith, but rather their use of violence against those who refused to adhere to the sect’s strict rules of behavior. But we suspect that his real objection was to Lenshina’s influence in the country’s north, and thus her potential to develop into a political rival. Kaunda simply chose to nip that problem in the bud, using the most brutal force possible—an effort aided, of course, by Lenshina’s sad delusion.
Having dedicated the better part of 2009 to understanding the threat posed by Ug99, a fungus that threatens to decimate much of the Eastern Hemisphere’s wheat crop, our ears always prick up when we hear of looming agricultural catastrophes. The latest comes in the form of Pathogen206, which afflicts wheat with yellow rust (aka stripe rust). Like Ug99, the emerging pathogen overcomes one of mankind’s key genetic defenses—a gene in which we seemingly placed far too much trust:
Following the epidemics associated with the development of virulence for Yr9, stripe rust susceptible cultivars were in most cases replaced. Unfortunately the resistance of many of the replacement cultivars, including the mega-cultivars PBW343, Inquilab-91, Chamran, Shiroudi, Kubsa, and Imam, was based on the single major gene Yr27 only. These cultivars represent the same genetic material (Atilla) released under different names in respective countries.
The breakdown of Yr27 was first reported in South Asia between 2002-2004, with mega-cultivars like PBW343 and Inquilab-91 in India and Pakistan showing susceptibility to the new Yr27 virulent pathotype(s). Replacement of these cultivars is underway (e.g, Inquilab-91 in Pakistan is being replaced by new resistant cultivars like Seher-06). Unfavourable environmental conditions presumably restricted the increase in frequency and distribution of pathotypes within the Yr27 lineage until 2009, when favourable conditions resulted in serious outbreaks of stripe rust in several countries e.g., Morocco, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Algeria and Afghanistan. Virulence for Yr27 was confirmed in many of the 2009 outbreaks.
Climactic conditions are currently ideal for a widespread epidemic, which could take out much of the Middle East’s wheat in just two weeks. (The current 2010 spread is shown in the map above.) The good news is that there are proven alternatives to the Yr27 wheat that has been breached; the bad news, per the usual, is that getting this wheat planted requires cooperation from dysfunctional national governments. Color us a deep shade of pessimistic on this one.
We were gonna hit you with another Bulletproof Project entry this afternoon, but paying gigs and prior commitments have conspired against us. The next few hours are all about writing FOIA requests and researching an upcoming “Mr. Know-It-All” column for Wired, before we bolt downtown for an evening of industrial design, Pakistani food, and Cavs-Celtics. Let us outro with a tune that we already know to be a favorite ’round these parts. It surprised us on an archived WEFUNK show the other day—we don’t usually go for the high-pitched squeals of kiddie singers, but the conceit totally works here. You can have the mic any time you want, little darlings.
A few months ago, in the course of writing about the phenomenal track record of the UMBC chess team, we briefly flicked at the notion that chess intelligence is a unique beast that doesn’t necessarily predict classroom (or life) success. The ability to imagine a game’s progress several moves ahead, as well as consider the implications of certain strategies before an opponent can even respond, is obviously a great skill, but one that doesn’t have nearly as many real-world applications as we’ve been led to believe.
Ever since churning out that post, we’ve been thinking about a related topic: How does chess intelligence compare to checkers intelligence? Though the games take place on more-or-less identical boards, it’s widely acknowledged that checkers is the far inferior test of mental acuity. Yet some impressive minds have nonetheless made the game their life’s work, and none have been as venerated as Marion “Two Ton” Tinsley. In the world of checkers, Tinsley’s status as the greatest to ever play the game is unquestioned. And his legend is burnished by the fact that he never lost outright to Chinook, the computer program that eventually went on to solve checkers a dozen years after Tinsley’s passing. (Tinsley did lose to Chinook in 1994, the year before his death, but only by forfeit after he withdrew for medical reasons.)
We naturally wonder, then, what it is about Tinsley’s brain that made him the greatest checkers player that our species will likely ever produce. The man behind Chinook, Jonathan Schaeffer, attempted to answer that question in a chapter of his book One Jump Ahead. He cites various theories, including Tinsley’s stubbornness and focus. But Two Ton’s chief asset seems to have been his raw memory:
When Tinsley was young, he studied checkers eight hours a day, six days a week. In later years, after he became a strong player and his enthusiasm for competitive play waned, he only studied eight hours a week. The claim was that Tinsley could remember details from every one of those eight-hour sessions.
I first saw Tinsley analyzing one of his tournament games in 1990. I listened incredulously as he began to ramble on like this:
“I first played h6-g5 in the fourth round of the 1948 Cedar Point tourney against Leo Levitt. He responded with b4-a5 and went on to lose after g7-h6. After the game, I was analyzing the position with Walter Hellman at Morrison’s Cafeteria and we concluded that b4-c5 was the right move. Freyer played b4-c5 against me in the third round of the 1952 Canadian Open, and the g7-f6 attack failed to materialize. A few weeks after the event, while analyzing with Don Lafferty at his home in Kentucky, I discovered that b8-a7 instead of my f6-e5 follow-up would lead to a forced win, but I had to wait until the 1970 Southern States tourney before springing it on Fortman.”
Tinsley said he didn’t have a photographic memory. Whatever kind of memory he had, he seemed to supplement the checkers analysis with an incredible number of useless details. Maybe the useless details were the key to how he remembered things.
It sounds so easy when phrased like that. But keep in mind that checkers offers roughly 500 billion possible positions. It would seem that a human brain wouldn’t be able to conceive of the implications of each and every one of those arrangements. But Tinsley appears to have had a wee bit o’ cyborg in him.
He also did a killer job on a 1957 airing of To Tell the Truth.
Okay, quick word association game: When we say “Bulgaria,” what’s the first thing that pops to mind? For us it’s french fries slathered in partially melted sirene, but heavy metal is a close second. And so you can only imagine the great times we’ve been having sifting through the archives of this stupendous site, inarguably the world’s leading repository of Bulgarian metal music and trivia.
The site led us to discover the clip above, from Bulgarian metal forefathers Impulse. It’s off this 1988 album, which means its release predated the collapse of the Soviet Union by many months. So how did Bulgaria’s Communist regime let such obviously decadent music slip through the censorship net? We credit the Scorpions, whose landmark tour of Eastern Europe in 1987 made Bulgaria safe for metal—and alsomay have played just as big a role in Communism’s destruction as the aggressive posturing of Ronald Reagan. Legs McNeil covered the tour for Spin, and his account is well worth your time. One of our favorite passages:
I leave to search the huge playing field for girls. I am amazed at the mind-boggling sameness of it all. In New York City, you can always tell when a heavy metal band is playing Madison Square Garden, because the angel dust casualties and the kids in motorcycle-gang gear, sans motorcycles, train in from the suburbs to Pennsylvania Station under the Garden and wander around the garment district in a drunken stupor. Here in Budapest, 40,000 kids have trained in from all over the Eastern bloc, looking like the same fucking kids! Same greasy hair, same sneakers and blue jeans, same denim jackets with 666 painted on the back. But no one is smoking pot or drinking beer. Jerry Falwell would be proud.
Fun addendum to McNeil’s reporting: Those kids weren’t wearing Levis, but rather cheap Bulgarian knockoffs known generically as panacas. Those Communist-era pants have since been memorialized in agreeably metal fashion.
In what must certainly rank as the least surprising athletic triumph ever, bodybuilder Tshering Dorji has been named the first-ever Mr. Bhutan. Though his victory is just days old, Dorji has obviously been expecting this title for years—something we assume based on the fact that his three-year-old charitable foundation is called Mr. Bhutan. Also, going in to the competition, he was the only competitor with experience on the international level—he actually lives in Finland, and has garnered some Top 10 finishes on the European bodybuilding circuit. (In addition to being Mr. Bhutan, he is also Mr. Turku.)
Despite all of his success and his charitable endeavors, Dorji is not universally beloved in his native country. And that is because in poor nations such as Bhutan, athletes are invariably products of the elite class:
Bhutanese audience has criticized Tshering Dorji of being born in a fortunate family which is one essence of successful body builders. But Tshering Dorji turned this comment down stating that it was not as easy as people think it is when it comes to financial matters.
“There were times during college days when my friends would make fun of the only jacket I had,” he said adding that whatever pocket money he got from his parents he would spend it on buying diets and going to the gym.
We find it a bit odd that economic jealousy would be a factor in Bhutan. Isn’t the Himalayan kingdom supposed to believe that happiness trumps material wealth?
While using the U.S. Patent Office’s records to try and discern what genius invented the jalapeno popper, we accidentally stumbled upon an invention for the ages: the flavored boot for eyeglasses. We’ll let the application’s description do the dirty work for us:
Many individuals who wear eyeglasses frequently will remove their eyeglasses and place the end of the temple arm into their mouth, and either chew or suck upon the end of the temple arm. Such actions, particularly chewing, can leave undesired indentations or scratches on the ends of the temple arms, which causes unsightly damage to their eyeglasses. When the eyeglasses wearer chews or sucks upon the ends of the temple arms, no taste, or flavor, is imparted to the eyeglasses wearer. It is believed that many adult wearers of eyeglasses, who do chew the ends of the temple arms of their eyeglasses, would enjoy having a desirable flavor imparted to them when they chew or suck upon the ends of the temple arms of their eyeglasses. It is believed that many younger children and teen-agers, who might not be wearing prescription eyeglasses, but rather sunglasses, would also enjoy having a desirable flavor imparted to them if they chew on the temple arms of their sunglasses…
The present invention includes a generally tubular shaped member having inner and outer surfaces, at least a portion of the inner surface closely conforming to the outer surface of the temple arm end portion; and at least the outer surface of the tubular shaped member being flavored with a fruit, candy, or spice flavor, whereby upon an eyeglasses wearer chewing or sucking upon the outer surface of the tubular shaped member, the fruit, candy, or spice flavor is imparted to the eyeglasses wearer. A further feature of the present invention is that the boot member may be formed of a plastic material which is impregnated with the fruit, candy, or spice flavor.
Upon discovering the boot, we obviously couldn’t help but think of the invention that helped Navin R. Johnson become a zillionaire (at least until that killer class-action lawsuit). But the Opti-Grab was never celebrated on a t-shirt.
Yesterday, a pal of ours asked whether the following stat (gleaned from a recent Harpers article) could possibly be true: One out of every 85 humans living today will meet their end as a result of a vehicular accident. That figure may sound ridiculously astronomical, but data from the World Health Organization lends some powerful support to the factoid’s veracity. According to the WHO, 2.2 percent of 2004 deaths were attributable to “road traffic injuries.” (We’re not sure why there’s a discrepancy between that figure and the Harpers one, but we’ll just assume it’s a definitional issue.) As you can see above, the situation is projected to get many times worse over the next 20 years, as car ownership becomes more prevalent in China, India, Brazil, and elsewhere.
Even more surprising than the lethality of motor-vehicle traffic was this WHO tidbit on the people who suffer most from mankind’s need for speed:
Almost half of those who die in road traffic crashes are pedestrians, cyclists or users of motorized two-wheelers–collectively known as “vulnerable road users”–and this proportion is higher in the poorer economies of the world. For example, while in the high-income countries of the Americas Region 65 percent of reported road deaths are among vehicle occupants, this situation is very different in the low-income and middle-income countries of the Western Pacific Region where 70 percent of reported road deaths are among vulnerable road users. The report suggests that not enough is being done to meet the needs of these vulnerable groups. For instance, speed is a key risk factor for injury among pedestrians and cyclists, and yet only 29 percent of countries meet basic criteria for reducing speed in urban areas, while less than 10 percent of countries rate the enforcement of their speed limits as effective.
It makes sense that these countries would have problems with enforcement, as it requires oodles of money to pay for well-trained, well-equipped, non-corruptible police. So what’s left to turn the tide? As this WHO report makes clear, our best (and cheapest) option may be the humble speed bump, combined with center-of-the-road pedestrian havens. True, motorists hate speed bumps, but the cost-benefit here has to tilt in favor of the physical alteration that will save lives. Simply reducing average urban speed by seven miles per hour should be sufficient to prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year.
If the speed bump can, indeed, reverse the worrying trend of global road deaths, we can thank the town of Chatham, N.J., for its long-ago innovation. And at this point, Jersey could definitely use a public-relations counterweight to its increasingly disturbing image.
A treasured Friend o’ Microkhan recently directed us toward this insightful yet depressing Foreign Policy piece, about the seemingly endless nature of Africa’s various armed conflicts. The author makes a convincing case that we do ourselves a disservice by trying to understand these ultra-violent clashes as wars, since one side usually has no interest in seeking peace. In other words, an outfit such as the Lord’s Resistance Army shouldn’t be viewed as an army at all, but rather a criminal enterprise whose power is perpetuated only by continued strife.
This cogent argument made us think of what might be construed as the LRA’s early 19th century equivalent: The Thuggees of India, immortalized in pop culture by that infamous heart scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The British firmly believed that the Thuggees were an organized movement dedicated to the veneration of the goddess Kali, who allegedly demanded human sacrifice. The Thuggees were thus blamed for tens of thousands of ritual strangulations, usually involving ceremonial yellow scarves. The British so feared this “movement” that they organized a systematic campaign of suppression, under the notoriously brutal William Henry Sleeman.
But did the British err in perceiving thuggee as an organized movement with clear goals, much like the well-intentioned souls who believe that Africa’s rebel movements have an interest in peace? Kim Wagner has dedicated much of his career to arguing that the thuggees were not sinister cultists, but rather simple (albeit vicious) bandits. The essence of his thesis can be found here:
I feel it safe to assert that travellers were strangled and plundered by bands of robbers in early 19th century India if not earlier…The men involved were part of the military labour market, sometimes joining larger armies and sometimes serving petty zemindars, and when faced with demobilization they had to find other ways of gaining a livelihood. In other words, Thuggee was the continuation of a predatory lifestyle under well-regulated circumstances by men thus deprived of the means for open plunder. As opposed to Sleeman’s claim being a thug was not a caste-like identity, thuggee was not motivated by religious zeal and it was certainly not centrally organized.
You can see, then, why the thuggee narrative made sense for the British. It was much easier to sell the paymasters back in London on an anti-cultist drive than a crusade against part-time bandits who occasionally staffed the very militias critical to the Empire’s local control.
Oh, and don’t forget, the thuggee riff made for excellent copy. The Tom Clancy of the late 1830s was a man named Phillip Meadows Taylor, and his most sensational best seller was Confessions of a Thug. Maybe it’s just us, but Confessions of a Temporarily Demobilized Soldier doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
The sitter’s deathly ill and the Grand Empress is at JFK picking up a shipment of lacey undergarments (slightly NSFW), so Microkhan Jr. is our sole responsibility ’til his afternoon playdate. That means no time for words o’ wisdom this morning, an announcement we make with heavy hearts. Hope to get back to y’all once the progeny is off our hands; in the meantime, check out the video above from Sai Sai, the most famous rapper in all of MyanmarBurma. (Rational for our word choice to be found here.) Apparently the children of the nation’s power elite enjoy hip-hop with a K-pop twist. Sai Sai himself comes from such a privileged background; his grandfather was reportedly a Shan nobleman who helped found modern Burma. As such, the 31-year-old rapper is reluctant to rock the boat in advance of the country’s upcoming elections—er, “elections.” Though given the conditions in Burmese prisons, we can’t necessarily say we’d make a more courageous choice.
Back in the 1930s, a New York subway conductor named Manuel Velazquez befriended a middling boxer named Pete “Kid Indian” Nebo. Like many pugilists of the era, Nebo fought two to three times per week in order to make ends meet. As a result of his athletic pursuit, Nebo suffered terrible brain damage, and was forced to live out his final days in a mental hospital. Saddened by his pal’s decrepit end, Velazquez decided to crusade against boxing. To that end, he began clipping out newspaper articles about the sports’ numerous fatalities, dating all the way back to the bare-knuckle era. This collection is now our best source of data on boxing’s historic lethality, consisting of 1,465 documented cases of deaths linked to boxing.
This 2007 presentation by the collection’s current curator is well worth a gander, particularly for its discussion of how fatalities inevitably fall after a high-profile tragedy compels reform. One such incident involved poor Willie Classen, whose death in 1979 altered the sport forever—not to mention for the better:
Two significant court cases followed the death of Willie Classen in 1979. One (Classen v. State of New York, 131 Misc. 2d 346 (1985)/500 N.Y.S. 2d 460 (Ct. Cl. 1985)) led to a requirement for ambulances at fight venues, and the other (Classen v. Izquierdo, 137 Misc. 2d 489 (1987)/ 520 N.Y.S. 2d 999 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1987) established the precedent that a ringside doctor’s failure to stop a fight on medical grounds could subject him to charges of malpractice.
Also of note: “Boxers do not always lose the bouts that cause their deaths. Since 1890, about 5% of boxers who died won their final bout.”
Contrary to our expectations, the Haim Saban profile in this week’s New Yorker is a killer read. We had no idea that the man’s empire began with a spectacular insight about cartoon music royalties, or that kiddie-show billionaires have such awesome pull with world leaders. And there is at least one classic reporting detail, in which the author describes Saban crediting his palatial Beverly Hills pad’s existence to “five retards in spandex.”
That uncouth remark refers, of course, to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the cheesy show that Saban developed in the early 1990s, and which eventually helped land him in the billionaires club. The profile sort of glosses over the show’s birth and early success, choosing instead to focus on the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that led to Saban’s brief alliance with Rupert Murdoch. That’s understandable, but a shame, because there’s a forgotten Power Rangers anecdote that reveals a lot about Saban’s ruthlessness. It’s behind a paywall, so we’ll just quote the essence:
There’s always a happy ending to each episode of the top-rated kids show “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.” But several cast members who hired a manager to boost their low wages are in danger of becoming orphaned morphins.
While the Fox show has morphed into the most popular and profitable kids show on TV and become a merchandising juggernaut worth an estimated $ 1 billion, the six stars are upset they’re not sharing in the riches. Each is pulling down an estimated $60,000 or so a year — not a lot for actors involved in a runaway hit series that can’t produce enough toys to keep shelves stocked. (Cast members make no money from the massive merchandising blitz.)
Three of the kids hired a manager, Ingrid Wang, who pressed for more bucks. Now the show’s producer, Haim Saban, has set up a large-scale casting call for new rangers.
Some felt the message was clear that the cast would be replaced if they didn’t play ball.
The six rangers — Austin St. John, Walter Jones, Thuy Trang, Amy Jo Johnson, David Yost and Jason Frank — all are around 20 years old and were unknowns when cast for the series. They also won’t make a huge payday if they appear in a feature Fox will distribute theatrically in early 1995.
Elie Dekel, vice president of marketing, acknowledged that casting calls would be taking place shortly in New York, Los Angeles, Orlando and Dallas to scout fresh talent. He also noted that the storyline requires that each kid lose morphing power upon graduation from high school.
As you might expect, Saban did end up replacing Power Rangers who refused to play ball, to no ill effect. The real genius of the show was that the heroes did their do-gooding behind masks, so it was easy to swap in cheaper unknowns when a star got too big for his or her britches. And the built-in expiration date that Dekel mentions ensured that Saban would always be negotiating with teenagers desperate for their Hollywood breaks, rather than seasoned acting veterans who were in positions to make demands.
On the plus side, the ousted Power Rangers will always be able to make a pretty penny at Power Morphicon.
Crazy morning ’round here, as we once again find ourselves butting up against a brutal WIRED deadline. But seeing as how this is an especially dreary Monday, at least here in this rainy metropolis where incompetent bombers run amok, we couldn’t just start your week with pure laziness. So let us spend a few moments teasing out the vintage wrestler thread we started on last week. This time, the object of our interest is not the first man to call himself “The Mormon Mauler,” but rather the fleshy behemoth known as Man Mountain Dean.
It would be easy enough to adore Dean simply for his impressive beard and ersatz hillbilly style. (He was actually a native New Yorker.) But what we like best about Dean is the fact he briefly dabbled in politics, running for the state legislature in Georgia, where he bought a farm with his sizeable wrestling winnings (accumulated in an astounding 6,783 matches). Perhaps he could have joined the ranks of such notable athletes-turned-elected-officials as Bill Bradley and Jesse “The Body”“The Mind” Ventura. But Dean just couldn’t stomach the political game, and he dropped out the race well before Election Day. These were his parting words:
“The things they say about in politics no honest man can take. If I stay in politics, I’ll slug somebody for sure. When a wrestler gets personal in the ring I let him have one right on the jaw, or maybe I pick him up and slam him to the mat. But if I tried that on one of these politicians, I’d land in jail and be sued for all I own. Wrestling is on the level, but politics…”
Too bad, because we have every reason to believe that Dean would have triumphed in the race. He certainly knew how to pull off a heartwarming photo op.
Upon bumping into this list of famous Mormon wrestlers last night, we were immediately intrigued by the story of Don Leo Jonathan, who grappled under thenom de sport “The Mormon Mauler.” Yet as we hacked our way into Jonathan’s sweaty tale, we came to realize there was a more intriguing narrative thread to explore—namely, the fact that he wasn’t the first Mormon wrestler to compete under that aggressive nickname. A good two decades before Jonathan lost his championship belt to Killer Kowalski, a wrestler named Dean Detton was known near and far as “The Mormon Mauler.” And he was arguably one of his religion’s most important ambassadors to the American mainstream.
Though Mormonism was already more than 100 years old by the time of Detton’s heyday, the faith was still regarded with tremendous suspicion outside Utah. The tabloid press was quite fond of portraying Mormons as sinister weirdos, while Hollywood did its best to stir up anti-Mormon sentiment with a series of seedy exploitation films.
Then came Detton, perhaps the first Mormon athlete to gain international fame. A former football player at the University of Utah, the Mauler (aka “The Mad Mormon,” depending on a promoter’s taste) was permitted to win the heavyweight championship, a feat that involved crushingwrestlers who embodied ethnic and racial stereotype that Americans seemed to fear even more than clean-cut Mormons. And though Detton was eventually converted into a heel after being ordered to lose to the eminently more popular Bronko Nagurski on two occasions, the Mauler’s career no doubt convinced millions of American wrestling fans that the strangers from Utah were not so strange after all. Without Detton’s trailblazing, for example, we do wonder whether it would’ve taken the Romney family a few more years to establish its national political might.
Alas, Detton’s story did not end well, or in satisfactorily Mormon fashion. Years removed from the ring glory, he took his own life in the kitchen of a bar he owned in Daytona Beach, FloridaHayward, California.
Apologies, but gotta check out early today—we’re back on the WIRED beat, ironing out the kinks in our addiction yarn. Back in the a.m. with some more of the good stuff; in the meantime, hey, puppets and Madlib’s helium-throated alter ego.
Did the codpiece come into vogue because a bunch of Italian counts were trying to conceal their fights against syphilis? An Australian doctor makes the case:
The treatment of the disease was for the most part empirical with multiple agents applied locally, which along with the bulky dressings would give large frontal bulges, impossible to hide. The problem would present the tailors with a challenge that appears to have been met by them featuring the mass with the codpiece, while also appearing to advertise the wearer’s virility. The development of the codpiece worn by powerful and prominent leaders would not only solve the problem but also start a new fashion trend for the Court followers.
The author also notes that, at least in Italian paintings of the Renaissance, codpieces were almost always shown as colored red. The coloration, he argues, was no accident—the most common ointment used in treatment combined mercuric oxide, sulphide, and cinnabar, creating a scarlet solution. Red codpieces were thus apt to conceal any drippage.
Codpieces of more recent vintage can be seen here. (Entirely safe for work,we assure you.) Our favorite? Tough to beat the one donned by Larry Blackmon.
The hero of the criminally underseen documentary Sliding Liberia is one Alfred Lomax, a young Liberian whose life was turned upside down by his nation’s brutal civil war. After fleeing his hometown of Robertsport in 2003, Lomax landed in the capital city of Monrovia, where daily foraging trips brought him in contact with the sport that would quickly become his greatest passion:
“The first day I went and got food, and rice on the second,” said Lomax. “Then one day I went back and I saw a bodyboard. Everyone else was taking food, but I took that. I held it in my hand.” Lomax didn’t know what the board was called (“I called it a floater”) but, thanks to a Scottish aid worker named Magnus, he did know what it was for. Before Lurd’s arrival, Magnus had occasionally surfed in Robertsport — observed by Lomax. “I used to watch. I used to dream that I could do it.”
That August, the war ended and Lomax returned to Robertsport. After school and his work with the local fishermen, Lomax would paddle out on his looted bodyboard, the only rider on Robertsport’s spectacular waves. Then one day in 2005, a Californian named Nicholai Lidow turned up: he had heard there were waves in Robertsport, and had brought along his board. Lidow was astonished to see a Liberian out on the waves with him. He befriended Lomax, gave him his surfboard and promised to return.
The tale continues here. And check out Sliding Liberia‘s other, Fela-scored trailer here.
While we’re sensitive to the fact that millions of people trust folk cures more than modern remedies, stories like this one make us question whether shamanism deserves to survive in the post-antibiotics age:
A couple in Samoa ,who perform traditional healing, have been found guilty of causing actual bodily harm, but had charges of manslaughter and witchcraft dismissed.
The case relates to the the death of a 37 year old woman they treated in 2008.
Sera and Felaia’i Lavasii were charged by the police after they treated the sick woman by placing her in a container half filled with boiling water, to chase away demons.
However the traditional treatment caused severe burns which resulted in her death.
As much as we lament this incident’s tragic (and entirely avoidable) outcome, the court’s verdict probably makes legal sense. We have little doubt that the two healers believed in the potential efficacy of their cure, as did their desperate patient. And, of course, we firmly don’t believe in witchcraft, so that charge was bunk from the start.
But there’s a deeper issue here, and that’s what role (if any) governments should play in nudging their populations away from shamanism and toward modern medicine. First off, let us head off the natural devil’s advocate retort here: Yes, there are certainly some folk cures that do work better than placebo. And we acknowledge that traditional healers, because they are more trusted than modern doctors in some community, may be better equipped to tackle psychosomatic illnesses in some patients. But boiling water to treat a mental-health issue? Um, no—you’ll never convince us that has any place in a society that cares about the physical well-being of its members.
We think, then, that the trick isn’t necessarily to ban or prosecute folk healers (except in extreme cases), but rather to usher them into licensing regimes. In exchange for the blessing of the state, healers should be expected to refrain from offering treatments that could be harmful. (Skeptics as we are, we assume that the vast majority of traditional treatments are entirely neutral. But that’s just us.) On top of that, healers could also be rewarded financially for referring truly ill patients to medical doctors.
Creating such a system would be no small task for many nations. But South Africa is already showing the way.
Hewing to that most time-honored of journalistic axioms—”Two equals trend”—we’d like to declare that we’re living in the era of the ersatz sample. Way back when, we were introduced to a whole host of R&B classics by reading the liner notes of various hip-hop albums. (We discussed, for example, how Dr. Dre led us into Donny Hathaway’s sonic embrace here.) But nowadays, there are more and more artists who are taking original music and recasting is as retro, to the point that a casual listener might be forgiven for thinking they’re listening to a sample source rather than a straight-up homage. The El Michels Affair is arguably the master of the form, but French singer Hawa stakes her claim in the Justice cover above. To be honest, we actually like this version better than the original—fake can not only be just as good, it can be better, too.
We’re in the midst of whipping through Nick Reding’s Methland, which is a fantastic feat of reporting. It takes an intrepid writer, indeed, to spend such a vast amount of time in small-town Iowa, connecting with tweakers and those who loathe them.
While Methland has earned major plaudits for its human touch, we’ve been more struck by some of the backstory it offers, particularly in regards to policy decisions that accidentally aided the drug lords. Reding delves into the Big Pharma lobbying that kept pseudoephedrine cheap and legal, despite the resistance of a single DEA bureaucrat. And he also notes that pseudoephedrine could easily have been excised from cold medicines several years ago, which would have put the kibosh on the most common means of meth production. A snippet from Reding’s explainer:
Mirror imaging is a process whereby a chemical’s molecular structure is reversed, moving, for example, electrons from the bottom of a certain ring to the top, and vice versa. Pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, and methamphetamine are already near mirror images of one another. To make meth from ephedrine, it is necessary to remove a single oxygen atom from the outer electron ring. Thus ephedrine and methamphetamine not only look the same under a mass spectrometer, but both dilate the alveoli in the lungs and shrink blood vessels in the nose—hence ephedrine’s use as a decongestant—while raising blood pressure and releasing adrenaline. The key difference is that meth, unlike ephedrine, prompts wide-scale releases of the neurotransmitters dopamine and epinephrine.
What the 1997 tests at the University of North Texas showed was that, at least in lab animals, mirror-imaging pseudoephedrine was equally as effective as regular pseudoephedrine as a decongestant. Unlike regular pseudo, however, the mirror-image version didn’t cause any side effects to the central nervous system, such as high blood pressure or a racing heart: the common “buzz” that one associates with cold medicine. Better yet, mirror-image pseudoephedrine could only be synthesized into mirror-image methamphetamine, which had no stimulant effects and could not then be made into regular meth.
Reding states that this experimentation ended in 2000, when the tests’ sponsor, drug maker Warner-Lambert,was acquired by Pfizer. The implication is that Pfizer didn’t want to spend the money to develop a pseudoephedrine alternative, seeing as how the old stuff worked fine. Meth addiction? Not the company’s problem, and even a business opportunity—a meth Smurfer‘s money is just as good as an ordinary citizen, after all.
Our question then is why no federal money has been used to further this research. Yes, we understand that there’s something fundamentally weird about using public dollars to bolster corporate R&D. But this strikes us as a worthwhile investment, given the economic consequences of our ongoing “war” on meth. The tab quoted here, via the RAND Corporation, is $23 billion per year. How much would it cost to further the mirror-imaging studies to develop a truly effective pseudo replacement? Even if we accept the pharmaceutical industry’s outlandish claims regarding drug-development costs, moving the cold-medicine sector past the Pseudo Era would cost only a fraction of the amount that meth consumption currently drains from the American economy every twelve months.
This innovation would also help pave the way for meaningful shifts in policy—either decriminalization or quasi-legalization. At present, meth vastly complicates that proposition because it’s relatively easy to produce domestically in small quantities. That means it would be virtually impossible to regulate should we someday opt for a regime akin to the Portuguese model. Also, to be honest, we wouldn’t mind one bit if meth were simply innovated out of existence—just because we favor drug-policy reform doesn’t mean we have to accept that all drugs are created equal.
We realize that our humble proposal is nothing more than a pipe dream—the federal government doesn’t have the means to run or supervise research along these lines. And so when it comes to dealing with meth, we’re stuck with enforcement. Good luck with that cat herding, drug warriors.
True, some small measure of sanity may soon prevail in Saudi Arabia, where a Lebanese man convicted of witchcraft seems increasingly likely to escape execution. But the anti-sorcery sentiment remains strong in the Persian Gulf, where Bahrain looks set to join the House of Saud in outlawing the dark arts. Could this be a sign that religious fundamentalism is becoming even more deeply entrenched on the Arabian Peninsula? Perhaps, but the words of one conservative Bahraini lawmaker make us wonder if there is a more Orwellian explanation:
Among those in favour of the move was Al Asala MP Ibrahim Busandal, who said postmen faced difficulty reporting suspicious packages to the police because witchcraft and sorcery were not considered illegal.
“The X-rays show that there are hair, nails and sometimes blood in the package, but they can’t stop it because they have no power to do so,” he said.
“This means there are witches and sorcerers waiting for those packages to do something that could harm those to whom it belongs.
“The Quran says they exist and everyone knows they do, so why are we opposing criminalising them if we know that there are people who would be affected by their witchcraft and sorcery?”
In other words,the law will conveniently empower the government to open the mail of anyone, under the pretense of protecting the people from magical harm. We reckon this is how limp democracies operate; they find ingenious excuses to maintain police powers, while making it seem as if the legislative system is simply working as designed. We’d advise the Bahraini people to toss the sneaky bums out this November, but we suspect that the fix is already in—such is life in an ostensible constitutional monarchy where the upper, appointed house holds all the power.
Much love to Nicolas Sarkozy for showing off his language-geek credentials at a Parisian environmental conference. A less astute world leader might’ve taken the easy way out by namechecking Esperanto in an attempt to describe a United Nations draft treaty as difficult to parse. But Sarkozy dug much deeper into the linguistic crates, citing the planned language Volapük instead.
The question now is whether Sarkozy’s gambit will inspire his executive peers to make similar references in the future. Our fondest hope at the moment is that speechwriters the world over are poring over the history of planned languages, and figuring out ways to fit the Esperanto also-rans into their bosses’ remarks. The tongue which we’d most like to hear receive a shout-out is Spelin, which briefly rivaled Volapük as the language of the future. The New York Timescovered the competition back in 1888, when it was widely believed that a universal language was inevitable:
Within the past few months several new candidates for popular preference have appeared, the inventors of which and their friends are waging a lively little warfare in behalf of their bantlings, only the echoes of which have as yet been heard in this country. The most important of these contemporaneous rivals thus far encountered by Volapük, is called Spelin. It is the work of Prof. George Bauer, a native of Croatia, a Province of Austria, and Processor of Mathematics in the Realschule of Agram. He is an old Volapükist—in fact, was one of the first to acquire the new language, and frankly confesses that but for the preliminary work of Prof. Schleyer he would never have thought of building Spelin. It is a superstructure, based on the same principles as Volapük, but more logically and philosophically carried out…
An examination of Spelin by one even slightly versed in Volapük will show that it is a natural step toward the evolution of a universal language as easy as it is progressive. The alphabet contains two letters less than Volapük, and there is a decided diminution in the matter of inflection. Spelin certainly does express an idea more briefly and with less montony of termination than Volapük.
Everything you need to teach yourself the basics of Spelin is contained within Prof. Bauer’s original pamphlet on the tongue. We’re not entirely sure why Spelin didn’t make it big, but perhaps the official ant mascot (above) played a role in its failure. It’s tough to convince people to switch languages by selling them on the idea of becoming faceless drones.
Whenever the NFL Draft rolls around, we’re reminded of one of the most thought-provoking stories ever produced by the annual ritual: the 2002 saga of Richard “Big Rich” Williams. A star offensive tackle at tiny Gardner-Webb University, Williams was such a muscular force that he played himself onto the pro scouts’ radar. After a strong showing at a post-season all-star game, he was projected to be a top-100 pick, a slot that would have guaranteed him a signing bonus in the neighborhood of $500,000, not to mention a lucrative multi-year contract. The future appeared golden.
And then, seemingly out-of-nowhere, Big Rich turned down the dream. He pulled his name out of the draft, electing to finish his degree and become a teacher rather than earn millions on the gridiron. A criminally hard-to-find Miami Herald article from 2003 quotes Williams on his reasons for switching gears:
“This could be kinda cool,” I thought to myself, driving to the airport. “Half the guys in America would kill to be in my shoes. But my excitement evaporated as soon as the flight attendant pointed out my seat. I’m 6-3 and weigh 340 pounds, yet the Miami Dolphins flew me on coach! I squeezed into the middle seat between an old man and a big woman. By the time I arrived, my stomach was growling. But nobody offered lunch. I bought crackers from a vending machine.
All day, I sat in my undershorts while doctors poked and probed me, and scheduled me for X-rays. When I produced a urine sample, they made some guy stand and watch to be sure I wasn’t manipulating them. At dinner that night, my steak tasted good. But I didn’t like the Dolphins’ cocky attitude. All they talked about was their team and how great they were. I just sat there, nodding my head. The Dolphins noticed because afterward, they told [agent] Brian [Parker] that I was “too quiet.” As soon as I got home, we talked about it.
“It’s like Sin City down there,” I said. “Anything goes. I don’t fit in.” That night, I lay awake with my head spinning. You hear about professional athletes snorting cocaine, beating up their wives and getting convicted of DWI, and these guys are complaining about me! As long as my football skills measured up, why should I have to change my personality?
So what’s Big Rich been up to since making his fateful decision? See the clip above. It’s taken from a demonstration by Team Impact, a youth ministry that employs feats of strength to win souls.
Personally, we would have gone for the NFL cash before dedicating our lives to showing off our ability to withstand nail beds. But we’re obviously made of weaker stuff than Big Rich.
Sad news out of the Philippines, where beloved comedian Palito has passed away. The man born Reynaldo Hipolito was in many ways the anti-Dom DeLuise—a performer whose career path was determined by his incredible leanness:
Born on Sept. 4, 1934, Palito was best known for his comedy films “Ram-Buto” and “Jones Bone,” which were spoofs of Hollywood characters Rambo and James Bond.
He started his acting career in the 1960s. One of his early movies was “Pitong Zapata” in 1965.
In the beginning, he was cast in straight action films. But because of his thinness, he was groomed as a comedian. His corpse-like mien and zombie look, more often than not, landed him comedy-horror characters.
A clip from Rambuto is above. The man’s work with the fan is incredible.
Every member of our species naturally fears death, given that we can never satisfactorily answer the question of what comes next. And so we’ve invented a zillion different ways of coping with that anxiety, many of which involve rituals that confirm a belief in the spirit’s indestructibility. Few of these rituals, however, are quite as involved as those once practiced by the Yupik residents of St. Lawrence Island, a blip in the Bering Sea. Electing to participate in a pal’s funeral there used to require a serious commitment, as recounted in this wonderfully detailed history of Arctic body art:
Funerary tattoos (nafluq) consisted of small dots at the convergence of various joints: shoulders, elbows, hip, wrist, knee, ankle, neck, and waist joints. For applying them, the female tattooist, in cases of both men and women, used a large, skin-sewing needle with whale sinew dipped into a mixture of lubricating seal oil, urine, and lampblack scraped from a cooking pot. Lifting a fold of skin she passed the needle through one side and out the other, leaving two “spots” under the epidermis.
These tattoos protected a pallbearer from spiritual attack. Death was characterized as a dangerous time in which the living could become possessed by the “shade” or malevolent spirit of the deceased. A spirit of the dead was believed to linger for some time in the vicinity of its former village. Though not visible to all, the “shade” was conceived as an absolute material double of the corpse. And because pallbearers were in direct contact with this spiritual entity, they were ritualistically tattooed to repel it. Their joints became the locus of tattoo because it was believed that the evil spirit entered the body at these points, as they were the seats of the soul(s). Urine and tattoo pigments, as the nexus of dynamic and apotropaic power, prevented the evil spirit from penetrating the pallbearer’s body.
Intriguing that the Yupik’s belief in malevolent shades so closely parallels the doppelgänger concept from Western European folklore. We reckon there’s a neurobiological basis for this similarity—that regardless of social background, human beings are prone to visual hallucinations designed to make sense of the senseless. And when dealing with the central mystery of existence, it naturally follows that our brains will opt for the easiest deception: Showing us the people that we’d seen in the flesh just weeks or days before.
Given that our stance on immigration tends to dovetail quite nicely with a certain hoity-toity newsmagazine, we can only shake our heads at Arizona’s latest legislative shenanigans. Sure, we probably shouldn’t be surprised by anything that comes out a state that often seems content to go its oddball way (to Chuck D.’s tremendous displeasure). But the moral case for the bill’s veto aside, we can’t process why more folks aren’t making light of the possible economic consequences of the proposed crackdown.
In purely fiscal terms, one of the bill’s most glaring problems is the way it essentially destroys the current day-labor market. Contractors will face huge penalties if found guilty of knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, and there are specific provisions that ban things like blocking traffic while offering one’s day-labor services. The law’s intent is clear: If contractors want day laborer, they will need to obtain it from citizens or visa holders.
But is that realistic? We find it hard to believe that citizens will provide the same quality-to-pay ratio as their undocumented peers. There’s a reason that day-labor markets the world over tend to be dominated by immigrants of recent vintage—such workers have a strong incentive to produce good labor for low pay, in part because they plan on remitting part of their compensation back home (where it will presumably go farther). And for a state like Arizona, where physical growth remains so vital to the economy, it doesn’t make a heckuva lot of sense to buck that global reality.
If the governor signs the bill, then, what will Arizona’s day-labor scene look like? Let’s turn our eyes east to Japan, which has long had a domestically produced day-labor workforce due to the nation’s hostility toward immigration. Alas, as this 2000 report makes clear, Japanese day laborers tend to be men in desperate circumstances—alcoholics, the homeless, and older workers for whom day labor merely provides a hand-to-mouth existence. In Osaka, the government has had to step in to ensure that these laborers can simply survive.
A disturbing photo essay on the Japanese day-labor scene here. The pictures provide an important reminder: Day labor needs to be a waystation to something better, rather than an end in itself. And, yes, providing economic assistance to a family abroad is definitely something better.
We’re still dealing with making sure all’s cool with the kid, so just a quick check-in regarding the 30th anniversary of the Mariel Boatlift. The clip above comes from a local station in northern New Jersey, home to the largest Cuban-American community outside South Florida. Make it to the back half and you’ll see that the denizens of Union City greeted the immigrants with something less than open arms. Nothing says “I hate and fear you” like a bomb threat at an emergency shelter.
The Miami Herald has a whole Web project devoted to the Mariel anniversary. And if you have a spare moment, check out David Card’s famous paper debunking the notion that the Mariel Boatlift adversely affected the Miami labor market.
We’re dealing with some Microkhan Jr.-related issues this a.m., so no morning goodness. But in a (somewhat) rare act of narcissism, we’d like to point you toward this interview we just did with the excellent Title of Magazine. If you’ve ever yearned for a slightly clearer sense of why we do what we do, now’s your chance. At the very least, you’ll learn about our admiration for both Terry Cole and DJ Assault.
From the Mighty Sparrow comes one of the silkiest-smooth videos of all time, featuring overalls that only a true legend could ever pull off. We’d love to try, but we fear we wouldn’t even make it to Lenox Avenue before the howls of derision became unbearable. The Sparrow, though, makes the orange-and-blue combo work. More power to him.
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