We’re never able to resist a story that involves marauding monkeys, and so the latest news out of Bugala Island couldn’t help but catch our eyes. As palm-oil production has expanded on Bugala, red-tailed monkeys have steadily lost habitat. The crafty primates, in return, have taken to ravaging the palms, seeing as how their older food sources have been destroyed. Rather than have farmers hunt and kill the monkeys, which is against the law, Ugandan authorities have come up with a novel solution to the crisis:
“We have plans to start giving out licenses to some people to export them (monkeys) to Russia and in return the country will be getting foreign exchange the same way we reap from local tourism,” tourism minister Sarapio Rukundo said, adding, “We are going to send our team on the ground to investigate those reports (of killing monkeys) and if we find out that it is true, the perpetrators will be jailed.”
This announcement actually raises more questions than it answers. What, for starters, does Russia want with hundreds (if not thousands) of red-tailed monkeys? More importantly, is this deal a long-term loser for Uganda? Given the bulk nature of the deal, we imagine that Uganda is fetching just a fraction of the standard price for small primates. At the same time, Bugala is part of a fairly robust eco-tourism industry, one that depends on an abundance of wildlife to attract paying customers. Assuming that Ugandan authorities will have to go to the trouble of rounding up the monkeys for export, why not relocate the animals to a preserve? Or is that not feasible because monkeys are simply to cunning for loose confinement? Having once nearly lost an eye to a Brazilian monkey who coveted our sweet roll, we know that our primate relatives aren’t all sweetness and light.
The always excellent Early American Crime just wrapped up a multi-part series on Levi Ames, a Massachusetts burglar who was hanged in 1773. Ames’ story survives in large part because of his last words, delivered on the gallows and commemorated in an illustrated pamphlet bearing the ridiculously non-concise name An address to the inhabitants of Boston, (particularly to the thoughtless youth) occasioned by the execution of Levi Ames, who so early in life, as not 22 years of age, must quit the stage of action in this awful manner. As he bid farewell to this Earthly realm, Ames spent appreciable time warning New England’s youth to obey the Ten Commandments—fairly stock sermonizing for the day. But as Early American Crime recounts, the condemned man also took a moment to offer his fellow citizens on some key security tips:
Keep your doors and windows shut on evenings, and secured well to prevent temptation. And by no means to use small locks on the outside, one of which I have twisted with ease when tempted to steal. Also not to leave linen or clothes out at night, which have often proved a snare to me. Travellers (sic) I advise to secure their saddle bags, boots, &c. in the chambers where they lodge.
Ames may not have been as eloquent as our favorite canine detective, but his words doubtless encouraged more than a few New England families to take a bite out of crime.
We have very vivid memories of the disappointment we felt upon first seeing The Phantom Menace. One of our pals had scored tickets to a late-night showing at the mammoth Ziegfeld Theater, and we ducked out of a raging party just to get our Star Wars on. The lights dimmed and the movie opened not with an action sequence, but rather with a reference to…a trade dispute? Really? Call us old-fashioned, but we prefer space-opera plotlines that eschew the minutiae of import tariffs.
GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, this week’s Bad Movie Friday entry, suffers from a similar problem. This flick should’ve been a slam dunk, especially given the voice talent the producers were able to hire. (We love us some Margot Kidder.) But as the opening clip above shows, the script gets bogged down in the day-to-day grind of engineering. Once the robots start talking about doing a “final installation” on “Plate 4156,” well, you lost us.
Listen, if you’re going to do an animated feature about robots that turn into cars and/or airplanes, something better blow up during the first two minutes of screen time. Or else we walk.
Our hearts got out to Roy Glauber, a Nobel Laureate physicist who was recently victimized by an extremely dumb burglar. (Note to aspiring master criminals: Don’t leave your food-stamp cards at the scene.) Though the local cops have nabbed the crook, they’ve so far been unable to locate Glauber’s Nobel gold medal, which he received five years ago for his work on the quantum theory of optical coherence. That makes us wonder if the burglar actually managed to fence one of the most sought-after prizes on Earth—and if so, what sort of loot he was able to wrangle.
While those Nobel gold medals are certainly rare, they aren’t quite as precious as you might think. Up until 1980, the 200-gram tokens were minted from 23-carat gold. But then Sweden’s equivalent of the IRS got concerned, stating that the medals were so valuable that winners were technically bound to pay taxes upon taking possession of the baubles. And so the prizes were downgraded, to mere 18-carat green gold coated in a thin veneer of 24-carat gold. Based on current sky-high metals prices, then, selling the contents of a melted-down Nobel prize should only fetch about $5,500 under perfect conditions.
Fencing burgled items, of course, is far from ideal for a seller. In fact, fences usually only pay two to seven cents on the dollar for stolen goods, with particularly “hot” items tending toward the bottom of that scale. (We assume a Nobel prize qualifies as rather scorching, given its uniqueness.) Therefore, if the burglar did manage to sell Glauber’s medal, he probably got no more than $110 for a symbol representing approximately seven decades worth of ingenious work.
As an aside, we explored the whole pawn-shop scene in this 2000 New York Times Magazine piece. Alas, we couldn’t work in the part about the heroin addict we accompanied to the local DMV, so he could obtain an identity card and sell his uncle’s pistol. Rough times in Brass City back then.
Rising sea levels recently submerged tiny New Moore Island in the Bay Bengal, thereby settling a longstanding territorial dispute between India and Bangladesh. (Curiously, the nations seem totally disinterested in claiming a piece of land that’s underwater.) While we certainly appreciate Mother Nature’s unique approach to conflict resolution, New Moore’s watery demise renewed one of our greatest fears: the fate of Microkhan world headquarters, which happen to rest atop a very small island. Given current sea-level trends, should we be looking to make a move to soon-to-be-sunny Duluth before Microkhan Jr. hits elementary school?
There’s a whole bunch of lightly researched speculation out there as to Manhattan’s fate, but few solid studies. The best we could dig up is this paper, discovered via NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The authors essentially conclude that the island should survive for the next few decades, but that residents might want to invest in really solid pairs of galoshes:
Climate-induced sea level rise in the MEC area will be enhanced by regional subsidence caused by ongoing crustal adjustments following the last Ice Age. Nevertheless, overall regional sea level rise is expected to remain relatively minor within the next 20 years, ranging between 11 and 30 cm. However, this temporary respite should not induce a false sense of complacency—more pronounced increases could appear by the 2050s (18–60 cm) and especially by the 2080s (24–108 cm).
The sea level rise would lead to more elevated storm floods. The 100-yr floods, ranging between 3 and 3.5 m in the 2020s would rise to 3.1–3.8 m by the 2050s, and 3.2–4.2 m in the 2080s. A significant corollary will be the marked reduction in the flood return period. The 100-yr flood within the MEC region would have a probability of recurrence once in 80 to 43 years by the 2020s, 68 to 19 years by the 2050s, and 60 to as often as 4 years, on average, by the 2080s. The area outlined by the 10-ft contour (3 m) in New York City and environs could have a likelihood of flooding once in 50 to as often as every 5.5 years, on average, by the 2080s.
The areas most at risk are those downtown, specifically the Battery Park neighborhood, which could actually disappear beneath the Harbor’s gentle waves. Fortunately, our beloved Atlah is not mentioned in the report—perhaps because our local park boasts one of the island’s highest points. Perhaps this means that, when the waters do roll in, the neighborhood will no longer reside in the livability cellar.
The 1960 Newport Jazz Festival is perhaps best remembered for Anita O’Day’s legendary rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown”—a performance she later found herself unable to recall, due to the fact that she was strung out on heroin when she took the stage. But while we can’t help but get shivers when O’Day croons, our favorite bit from those summer concerts is John Lee Hooker’s turn fronting Muddy Waters’ band (above). Strap on the noise-canceling headphones and give a listen—it’s epic.
In the midst of researching the economic downsides of bride prices, we came across this recent study from Tanzania, where money always changes hands before a young couple’s nuptials. As noted in the chart above, girls who toil in the fields attract far greater bride prices than peers who stick close to home:
Using an instrumental variables strategy, we show that child labor in agricultural activities is significantly associated with better outcomes in terms of family wealth, particularly for physical assets, land, and bride prices. Although preliminary, our results suggest that agricultural work by children is being positively valued on the marriage market, whereas household child labor work is being penalized.
It’s easy to see why this is the case: agriculture is by far the biggest component of Tanzania’s economy. But if bride prices were abolished, would families be less inclined to put their daughters to work in the fields? That would seem to be a long-term good for a nation looking to decrease its reliance on farming.
More posts on the distorting effects of bride prices soon. In the meantime, here are the arguments for and against the practice.
With the start of the World Cup less than two months away, South African cops are working hard to stem the tide of counterfeit jerseys:
A Swazi man was on Saturday night arrested at the Oshoek Border gate after allegedly being found with 12,000 fake World Cup soccer shirts worth E3.6million.
SAPS spokesman Colonel Vishnu Naidoo yesterday confirmed the arrest of the Swazi man on Saturday and said the shirts were worth E3.6 million and other clothes worth E200 000 bringing the total to E3.8 million worth of counterfeit goods found in the truck. The arrest comes after the SAPS had seized counterfeit Bafana Bafana soccer jerseys worth between E15 million and E20 million between last month and today.
In watching the news report above, we couldn’t help but notice that the police captain appeared entirely unable to explain the economic reasons for the crackdown. And that got us thinking about whether the World Cup presents a situation in which counterfeiting may actually be economically beneficial, at least when all is said and done.
The stock analysis of apparel counterfeiting is that it’s a multi-billion dollar racket that provides zero benefit to national economies. But this take ignores several salient facts, starting with the impact on retail sales. As has been widely noted, official World Cup merchandise is far too expensive for most South Africans—jerseys are selling for approximately $150, in a country where the average per capita income is less than $2,800 per year. Fake jerseys can entice a whole new crop of consumers to pony up for football gear, largely to the benefit of small retailers who lack the capital to purchase official merchandise.
Oddly, there may also be a moral case to be made here. Unlike a professional franchise, a national team is theoretically the property of a country’s entire body politic. It thus seems unfair for such a team’s administrators to strike a licensing deal with a foreign company (Adidas, in this case) that puts official merchandise beyond the reach of the squad’s ostensible “owners.”
So let a thousand counterfeiters bloom this World Cup season. The South African cops should turn their attention to the violent illegal abalone trade instead.
Something sorta major just came up, so we need to check out for the afternoon. Apologies, but fear not—we’ll be back strong tomorrow, bringing you nothing but the finest handpicked information. For now, though, please indulge our recent fascination with The RZA’s creative process by checking out this 1999 interview with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. As many of y’all know, RZA’s first foray into film scoring was done in collaboration with Jarmusch, for Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Besides being the first film that Microkhan and the Grand Empress ever viewed together, Ghost Dog provided a great opportunity for two talented artists to come together in a most unusual way. Here’s Jarmusch’s account of how he obtained RZA’s raw material:
RZA would go away for three weeks, having only seen the film only in a rough cut on an Avid editing machine, and then would call me up and say, “Yo, I got some music, I got a tape, meet me in a blacked-out van at 3am on 38th Street and Broadway.” So I go there, get in the van, RZA gives me a little DAT tape with nothing written on it and says, “Yo, check this shit out” and I’d say, “Does it go anywhere? Any ideas for a particular place in the film?” “Nah, nah you guys figure that shit out, you gotta use hip-hop style, you can edit it, you can change it, you can put two together, here’s some stuff.”
So I got three tapes from him over a two-and-a-half-month period and this guy is a genius; I got real respect for him. He gave me so much incredible music by the end that I couldn’t use it all, it would have drenched the film in music. But he taught me to adapt to his style in the same way Neil [Young] did. Neil said, “I really want to play right to the picture,” and RZA style was, “This is the way I work, hip-hop style, you gotta play with them, you gotta play with them how you wanna.” So I learned a lot from both of them in different ways. And RZA made beautiful, beautiful music for the film.
More downtown meetings this morning, so we’ll have to circle back to you in a few hours. In the meantime, please ponder some words of wisdom from one of Microkhan’s all-time favorite artists, The RZA. He shared the following insight with the great Stop Smiling back in 2006:
RZA: I’m going to tell you a funny story I don’t share with a lot of people. When I made the Bobby Digital album, I actually had the mentality of being a vigilante. I got a special car built with police sirens and everything. I got a special suit built, and the suit was level-four security, meaning you couldn’t stab me or shoot me. I was like, “I’m going out at night to fight crimes.” My uncle, who was a master black belt at martial arts, was my driver.
Stop Smiling: He was your Kato?
RZA: He’s my Kato. And a couple of nights I actually stopped shit without having to stop shit. That’s the RZA, a’ight, a’ight.
We can only imagine the shock of folks who had their criminal plans foiled when a famous hip-hop artist emerged from his car, wearing level-four getup. The level of surprise surely rivaled that experienced by Minneapolis residents who opened their doors to discover a Bible-thumping Prince.
Tied up in downtown meetings for the rest of the day, so we’ll leave you with the classic Ruby Andrews track above. Back here soon, provided that Microkhan Jr. lets us get a decent night’s sleep. Suffice to say we’re operating at quarter-strength today, due to his 3 a.m. shenanigans. We do wonder how Genghis dealt with rebellious children. Hugs were probably not his preferred method.
It seems like there might be an interesting parallel between perceptions of fatness and tanning. In both cases, there seems to be a general trend that as cultures move away from subsistence living. Lower body mass and tanning have become attractive in first-world cultures, whereas being skinny and tan are usually seen as low-class in subsistence cultures.
Okay, good point. Microkhan doesn’t tan very well—our two main shades are white and red—so we’ve always kind of resented the First World’s obsession with bronzed bodies. So how might one of the primary banes of our existence arisen in the first place?
We’d like to place the blame squarely on a great man, the Danish physician Niels Ryberg Finsen, who suffered from an undiagnosed case of Pick’s disease. Finsen’s personal medical situation inspired him to contemplate the effects of the Sun:
The disease was responsible for my starting investigations on light: I suffered from anaemia and tiredness, and since I lived in a house facing the north, I began to believe that I might be helped if I received more sun. I therefore spent as much time as possible in its rays. As an enthusiastic medical man I was of course interested to know what benefit the sun really gave. I considered it from tbe physiological point of view but got no answer. I drew the conclusion that I was right and the physiology wrong. From this time (about 1888) I collected all possible observations about animals seeking the sun, and my conviction that the sun had a useful and important effect on the organism (especially the blood?) became stronger and stronger.
Finsen was eventually awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in using phototherapy to treat lupus, a honor that fundamentally changed the Western world’s attitude toward skin tone. Previously, anyone with the means to avoid sunlight did so—thus all those Victorian parasols and long gloves. But once Finsen’s work confirmed the health properties of sunlight, the tanning die was cast.
Of course, beauty aesthetics tend to cycle, and we may have hit the outer limits of tanning’s heyday. Is Snooki’s change-of-heart the event that will mark the end of Finsen’s influence on tanning preferences? Or perhaps it’s this photo.
Whatever happens, at least Finsen will forever enjoy this awesome tribute to his genius.
Upon further inspection, however, what really wows us about Droganes’s case is the fate of his former stock, all of which was seized in a 2007 raid:
In all, agents confiscated 1 million pounds of fireworks. They’re being stored in bunkers at a former ammunition plant in Nebraska at a cost to the government of $87,500 a month, McClure said. The government has acknowledged that some of the fireworks are legal, and Droganes has asked for their return. Another attorney, Gary Sergent of O’Hara, Ruberg, Taylor, Sloan & Sergent, claimed in court papers that the legal fireworks are valued at $3 million.
As we understand it, Droganes’s claim here is solid, given that the government has openly acknowledged that some of the cache is legal. So, whose job will it be to sift through 1 million pounds of fireworks in order to separate the legal from the illegal? And how much will that add to the $1.84 million tab that the government has already paid simply to store the evidence?
The obvious solution would be to make a trade with Droganes: Suspend his sentence, in exchange for his consent to give Nebraska the biggest fireworks show in history. But we get the feeling that such a logical conclusion isn’t in the cards.
If you haven’t read it already, Jon Lee Anderson’s latest dispatch from Guinea is well worth your time. The piece does an excellent job of conveying the chaos of Moussa Dadis Camara‘s brief reign, which was marred by one of the great atrocities of recent vintage. Suffice to say that Dadis and his cronies come off as dangerously erratic; the fact that they were briefly able to rule a sovereign nation, even one as hardscrabble as Guinea, is an absolute farce.
There is one reportorial observation that jumped out at us in particular:
Drug abuse seemed to be rampant among Guinea’s soldiers; one favored drug was brown-brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder.
Our first thought upon reading this nugget was, “Well, that explains so much.” But the more we pondered this seemingly hardcore drug, the more we came to wonder about its history. What extra kick might gunpowder provide, and what might be the health consequences of sniffing a substance intended to spark miniature explosions?
So we dove into the brown-brown backstory, and would like to present to you the pros and cons—including some evidence that the drug may be more urban legend than regular tipple for West African soldiers. Everything you ever wanted to know about cocaine-gunpowder mixtures after the jump. [Read more →]
An exceedingly quick Bad Movie Friday this week, as we need to duck away and deal with some weighty matters. So we’re going with a slam dunk: Cyborg Cop, directed by quasi-legendary Sam Firstenberg (aka the man who gave birth to that cinematic abomination known as American Ninja). While Firstenberg may have some action chops, we feel like the clip above pretty much proves that romance in the Hepburn-Tracy vein just isn’t his bag.
In the midst of researching a forthcoming post on the economics of sports bribery, we’ve been learning a heckuva lot about the backstory on Shoeless Joe Jackson, the baseball great whose legacy is tarnished by the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. We dig the fact that Jackson was a linthead who spent his childhood working in a textile mill, and would have stayed there were it not for Textile League Baseball. Because back before professional baseball was a vertically integrated monopoly, some of the greatest talent came up through company-sponsored teams that played in the hinterlands, where drunken, brawling crowds and hardscrabble fields were the norm. We particularly like this description of a certain Textile League diamond’s hazards:
A favorite target for Bill Osteen and his teammates in 1916 was an oak tree in center field at Poe Mill Park inside the fence. The ground rule was that “a person cannot take more than two bases on a ball hit to a field ornament.”
Check out a brilliant photo history of semi-pro Carolinas baseball here. The ladies team above didn’t consist of lintheads, but rather milkmaids.
We realize you need no convincing that life in a Bangladeshi brothel is beyond abysmal. But this NGO’s dispatch from the frontlines of the South Asian nation’s flesh trade is still a stunner. As if a prostitute’s lot in life wasn’t bad enough already, there is now tremendous pressure on brothel employees to warp their bodies through pharmacological means:
One girl called Asha is just a teenager but she has to serve customers all day. Her name means ‘hope’ but there appears to be very little of this in her life. She is forced to work seven days a week and gets just one pound per customer. The money goes directly to her madam. Unlike other girls her age around the world, Asha is under pressure to become fatter to make herself look more attractive and healthier to clients, so her madam makes her take a drug called Oradexon – a steroid which was originally meant to make cows fatter.
Asha calls her madam a ‘mother’. The madam owns five other ‘daughters’. She gives all her girls Oradexon because she needs to maximise her profits. “The clients like plumper girls and this is why I give them the drug. I know it has bad side-effects but I also give them vitamin pills,” the madam said.
Lutfun Nahar from ActionAid Bangladesh, who works in the brothels, was one of the first people to realise that the drug was being widely used. “I remember thinking, there are all these bulky girls here – how did they get like that?” she said. “And then I asked around and someone told me they were all taking a drug called Oradexon, which is the same preparation used for cows in the cow farm, to make them fatter.”
Nahar said the drug is a godsend to those who run the brothels. “Here in Bangladesh the girls must be 18 to do this work. But this drug means the pimps are able to get girls who are as young as 12 or 13 – many of them have been trafficked, and have nowhere else to go – and make them look much older.”
The active ingredient in Oradexon is dexamethasone, which can have some nasty side effects, esepcially when taken incorrectly. Alas, we very much doubt that the sex workers of Bangladesh are taking their steroids under a doctor’s close supervision.
Look, we’re as excited as the next khan about the forthcoming FIFA World Cup—if Paraguay wins it all, we stand to make a pretty penny. But our enthusiasm for soccer’s top tournament pales in comparison to the love we feel for the Kabaddi World Cup 2010, currently taking place in Punjab, India. Longtime readers already know that kabaddi holds a special place in our hearts. And so you can only imagine how intently we’ve been following the results filtering out of Amritsar and Gurdaspur, especially those involving the game-yet-overmatched U.S. squad.
We also find ourselves unable to resist the prose of kabaddi sportswriters, who certainly dig in with gusto:
The primordial sport of an ancient civilisation made a stunning appearance in this city with thousands of locals flocking to the outdoor stadium to witness the proceedings in the first Pearl World Cup Kabaddi 2010.
On a day, when the fare revolved around some brilliant individual displays, the icing on the cake was provided in the pool B match played between Pakistan and Spain. The men from across the border entered the ground as the overwhelming favourites—as favourites as the Lions were when they were thrown into the ring with the Christians in the Roman coliseum. And they lived up to their top billing with embarrassing ease when they knocked the daylights out of a hapless Spain 61-32.
To no one’s surprise, Pakistan and India appear headed to the finals on April 12. Let’s hope they get the security situation sorted out before that epic clash.
The upheaval in Kyrgyzstan has been both violent and quick, with autocratic president Kurmanbek Bakiyev electing to flee as soon as his security forces proved themselves incompetent. It seems like just yesterday that Bakiyev came to power amidst the hope spawned by the Tulip Revolution. And now destitute Kyrgyzstan is back to square one, in terms of establishing some sort of functional government.
In the grand tradition of recent political tumult, the turnover in Kyrgyzstan will need a snappy name. With virtually every color in the spectrum already claimed by previous events, we’d like to humbly suggest the Coltan Revolution, after the metallic ore found in the capacitors of mobile phones. The name fits because, as this New York Times slideshow briefly notes, much of the people’s rage was due to higher mobile-phone rates. But to get a full idea of how Bakiyev created the straw that broke the camel’s back, you need to check out this dispatch from nine days ago:
Activists are criticizing draft legislation that would expand the Kyrgyz government’s ability to monitor telephone calls and email.
The State Committee on National Security (known by its Russian acronym, GKNB) already has the ability to eavesdrop on suspected criminals, provided that agents obtain a court order. The amendments, however, would substantially simplify state security agents’ ability to monitor anyone.
The legislative changes appear likely to place an economic burden on telecom companies in Kyrgyzstan. And, ultimately, it may be mobile phone users themselves who shoulder the cost of the expanded monitoring effort. That’s because the legislation mandates that phone service providers operating in Kyrgyzstan install monitoring equipment at their own expense.
“The government is passing the expenses for the equipment on to cellular operators. But it is obvious that operators will pass that [cost] on to mobile subscribers,” Mambetalieva said. “Maybe big companies can handle [such expenses], but small mobile companies will not be able to survive because it is a lot of money.”
Mobile phone users already balked earlier this year when the government applied a new tax of 0.6 som per phone call (approximately $0.01).
In other words, it wasn’t necessarily the infringement on civil liberties that nudged the Kyrgyz people into open revolt; it was the government’s boneheaded decision to make them shoulder the cost of increased surveillance. Given his failure to foresee the eminently foreseeable consequences of such a mandate, we’re gonna venture a guess that ex-President Bakiyev isn’t much of a chess player.
Last night, we attempted to offer a pal of ours some reassurance. He’s expecting his first kid this summer, and he naturally has mixed feelings about what the future holds in store—the unabashed joy of ushering new life onto Planet Earth, of course, but also the loss of a whole bunch of personal autonomy for the next 18 years. We did our best to tell him that the pluses vastly outweigh the minuses, but he sort of scoffed at our sweet words. People who wax rhapsodic about the pleasures of parenting, he boldly suggested, reminded him of brainwashed cult members.
At that very moment, our thoughts turned back to one of our formative literary experiences: the serialized comic version of The White Mountains, which appeared in Boy’s Life in the early 1980s. For a magazine frequently lampooned for its wholesomeness, the series represented a terrifying departure from the norm. Forget about the book’s alien invasion theme for the moment; what really freaked us out about The White Mountains was the description of “capping,” by which young teenagers were turned into zombies by sinister cyborg overlords. As noted in the outtake above, the biggest juvenile rebel would become a veritable cog-in-the-machine after being capped—an awful fate that didn’t escape the notice of the book’s young heroes, who choose to rebel against this de facto lobotomization.
That said, the capped were rewarded with bliss. And they in turn became the community leaders who assured future capees that the process was not to be feared. We have to hand it to The Tripods—they took a page out of the human-perpetuation playbook, and ran with it.
From the northernmost portion of Canada comes a salient lesson on mankind’s bottomless thirst for booze—a thirst that we’ll go to ridiculous lengths to slake:
The announcement of an alcohol task force comes on the heels of a string of bootlegging busts across the territory. At a news conference Wednesday, RCMP Sgt. Jimmy Akavak said the police seized $400,000 worth of bootleg booze since January alone.
Bottles can command high prices, especially in dry communities, where a 60-ounce bottle of vodka can go for as much as $600, Akavak said.
As he spoke, Akavak stood next to a massive display of hundreds of bottles of alcohol, mostly vodka, that police seized in recent raids. Akavak said 80 to 90 per cent of the RCMP’s workload is related to alcohol.
To put that CN$600-per-bottle figure in perspective, you need to realize that the average per-capita income in Nunavut is approximately CN$11,000. That means the residents of the territory’s dry counties are willing to spend 5.5 percent of their annual income on a single bottle of Smirnoff vodka (the region’s most popular tipple, according to the Nunavut Liquor Commission).
Our stock solution here is to end prohibition—it would instantly eliminate the black market, and free up the Mounties to tackle other pressing issues. But we’re also sensitive to the terrible havoc that booze has wreaked on many Arctic communities over the years. Is there a middle-ground solution here?
We’re just days away from the Sudan’s hotly anticipated elections, and no one can say for certain how the process will unfold. But after reading this haunting dispatch, we fear that violence will mar the nation’s fledgling attempt at democracy. It was written by photographer Pete Muller, who has been accompanying music-star-turned-aspiring-politician Mary Boyoi on the campaign trail. Suffice to say, Boyoi is taking huge risks simply by running for office:
As night descends on Pibor, Mary receives word that one of her supporters has been arrested. Unsure of the circumstances the arrest, she begins to fear that a similar fate might await her here. With the news fresh in her mind, we head to the Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) compound with hopes of pitching our tents within its walls. It is not until we are inside the compound that I learn that Mary has no existing relationships with MSF staff in Pibor nor had she previously alerted them of her intentions to stay in their compound. “I am a famous musician in southern Sudan and I am now running as a political candidate,” she explains to a skeptical logistics manager, Chris. “This man is a journalist covering my story,” she adds, gesturing in my direction. Chris looks me up and down and I know, without a doubt, that there’s no way we’re sleeping in this compound.
Boyoi’s election-themed music video can be seen here. And we highly recommend that you follow Muller’s excellent blog over the coming days, as Sudan careens toward its uncertain fate.
In our haste to post about Dave Tompkins’ vocoder opus, we neglected to mention one of the book’s best features: the fact that it highlights an epic Klaus Kinski performance about which we were entirely unaware. Despite our passable knowledge of French, we can’t quite grok the plot of 1979’s Zoo zéro based on the clip above. But we’d say it’s a safe bet that Kinski plays the villain here. How the Wreck a Nice Beach does its best to sum up the avant-garde action:
Kinski smokes away his vocal cords while speaking through a vocoder. Kinski’s “speech” is triggered by a computer keyboard and some no-look typing while he exhales bloodless blue ghosts. A couple of lions have to listen to whatever he says (something about a car crash and Mozart), as does a woman in an evening gown, one cage over.
The nexus between technology and music is obviously a topic of great interest ’round Microkhan headquarters, so we couldn’t have been any more delighted to receive a gratis copy of Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop a few weeks back. The book is everything a great piece of information art should be—killer dusty-corners research combined with insight and passion. But more than that, each page exudes Tompkins’ genuine wonderment and joy; whenever he pops off with a fresh anecdote about, say, Scottish intelligence agents or the Jonzun Crew, his excitement is palpable.
Needless to say, we learned a ton about how a Bell Labs’ creation changed the face of pop music forever, once the likes of Kraftwerk and Juan Atkins got their hands on vocoders. But let us just offer this tasty snippet regarding SIGSALY, the vocoder-based encryption system that protected Allied communications during World War II. The key to SIGSALY was the use of background noise (SIGGRUV), which was provided by an endless array of vinyl albums that were played once each, then discarded. Those albums, it turns out, were created by none other than the folks responsible for assaulting your ears with air pudding:
For the recording of SIGGRUV, the Signal Corps hired the Muzak Corporation, located at 46th Street in Times Square. Randomized covert noise was a considerable leap for a company that transmitted crooners and waltzes over phones lines. Intended for depressed office geraniums, Muzak was invented by George Owen Squier, a Signal Corps officer who spent World War I designing remote-control mine detonators. The company’s deceptive lull of a motto—”Muzak fills the deadly silences”—in a sense abided by SIGSALY’s strict policy of constant noise, though instead of Guy Lombardo, it was a concentration of millions of panicked electrons banging around inside fourteen-inch glass vacuum tubes…
More than 1,500 gold-splattered records were initially pressed and duplicated for synchronization on both ends of the conversation. Each record was one-sided as a safeguard against B-side confusion and assigned CB-trucker code names like Red Strawberry, Wild Dog and Circus Clown. As the war spread, the Pentagon began pressing up cheaper acetates in-house rather than risk shuttling throughout Manhattan by limousine. Upon completion, the records were transported via armored truck to a former girls’ school in Arlington, Virginia, and kept in a safe with the combination entrusted to three officers who were then blindfolded and turned around twenty-five times, thrown in the back of a white van, driven to the next county and dropped off in their underwear with a bag of peanuts and some kite string.
In addition to helping us defeat the Axis, the vocoder also contributed mightily to the sonic destruction of Miami.
Until their 2010 first-round draft choice inevitably blows out his ACL before scoring a single point, we will not blog about our beloved Los Angeles Clippers again. But we couldn’t let this dismal season pass without dredging up an anecdote that sums up the franchise’s eternal woes in about as concise a package imaginable. It comes from a decade-old Los Angeles Times column, in which a former Clippers coach recounts the big boss’s ridiculously skinflint ways:
“I’ll never forget [owner Donald Sterling] would say, ‘Why do we have to buy their socks?’ And I’m like, ‘That’s just the way it is.’
“It was like that all the time. It was all about trying to save money. And this was one of the richest owners in the NBA at the time.”
Staying on the ancient sports theme, we’d like to call your attention to the clip above, which depicts the not-so-delicate art of bull leaping. (We’ve got it cued up to the good stuff, so click away in the knowledge that you’ll be wasting zero time.) What fascinates us about this sport is not so much its danger, but rather its age—jumping over charging male cattle was basically the Minoans’ version of basketball. The full knowledge here, including this lovely tidbit:
There was apparently more than one technique: the frontal leap over the horns, which seems to have given way to an elevated leap from above, and also a vault from the side…Given the contextualized nature of Minoan art—at most, some scens depict an unsuccessful figure lying prostate on the ground under or near a bull—it is hard to say whether the participants were voluntary elite males and females, impetuous young men trying to showtheir courage, professional acrobatic performers at court, or captives and slaves enduring a dangerous ordeal.
Another lost season for our beloved Los Angeles Clippers has got us thinking about what fate our team would have faced in a less forgiving age. It’s easy to forget that sportsmanship is a rather recent innovation, and that athletes in the ancient world often faced dire consequences should they lose a single contest. We’re not necessarily speaking of the obvious examples, like those poor Roman gladiators or unfortunate Aztec ballplayers. The penalty for poor athletic performance wasn’t always death; sometimes it was simply abject humiliation:
An early Hittite text speaks of an archery contest held in the presence of the king, in which the winner received wine, and the loser suffered the humiliation of stripping naked and bringing water for the others.
As much as we’d like for the Clippers to be a wee bit more motivated on the floor, we have to say that the advent of sportsmanship speaks well for our species’ development over the past few millennia. Any society that builds punishments into its games’ rules is a society that has some serious problems with its power dynamics. Because ultimately, an over-reliance on sticks (as opposed to carrots) can only breed paranoia and fear between those who play the games, and those who use them for amusement.
That said, we wouldn’t mind seeing Clippers’ owner Donald T. Sterling get a little taste of Hittite mockery. Lord knows he deserves it.
The last week’s been mighty rough, as we suffered through an illness akin to that which Pip endured toward the end of Great Expectations. Yet just as Dickens’ hero pulled through the ordeal to hear the joyous news that Joe and Biddy got married, we have come through the other side with lifted hearts and sky-high spirits. We’re not quite ready to get back into the thick of Microkhan, but a relaxing Easter weekend with the clan should do wonders for our mental clarity. In the meantime, we hope you can sustain on one of our all-time favorite April Fools jokes, which we’d like to file under “How We Wish This Was Real”: the tale of an obese superhero named The Gormandizer:
The Gormandizer was Frankie Franklin, a competitive eating champion whose specialty was hot dogs. In the first issue, Frankie accidentally ingests hot dogs that have been irradiated by nuclear waste. Rather than dying of radiation poison, Frankie gets super powers, with the ability to eat anything at all, from nuclear waste to oil, to Twinkies.
Being the owner of an electronics repair shop, this new power serves him well, as he is able to easily dispose of waste that is otherwise regulated by government bureaucrats in the newly-formed EPA. Frankie’s shop becomes the cleanest in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City, which leads to some serious questions for the regulators.
In the first issue, Frankie Franklin gets his new powers just before he is abducted by aliens who have selected him to be earth’s champion in an intergalactic eating competition. He has to out-eat representatives of 75 other planets, and the planet of the loser will be destroyed.
The Gormandizer not only doesn’t lose, but he actually wins, eating thousands of living “skunkrabbits.” And thus is born “a hero with bite”!
Back here next week with posts about Hittite sports, nocturnal banditry, point shaving, and chess hustling, among myriad other topics. ‘Cause we’re about to put the “daily” back in “Daily polymathism since the Year of the Ox.”
Seems that we’ve come down with a case of the dreaded Osaka flu. Barely enough energy to type, let alone think deep thoughts. We’re doing out best to knock out the sickness with rest and caffeine (as opposed to more dubious remedies of yore). Back as soon as our head’s clear; in the meantime, check out the sample behind that Nas and Damian Marley collaboration we posted a few days back.
Primarily known to Westerners through its association with Madonna, Malawi is one of the most socially conservative nations in Africa, if not the entire world. The country’s aggressive censorship board has long forbidden any hint of sex or violence, even when public health has been at stake. And the banning hasn’t just excluded allegedly raunchy entertainments—under long-serving President for Life Hastings Banda, the censorship board put its seal of disapproval on all manner of books, music, and movies. A snippet of the madness here, from a 1990 Human Rights Watch report:
The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka was banned because of a reference to “open breasts”—an affront to public decency—and its supposed ridiculing of African traditions. The first chairman of the Censorship Board described Soyinka as “a bad man who [had] been chased out of his own country and…none of his plays can be performed.” The same chairman, Tobias Banda, apparently banned Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot because he was upset by “the man with the rope around his neck.”
The board’s most infamous decision took place in the late 1980s, when President for Life Banda ordered it to ban the seemingly innocuous Simon & Garfunkel tune “Cecilia.” The tragi-comic logic here:
The reason for the ban is that Cecilia is also the name of President Banda’s “Official Hostess” or mistress, Tamanda Kadzamira. The banning apparently coincided with a somewhat rocky phase in their relationship—“Cecilia/I’m down on my knees/ I’m begging you please to come home.” Malawians apparently took to singing bowdlerized versions and even humming the tune was guaranteed to raise a smile.
We’re happy to report, however, that Malawians used technological workarounds to get their pop-culture fixes during the darkest of the Banda years. Never underestimate the power of the humble VCR.