Living in Europe during the Middle Ages was certainly no picnic, given the abundance of horrid diseases, the precariousness of the food supply, and the constant threat of having one’s arms lopped off by a passing knight. Yet how much agony and anxiety did the denizens of Medieval fiefdoms really experience? Not bloody much, given their heroic consumption of alcohol. In fact, it sounds as if the average vassal or lord had more than a few purely sober minutes each day:
In medieval England the normal monastic allowance was one gallon of good ale per day, often supplemented by a second gallon of weak ale. The daily ration for the Black Monks of Battle Abbey in Sussex was one gallon of wine a day, more if the monk was sick…The evidence also indicates that peasants were able to consume more ale after the demographic slump of the mid-fourteenth century, so that in the late fourteenth century both the abbot of Newbo and the nuns of Nuneaton were giving their workers one gallon of ale a day.
The heavy drinking of medieval England continued into the early modern period. The account books for the Percy family of Northumberland reveal that in 1512 the lord and lady shared a quart of beer and a quart of wine each day for breakfast. Their two children in the nursery, aged about 8 and 10, shared a quart of beer at breakfast. At the court of Henry VIII three ladies in waiting shared a gallon of ale between them each day likewise at breakfast. Calculations based on the amount of barley used for brewing in Conventry during the 1520s indicate that the average consumption of ale was 17 pints of strong ale a week for every man, woman, and child in the town. Statistics for English consumption of beer late in the seventeenth century indicate an annual consumption per person of 832 pints. To put this figure in context, in 1976 the amount was only 209 pints, one fourth the earlier figure.
The one caveat in all this is that it’s tough to determine the alcohol content of Medieval English ale. But even if the stuff was no stronger than Miller Chill, those Percy kids certainly started out their days in mind-warping fashion.
(Image of a serf using a primitive beer bong taken from the Luttrell Psalter)
Our affection for the Indian sport of kabaddi is well-known around these parts. But our taste in the athletics of the subcontinent doesn’t always run toward the brutal, as proven by the soft spot we’ve recently developed for kho-kho, which can perhaps be best described as a formalized version of freeze tag. We won’t pretend to understand all the rules, but there’s nothing too tricky about the core concept: attackers lunge after defenders, and success is achieved by laying hands on an evasive opponent.
Best of all, we now have ironclad scientific proof that kho-kho attracts far gentler souls than the rough-and-tumble kabaddi:
This study was undertaken at the Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra, Haryana, India, in 2005, to determine the level of aggressive tendency among sport persons (n=50) of Kabaddi and Kho-kno games. Results showed that the mean value of aggressive behaviour of Kabaddi players was higher than that of Kho-Kho players at 0.05 level of significance. It is concluded that the players of Kabaddi games had more aggressive behaviour than that of Kho-Kho players.
Some Karnatakan legends of the sport listed here. Funny how several of them ended up as cops once their playing days were done—Shaq would certainly approve.
Nations at odds have long resorted to counterfeiting one another’s currencies, on the theory that doing so can severely undermine a foe’s economy. But the tactic just doesn’t sting like it used to, in part because cash is so less essential today, but also because the increasing sophistication of anti-counterfeiting technology has made the gambit incredibly expensive. Manufacturing a high-quality $100 bill is now estimated to cost $50, which means achieving any meaningful destabilization of the American economy (which has roughly $575 billion in currency swimming about) would require the sort of investment that’s beyond the reach of our most ardent enemies.
We develop upper and lower bound estimates for the quantity of counterfeit dollars in circulation. Processing data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggest a lower bound of $12 to $14 million in value terms. Using denomination-specific weights to scale up the lower- bound estimate to account for the counterfeits passed outside the Federal Reserve yields an upper-bound estimate of $67 to $108 million, or about $1 to $1.50 per $10,000 in circulation. We believe that an estimate in the neighborhood of $40 to $50 million, or 60 to 80 cents per $10,000 in circulation, is the most plausible, and is consistent with a relatively short average lifespan for a given counterfeit note. These figures are relatively small, but for U.S. consumers, the threat from high-quality counterfeits is even smaller: for the $20 and smaller denominations, counterfeiting losses are tiny, at $7 million in 2002, of which less than $220,000 were notes that could not be detected by users with minimal hand inspection.
We further find that while it is indeed possible that a large number of counterfeits could be injected into the financial system, it is quite unlikely that they would remain there in use and undetected. We find the close correlation between the country distribution of the counterfeits detected by the Federal Reserve and the Secret Service particularly intriguing; we believe it is strong evidence that both counterfeit detection and incidence fall within a small range of about one note in 10,000 throughout countries where dollars are in circulation.
In other words, sleep soundly tonight—the printing presses of Pyongyang will never bring us down.
Oh, and we realize the $3 bill shown above is not technically counterfeit—just a pre-Civil War relic, printed when Alabama was an outcast from the American monetary system. The whole long, boring story is told here.
Today marks the second anniversary of Microkhan Jr.’s birth, an event that can only be appropriately honored with the De La Soul cut above. The kid sorta shares a name with the group’s DJ, plus we agree with the spoken sentiment at the song’s beginning—fatherhood makes up for a lot of day-to-day drudgery. Though, granted, it also makes us occasionally yearn for a simpler era—say, 2002 or thereabouts, when we were able to devote the bulk of our spare mental bandwidth to the pursuit of leisure. These days, not so much. Hopefully that deprivation will eventually lead to a new form of wisdom. Guess we’ll find out.
One of our treasured Japanese correspondents just have us a heads up about this tragedy, involving an airplane stowaway who apparently froze to death while concealed in a Boeing 777’s landing gear. Such deaths are actually somewhat common, not to mention quite predictable—at 35,00 feet, temperatures are insanely icy, and oxygen scarce. Yet men and women desperate to escape terrible circumstances keep on tossing the dice.
Do any of them ever win the gamble? We actually looked into this very question some seven years ago, and found a few miraculous cases of survival. Two of our favorites go like so:
Fidel Maruhi, a Tahitian native, lived through a 7-and-a-half-hour flight from Papeete to Los Angeles. When he was discovered, Maruhi’s body temperature was just 79 degrees, about 6 degrees colder than what’s usually considered fatal. Repatriated to Tahiti after his feat, Maruhi later said that he remembers nothing of the trip, having blacked out just after takeoff.
In December 2002, a Cuban refugee named Victor Alvarez Molina made it to Montreal in the wheel well of a DC-10, enduring four hours in temperatures that dropped to minus-40 F. His saving grace was a leak in a compartment pipe, which seeped out warm air. The pipe also provided him a convenient lifeline to hold onto when the landing gear deployed. Unlike Maruhi, Molina was granted refugee status and now hopes to bring his family to Canada. Presumably in more comfortable circumstances.
The FAA’s latest look into the stowaway problem can be found here. We wonder how many deaths it will take before pre-flights checks of wheel wells become mandatory—especially for planes departing nations mired in misery.
Last night, a certain sporting event didn’t go the way we had hoped, leaving us questioning why we invest so much of ourselves in supporting certain teams. Even under the best of circumstances, such fandom leads to nothing but heartache most years, as seasons inevitably end on sour notes. Is it time, perhaps, to give up our juvenile affection for our Big Three teams (the Colts, Clippers, and Angels) and move on to less depressing outlets for our excess mental energy?
That may sound like heresy to those among you who care deeply about spectator sports, but as of this morning, we’re leaning toward renouncing fandom forever. The Super Bowl defeat got us started down that intellectual road, but it was reading about the Nika riots of 532 A.D. that made us get serious about the radical move. In describing the riots’ origins, the Byzantine scholar Procopius really brought to life how sports fandom can destroy the souls of men:
In every city the population has been divided for a long time past into the Blue and the Green factions; but within comparatively recent times it has come about that, for the sake of these names and the seats which the rival factions occupy in watching the games, they spend their money and abandon their bodies to the most cruel tortures, and even do not think it unworthy to die a most shameful death. And they fight against their opponents knowing not for what end they imperil themselves, but knowing well that, even if they overcome their enemy the fight, the conclusion of the matter for them will be to be carried off straight away to the prison, and finally, after suffering extreme torture, to be destroyed. So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colours be brothers or any other kin. . . . I, for my part, am unable to call this anything except a disease of the soul.
A similar (albeit less gory) sentiment is expressed in t-shirt form here.
We fully acknowledge that this wasn’t a red-letter week at Microkhan, at least in terms of posting frequency. Paying gigs got in the way, as did Microkhan Jr.—the parenting equation has changed dramatically now that he’s figured out how to open the front door. Worry not, though, we’ll be back to full strength next week—though perhaps with a mighty hangover on Monday, if we’re forced to resort to the bottle after an unthinkable Colts loss. (Yes, we’ve got some serious angst over Dwight Freeney’s bum ankle.)
We’ll leave you this week not with Bad Movie Friday, but something else on the train-wreck vibe: a clip from the 1997 boxing match between Lennox Lewis and Oliver McCall, in which the troubled McCall infamously had a nervous breakdown in the ring. In the aftermath, McCall’s trainer minced no words in describing his charge’s psychological flaws:
McCall’s claims that he was playing possum in some altered version of Muhammad Ali’s famous “rope-a-dope” rang hollow not only with Nevada boxing regulators but his own trainer.
“Lennox was in there with a lunatic,” McCall’s trainer, George Benton, said. “Any man in his right mind wouldn’t act like that…The man’s mind just wasn’t there.
Amazingly, McCall is still boxing today—and talking some serious smack, too.
South Koreans are scrambling to incinerate their dead like never before, a trend that has forced the government to revise the law and allow funeral homes to cremate bodies, rather than ship them to one of only four crematoriums in the entire nation. That certainly seems like a much-needed legal step, given the recent increase in South Korea’s cremation rate:
According to the Health Ministry, the nation’s cremation rate for 2008 marked 61.9 percent, up from 27.5 percent 10 years ago.
That stat got us thinking about the trends in the United States. The Cremation Association of North America breaks it all down here:
Since 2000, CANA has projected the cremation rate to 2010 and 2025, which based on current confirmed figures of 2006 (33.61%) and preliminary 2007 figures (34.89%), stand at 39.03% for 2010 and 58.89% for 2025, which equates to nearly 1,909,802 United States cremations in 2025.
There’s a lot of simple economics at play here. As nations develop and property values increase, burial space becomes increasingly dear, making cremation the clear budget-conscious choice. But we reckon that both secularization and physical mobility play a role in cremation trends, too. Secular families surely place less emphasis on the rituals of regularly paying respects to headstones, while children who’ve dispersed hundreds of miles from their birthplaces are less apt to value the existence of permanent markers.
The state-by-state breakdown of cremation rates lends credence to these theories. Note that cremation is most popular in the Far West, while least popular in the Deep South. The spread is pretty enormous—nearly two-thirds of Washingtonians end up as ashes, versus just 3.22 percent of Tennesseans.
The Volunteer State rate is actually bafflingly low—the second-to-last state on the list, Alabama, more than doubles the Tennessee rate. Perhaps there’s some Elvis envy at work around Memphis.
Apologies for being late with this year’s obligatory Australia Day post. Though we’ve never had the pleasure of visiting the island continent ourselves, we’ve long enjoyed the company of Aussie compatriots—especially those we’ve encountered while roaming the far corners of the globe, since the Aussies always seem to know where the bar is. More importantly, we dig their self-deprecating sense of humor, which has included the adoption of the boxing kangaroo as a symbol of national pride.
Thankfully, Australians no longer have the stomach for boxing kangaroos of the literal sort, having rightfully determined that the practice is cruel. But the spectacle enjoyed a brief heyday the world over during the early 1890s, when the celebrated Jack the Kangaroo (never to be confused with Kangaroo Jack) took London by storm. An enthusiastic British newspaperman was there to bear witness:
He made his bow at the Aquarium on November 17 before a large and delighted audience, and fought six rounds with Professor Landerman, his captor, trainer, keeper, and friend. The contest was to be strictly under the Marquis of Queensberry’s rules, but we regret to say that the representative of Australia showed a disreputable and unprofessional determination to use his feet.
Soon enough, no theater could do without a boxing kangaroo as its headliner, and the Vaudeville establishments of New York’s 23rd Street battled over who had the most skilled marsupial on its payroll. And yet by 1897, the fad was over, entirely due to the ironclad law of supply and demand:
It will be remembered that a boxing kangaroo was exhibited in London at the Aquarium. It drew such crowds that every other place of entertainment had to have its boxing kangaroo: but kangaroos were not to be had in such numbers, and some resorted to the clumsy expedient of clothing a man in a kangaroo skin. Even so,the demand remained unsatisfied, and cables were sent out to Australia to agents and the Captains of ships lying there to bring over as many kangaroos as they could find. Kangaroos consequently, which before were practically unsalable, bounded up to 100 pounds apiece; now they are again unsalable, and are heard of only in connection with a rather rich soup that is made out of their tails.
More on the nitty-gritty of 1890s kangaroo pricing here. A superstar could earn around 20,000 pounds per year, but few kangaroos had the skills to attain such lofty heights.
The gimmick was thereafter only occasionally revived for comic effect—most notably by Italian boxer Primo Carnera and, rather ingeniously, Woody Allen.
The mid-1970s were a gloomy time in Polish history, even by that long-accursed nation’s standards. Government-mandated price increases on essential goods led to a series of violent protests, which were quelled in typically brutal fashion. To paraphrase a certain Shogun Assassin quote made famous on GZA’s Liquid Swords, it was a bad time for Warsaw.
But it was also a wonderful time to be a Polish funk musician, thanks to the benevolence of the state-owned Polskie Nagrania Muza record label. As we’re previously noted, Poland has long been a surprising hotbed of soul-inflected jazz, perhaps due to the nation’s larger-than-normal diaspora during the Cold War. And to the joy of music aficionados the world over, the Gierek regime seemed far more interested in oppressing the proletariat than micromanaging the Polskie Nagrania Muza catalogue. So plenty of “decadent” Western-style gems slipped through the system, including Arp Life’s semi-legendary Jumbo Jet LP. The best cut is above; a longer, pre-release version can be experienced here.
Completists should also set aside an hour or so to learn about the entire history of Polish jazz, a tale that begins on the swinging Warsaw scene some 80-plus years ago. If you’re pressed for time, though, this quickie synopsis should give you more than enough to prove your bona fides.
While today’s Congressional politics may seem somewhat distasteful to fans of decorum, Capitol Hill’s past is full of far more vicious conflict between ideological opposites. As noted in this New York Times report from 1856, the people’s representatives were once none-too-shy about resorting to the gun or sword when positions seemed irreconcilable—though, to the American politicians’ credit, they were not quite as violent as their British counterparts:
Duels have been fought by members of Congress from the very commencement of our existence as a nation, but these affairs have been much less frequent than is generally supposed to be the case. In fact all of the Congressional challenges that have been sent from the meeting of the first Congress in Philadelphia down to the affair between Brooks and Burlingame, do not exceed twenty-five in number, not half so many as have been fought by members of British Parliament….The records will prove that there has been less of personal violence, and fewer encounters in our Congress than there have been in Parliament, during the same number of years, since the Declaration of Independence.
One of our favorite barroom debates concerns which animal will become the planet’s dominant species once a comet, asteroid, or accidental release of sinister nanobots makes human civilization go the way of the Zastava Koral. The smart money’s usually on the cockroach, due to its alleged ability to survive a nuclear Armageddon. And no one has ever gone broke by betting on the resilience of Rattus rattus, a species that has certainly proven itself an aggressive populator of barren landscapes.
But don’t sleep on spiders, which accomplished the seemingly impossible some 127 years ago by re-establishing themselves on the Indonesian island of Rakata after the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatau. In a land of nothing but ash and heat, arachnids staked their claim:
The first search for life on Rakata was conducted by a French expedition in May 1884, nine months after the explosions. The main cliff was eroding rapidly, and rocks still rolled down the sides incessantly, stirring clouds of dust and emitting a continuous noise “like the rattling of distant musketry.” Some of the stone whirled through the air, ricocheting down the sides of the ravines and splashing into the sea. What appeared to be mist in the distance turned close up into clouds of dust stirred by the falling debris. The crew and expedition members eventually found a safe landing site and fanned out to learn what they could. After searching for organisms in particular, the ship’s naturalist wrote that “notwithstanding all of my researches, I was not able to observe any symptom of animal life. I only discovered one microscopic spider—only one; this strange pioneer of the renovation was busy spinning its web.”
So how did this arachnid pilgrim make it to Rakata? It’s all about ballooning; video here.
The recent passing of J.D. Salinger got us thinking about the small role The Catcher in the Rye played in our decision to wield the (figurative) pen for a living. While we’re pretty sure the book wouldn’t hold up should we crack it again today, it wowed us during junior high. It was, in fact, one of the first semi-adult books we kept on jonesing to read until we finished, a feeling we’d only had about Tolkien and the Hardy Boys up to that point.
But The Catcher in the Rye‘s artistic influence on Microkhan pales in comparison to that of a far more important cultural touchstone: the Star Wars cantina scene, which sparked our lifelong love affairs with distant lands, linguistics, and good music. We love it so much, in fact, that we dropped a Mos Eisley “Easter egg” quote into the pages of Now the Hell Will Start (to the immense displeasure of at least one eagle-eyed reviewer). So imagine our immense joy upon re-discovering the video Billy Ocean’s “Loverboy” (above), which offers a cut-rate facsimile of George Lucas’s creation. We’ve got it cued up to where the going gets good—the 36-second intro is way too interminable to bear. But once you’re helicoptering alongside the dude on the horse, you just can’t help but watch ’til the end.
About a decade ago, we had the privilege of spending some time out on Greenland’s ice sheet, in the company of the Air National Guard unit responsible for keeping polar scientists stocked with food and medicine. Much of that trip is a blur, due to the fact that we lost innumerable brain cells due to both frostbite and schnapps, but we do have vivid memories of the jocular scientists, who spent six months at a time living in tents out on the ice. It was an unbelievably harsh existence, yet one that didn’t seem to faze them in the least. I came away mightily impressed by their psychological fortitude.
But as detailed in this great Men’s Journal piece, not every egghead assigned to the planet’s most frigid climes is able to endure the isolation. The article looks at the mysterious death of one such scientist, and pays close attention to how such men and women are selected for their duties in the first place:
The physical screening is rigorous — it’s often said that everyone handed a winter contract has perfect wisdom teeth, and some bases won’t even consider you if you have an appendix — but psychological screening is far less straightforward. Through a series of tests and interviews, the NSF tries to hire people with a rare and delicate balance of good social skills and an antisocial disposition — basically, loners with very long fuses.
Some of the first behavioral studies on the South Pole winterover were launched after the sudden onset of schizophrenia in a construction worker in 1957. He had to be sedated and quarantined for almost an entire winter. Lore has it he was put in an improvised mental ward — a specially built room padded with mattresses. Because incidents like these can spiral out of control quickly this far from civilization, putting entire crews at risk, NASA saw a South Pole winter deployment as an interesting analogue to long stays in space.
That last point is key, because we’re deeply skeptical of NASA’s current efforts to develop long-term hibernation for space travel. We can’t foresee such technology being in place before we’re ready to visit Mars, for example, or perhaps establish some sort of permanent lunar research outpost. That means we’ll have to be very, very particular about picking who to dispatch on those missions, lest they turn mentally unstable or murderous (or both). That, of course, is easier said than done—the current screening process obviously has some flaws, though flaws that may never be excised due to the complexity of the human psyche.
Perhaps the solution isn’t to spend so much time and effort on developing hibernation technologies, but rather to devote ourselves to formulating diversions that can make the time pass quickly. Perhaps David Foster Wallace was on to something when he concocted the idea of “The Entertainment.”
It should go without saying that we do our best to keep apprised of the goings-on in North-East India, a place near-and-dear to our hearts. (Yeah, we have multiple hearts—what of it?) We were thus chilled to learn recently that the esteemed province of Nagaland has been invaded by Mary Kay Cosmetics. And the grand-dame of multi-level marketing enterprises is taking no prisoners in its attempt to turn India’s tribal citizens onto the supposed wonders of the MelaCEP Whitening System:
“There are around 800 to 900 sales force members in Nagaland alone” stated Puneet Madan, Director of Sales Development. He said that it was not only Dimapur that was showing a positive response. Other districts of Nagaland as well such as Peren, Phek and Mokokchung were showing a tremendous interest in Mary Kay products, he said. Dave Grant, Vice President of Sales Development and education of Mary Kay Asia Pacific Region and other Mary Kay representatives were also present at the press conference.
If we assume a Nagaland sales force at the midpoint of Madan’s estimate, that means the province has one Mary Kay rep for every 2,352 citizens. In the U.S., by contrast, the figure is one for every 3,529 men, women, and children.
Suffice to say, we don’t think Mary Kay’s arrival should necessarily be hailed as a great advancement for the North-East. Quite the contrary, in fact—we consider ourselves great skeptics of the Mary Kay model, which seems far more concerned with making coin off starry-eyed “consultants” than actually moving product to customers. And if these figures are accurate, that certainly seems to be the case in India.
Plenty more on the Mark Kay business model here—we highly recommend the section that breaks down the math on those “free” cars.
No Bad Movie Friday this week, in part because we had a change of heart about calling out the 1993 Bruce Willis vehicle Striking Distance. Yes, it was almost certainly pitched to the producers as “Die Hard meets Serpico…on the water!” And we’ll never, ever buy Sarah Jessica Parker as a Pittsburgh cop. But watching the trailer reminded reminded us that it’s not aggressively terrible, just relentlessly average. It would thus be unfair to lump it into the same shameful category as Hard Ticket to Hawaii.
So we’re gonna leave you instead with a post that hews to today’s addiction theme: a snippet from a 1982 interview with Gregg Allman, a man who knows a thing or two about wrestling with the lure of lotus eating. We’ve got the clip cued up to the best part, so no need to wade through Allman’s less eloquent musings.
Given our obvious enthusiasm for the effects of alcohol, we were a bit taken aback by a recent New York Times piece extolling the virtues of half-bottles of wine. Apparently there are people out there for whom a regular ol’ 750-mL bottle of wine is too much to split with a loved one—the writer includes a line about such a ghastly amount of alcohol causing its imbibers to “stumble into bed without doing the dishes.”
We initially guffawed at such lightweights, but they actually have some pretty notable company from history. As Herodotus recorded in his History, one of Sparta’s mightiest king’s, the great Cleomenes, lost his power and then his wits thanks to his affection for undiluted wine:
His own countrymen declare that his madness proceeded not from any supernatural cause whatever, but only from the habit of drinking wine unmixed with water, which he learnt of the Scyths. These nomads, from the time that Darius made his inroad into their country, had always had a wish for revenge. They therefore sent ambassadors to Sparta to conclude a league, proposing to endeavour themselves to enter Media by the Phasis, while the Spartans should march inland from Ephesus, and then the two armies should join together in one. When the Scyths came to Sparta on this errand Cleomenes was with them continually; and growing somewhat too familiar, learnt of them to drink his wine without water, a practice which is thought by the Spartans to have caused his madness. From this distance of time the Spartans, according to their own account, have been accustomed, when they want to drink purer wine than common, to give the order to fill “Scythian fashion.” The Spartans then speak thus concerning Cleomenes.
We always associated the consumption of watered wine with infirmity—the kind of thing you did when you were too old or sick to handle the straight stuff. But perhaps this practice explains the Spartans’ fitness for battle, at least as compared to those drunken Athenians. A lesson for today’s great clash of cultures, perhaps? Though don’t expect us to give up our Marker’s Mark in the name of preserving Western values—we’d rather go down with a pleasant buzz.
(Image via the Sparta Pages from the University of Texas)
Having finally closed the Wired story that sent us out to Kenya last fall, we’ve moved on to another big project for the magazine. This time the focus will be on addiction, which means you should expect plenty of drug-policy posts in the coming months. We’ll kick off the fiesta today by noting this paper out of Britain, in which the authors make a truly contrarian claim: that heroin use needn’t always lead to abuse:
Our findings suggest that sustained heroin use does not inevitably lead to dependency, and that dependency will not always cause users significant problems – particularly involvement in crime and personal degeneration. We have demonstrated that, for some people, using heroin does not strip them of the ability to make conscious, rational and autonomous decisions about their drug use. The descriptions of heroin use presented here contradict the stereotypes that are to be found in the media’s treatment of the topic and political statements about it. They almost certainly conflict with popular beliefs about the drug.
The authors are careful to note that they’re not trying to infer that heroin is harmless, or that it can be used rationally by every addict. But as their case studies reveal, there is a large population of British heroin users who do not lose everything to the narcotic. Rather, they manage their use by remaining aware of its power. Several of the users surveyed, for example, strictly adhere to rules when dabbling in heroin—they force themselves to spend only a certain amount on the drug each month, for example, or they refuse to use until other priorities (such as work or family) have been taken care of.
None of this is to suggest that these people wouldn’t be better off heroin-free. But as the paper concludes: “If debate about drugs is to be rational, it is important that this fact is recognised, and that constructive lessons are drawn.”
Chapters 3 and 4 are particularly recommended if you’re in a rush.
We’ve long been planning a meditative post on an axiom that’s caused us no shortage of angst these past few months: “People always run from what they’re best at.” Those musings will follow eventually, once things on the paying-work end have settled down a bit. In the meantime, take the above soul cut, off The 24-Carat Black’s classic Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, as an object lesson in what we’ll be talking about. Dale Warren, the man behind the group, was one of Stax Records’ in-house maestros, producing for all manner of Memphis superstars. (He also did a long turn in Detroit’s indie soul scene.) But the man obviously had a hankering to have a group of his own, and the result was the oft-neglected The 24-Carat Black. Ten-minute jams with depressing lyrics just weren’t what the mainstream wanted back in the early seventies, and Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth quickly landed in the cutout bin.
Was an artist of Warren’s obvious talent simply fated to remain behind the scenes? If you’re heart’s set on being a performer, it must be darn frustrating to see your hard work contribute to another artist’s stardom—no matter how much cash you earn along the way.
A great piece out of small-town South Carolina on an alleged attempted murder that turned out to be nothing of the sort. The “victim,” Pearl Brown, wasn’t very detailed oriented, and that was ultimately her undoing. She probably should have researched the link between head trauma and amnesia a bit more, a line of inquiry that might have led her to conclude that she couldn’t possibly fake memory loss by gashing herself on the noggin. And it was unwise to call 911 from her cell phone while posing as the attacker, then delete all of the phone’s data in an amateurish attempt to cover her tracks. As the lead detective noted, “What 16-year-old isn’t receiving texts on their cell phone?”
But Brown’s worst gaffe was ignoring the cops’ advice and talking to the press:
On Monday, [Det.] Wright asked Brown to come to the station to be interviewed. He said he stressed the serious nature of the charges, and told her if she was having a relationship with her alleged attacker, it was time to speak up. She told the detective she was telling the truth.
That afternoon, she retold her story for two television news reporters.
“I was shocked,” Wright said. “I told her she didn’t have to talk to them, but she said she wanted to. I couldn’t believe she wanted to do that.”
It was by mere circumstance that Wright was near a television that evening when one of the news stations played the recording of the 911 call, followed by footage of its interview with Brown. The detective said he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “It was the same person,” he said. “It was the first time I’d heard her voice alongside the 911 tape. I asked myself if it would have even been possible for her to have knocked herself out. But I knew.”
[Coach Alan] Sherman contacted the nation’s top high school chess coaches and suggested they send their standouts to UMBC. He also spread the word through postings on websites and online news groups that UMBC was looking for top-notch chess players. And, perhaps most important, Sherman persuaded the university to give a full tuition scholarship to the winner of the Maryland Scholastic Championship, which UMBC would host. In the spring of 1995, Sherman landed his first blue-chip recruit: William “The Exterminator” Morrison.
Then 35 years old, Morrison had been raised in New York City. As a youngster, he passed much of his time in Washington Square Park—the bustling heart of Manhattan’s chess district, which served as the backdrop for the 1993 film “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” Morrison came from a poor family, and gladly took money off unsuspecting opponents.
After dropping out of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Morrison served in the U.S. Air Force before falling back on chess to make ends meet. As he competed in regional tournaments, his reputation spread inside chess circles. In 1995 alone, Morrison won the chess championships of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. “He doesn’t like to be referred to as a chess hustler; he considers himself a chess professional,” Sherman says.
That spring, Morrison turned up at the UMBC Open. Sherman, who knew him only by reputation, was excited to meet the chess talent in person. After learning that Morrison had not finished college, Sherman offered him a scholarship on the spot. Morrison, nearly twice as old as the typical entering freshman, accepted.
As is so often the case with college athletics, the snagging of one top-flight recruit opened the floodgates for others. And Coach Sherman goosed along the process by convincing a major corporate sponsor—Coca-Cola—to pony up for some extremely sweet chess scholarships.
Now, you might assume that such scholarships would be unnecessary, since chess masters must obviously be extremely good students given their obvious brilliance. But that isn’t always the case, apparently. Which hopefully means the inverse is true, too, because we’re truly terrible at the game—don’t think we ever beat Sargon a single time.
Also, no chess post could be complete without this.
If you’ve heard of the traditional Indian sport of mallakhamb, it’s likely in relation to its supposed role in the creation of modern pole dancing. But there’s an offshoot of the sport that involves rope tricks rather than pole stands, and it’s quite a sight to behold (see above). While mallakhamb may be little know outside the Subcontinent, it’s apparently making great strides in Germany these days. And why is that? An Indian master endeavors to explain:
“I have coached players in Japan, France, Malaysia and Mauritius but I found Germans most receptive. Their body structure, willingness to learn and fitness gives them an advantage.”
Body structure?
Update Looked like we picked a fortuitous time to talk about this sport. Superstar Shrinivas Havaldar recently launched this site, billed as the first Web destination dedicted exclusively to mallakhamb. Perhaps that’s a bit hyperbolic, but who are we to argue?
Having spent some time in Alberta’s northern climes, we’ve taken an unusually keen interest in the arrest of Wiebo Ludwig, a religious patriarch with a Luddite streak a mile wide. Having served time for vandalizing oil-industry equipment in the past, Ludwig recently presented himself as man capable of coaxing a fellow pipeline bomber into giving up his detonators. Now he stands accused of actually being that bomber, a charge that really doesn’t surprise us in the least given what we learned about Ludwig in this memorable Outside profile from a dozen years ago. The whole thing is worth a close read, especially if you share our interest in religious sects that purport to be living a truly Biblical lifestyle. But it’s this chilling passage that does the best job of summing up the patriarch’s rage:
I felt as though drafts of disorienting vapors had been released into the sun-drenched room. At one moment I thought I was sitting among a group of likable, harmless eccentrics who were giddy with the notion of naughty play; at the next moment I thought that this band of freshly minted green warriors was just desperate and disheveled enough to maim someone. “Blood has already been shed by the industry,” said Wiebo, with well-received bluster. “More blood is going to be shed sooner or later. It’s entirely justifiable.” Bryzgorni gazed at the crumbs on his cake plate and said, “We’ve got no choice. They’re choking us.”
Wiebo thrives under a siege mentality, and his family can be seen walking in lockstep directly behind him, straight into the heart of impending crisis. That is Wiebo’s way. “Will we risk being hated by men for the sake of the gospel?” he asks me, as if I’d know. “Do we fear men or God?”
We wonder if Ludwig ever questions his decision to be so open with the media. Then again, many reporters have given him sympathetic treatment, charmed by both his jocular manner and homemade cranberry wine. We’re sure the Canadian journalists don’t receive similar hospitality in Bountiful.
Apologies, just a crazy day here in Atlah. Closing multiple stories and dealing with Microkhan Jr., all at once. May have to reach for a sip of hooch at lunch, just to keep the nerves on an even keel. Take the dreamy superstar collaboration above, and we’ll circle back to you either later today or first thing in the a.m. Good stuff cooking, just don’t have the mental bandwidth to make it gel right now.
Whenever we drive through a mid-sized American town that has obviously seen better days, we wonder what industry built the once stately homes that have fallen into gentle disrepair. In most cases, it seems, such towns have fallen victim to the decline in manufacturing—Waterbury’s reign as “Brass City,” for example, certainly seems like a distant memory. Yet there are also cases in which a town’s core industry was built on a dubious fad, such as the turn-of-the-century vogue for patent medicines. That is precisely how the hamlet of Prospect, Maine, briefly rose to prominence. The town’s inhabitants, it seems, had a special knack for obtaining one of the most essential ingredients in liniments of questionable quality: skunk oil:
Neither tradition not the memory of living man runs back to a time when Prospect was not the skunk oil metropolis of Maine. Even in the times when angleworm oil and snake oil ran skunk oil a close race for leadership Prospect maintained its reputation for producing more skunks to the acre and fatter skunks than any other town. In the days of the civil war gen. Heagan, a veteran of the conflict with Mexico, gained a reptuation for benevolence and a small fortune by extracting the oil from skunks and sending it to the army hospitals for the relief of stricken troops.
The piece goes on to state that, due to an exceptionally cold 1905 winter that killed many a skunk, the reeking rodent’s oil was fetching up to $6 per gallon—or about $142 in 2010 dollars. We initially figured that today’s prices would be a fraction of that, but boy were we wrong. Perhaps there is hope for Prospect yet.
We’ve recently been toying with the idea of self-publishing a book, but can’t quite seem to get over the feeling that such a maneuver will result in a disastrous labor-to-pay ratio. That said, we’ve been heartened to learn that putting out one’s own book is no longer the sole domain of conspiracy theorists and frustrated poets. The great Yaphet Kotto has joined the trend with Kill Bond, an angry (and apparently poorly punctuated) account of the time he spent filming Live and Let Die in England. There is a brief teaser on Kotto’s official website; to glean the rest, you’ll have to shell out $19.95. We’re saving up now, especially in light of this tidbit from a 2008 paean to Kotto’s genius:
In 1973 he became the King of the Caribbean underworld in the James Bond adventure Live and Let Die and got lost in his role. Kotto played the dual parts of Mr Big/ Dr Kananga as a man in awe of Bond. He copies Bond’s suits, his love of women, gadgets and cars and Kotto began to do the same in real life. Outside of the film he insisted on being driven in limousines, only stayed in the finest hotels, he drank champagne by the bucket full and travelled the world like his own version of an international playboy spy. “It took me three years to stop this foolishness,” he later admitted.
For the record, we’ve loved Kotto’s work ever since seeing Midnight Run in the mid-1980s—the prototypical action buddy comedy, and one that Hollywood has yet to beat in terms of quality. And so we forgive him such recent trespasses as Witless Protection, on the assumption that he takes such gigs only to fund the Filippino “creativity resort” he runs with his wife. Anyone who care to make a donation can do so here, and snag an autographed photo for their troubles. Again, something we’re saving up for—perhaps by canceling Microkhan Jr.’s second birthday party. We’re sure he’ll understand when there’s a signed Yaphet Kotto photo looming above his crib.
It’s not often that we read a piece as boldly contrarian as this letter to the editor from the pages of The Bellingham Herald. The correspondent comes out hard in favor of a practice that’s likely to get you arrested if you don’t take care: hitchhiking:
As a person who has traveled thousands of miles by the grace and generosity of strangers, I feel that I can say that hitchhiking is safe. I can’t find myself speaking poorly of any of the traveling companions I’ve met over the years, whether I was in the driver’s seat or the passenger’s. Nor have I heard a hitchhiking story, first or secondhand, that turned violent.
Conversely, picking up hitchhikers is known to provide conversation, shared driving time, great stories, delicious snacks, carpool lane privileges, and the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve personally facilitated that leg of someone else’s journey.
Unsurprisingly, the letter writers gets smacked down in comments by naysayers who insist on hitchhiking’s perils, to rider and driver alike. That argument certainly makes intuitive sense, and disturbing anecdotes can occasionally be found in police blotters nationwide. But is the threat exaggerated? Trouble is, we don’t really know for sure, since there hasn’t been any non-biased, peer-reviewed research into whether there is a significant correlation between hitchhiking and crime. A 2001 study published in the journal Sociological Research surveyed the scene, and found the evidence lacking:
We have also suggested that, at a general level, the decline is associated with a heightened perception of other people as risky, noted by Goffman (1971) as a feature of the urban social environment, and treated by subsequent social theorists as a key aspect of the consciousness of late modernity. The perception, however ‘objectively’ unjustified, has had real effects, and it is conceivable that in western societies (with the possible exception of some rural areas) hitch-hiking has entered an irretrievable downward spiral, in which hitch-hikers have become by definition marginal, deviant, possibly criminal, and certainly risky. The fewer hitch-hikers there are, the less inclined drivers will be to give them lifts, and any residual sense of obligation will become less persuasive when former hitch-hikers see those now seeking lifts as essentially different from, rather than younger versions of, themselves.
Obviously, your odds of being knifed by a hitchhiker are zero if you refuse to pick any up, a line of logic that the human mind naturally gravitates toward. We do wonder, however, how big of a role media has played in creating the perception that pure hitchhiking (that is, hitching that does not involve extraneous criminal activity such as prostitution or drug use) is guaranteed to result in major injury or death. Is it the old “Vanishing Hitchhiker” myth that began to color the practice as hopelessly dangerous? Or should we blame Rutger Hauer—which, it should be noted, is our default position when looking for a scapegoat for all minor of social ills.
When it comes to sports fandom, we’re incurable pessimists—perhaps no surprise given our decades-long love affair with the most miserable franchise in the history of athletics. And so in the run-up to this Sunday’s monster Colts game, we will not dare to offer any sunny predictions about the inevitability of a Super Bowl. We’ve been disappointed far too many times to put our heart on the line in such a manner.
But we would like to note two minor omens that seem to portend well for our favorite NFL squad, a team which we’ve followed through years both lean and fat. The first involves our rookie head coach, Jim Caldwell, who sounds like he’s not a lot of fun at parties, but obviously knows how to manage talent. In last week’s game versus the Ravens, we were faced with a potentially decisive 4th-and-4 late in the second quarter. This is exactly the sort of spot where ex-coach Tony Dungy would have played it safe—the man’s fatal weakness was being too conservative in the playoffs. But without even a flash of emotion on his face, Caldwell made the finger gesture for “go for it.” We converted by a few inches, and scored a touchdown soon after. Moments later, Peyton Manning jogged up to Caldwell and gave him a grateful pat on the back. The takeaway? These guys are on the same wavelength in critical situations, and that’s something that’s been lacking in previous Colts playoff runs.
Our second good omen came at the very end of game. The CBS cameras showed defensive mavens Dwight Freeney and Robert Mathis casually walking off the field. They looked curiously relaxed, as if they’d just wrapped up a junior varsity practice rather than a divisional playoff game. More than that, there was something about their expressions that conveyed the seriousness of their purpose—the intensity of their focus was written all over their faces.
Minor observations, perhaps. But we’d like to think we have a pretty good track record of successfully interpreting the scowls, smiles, and yawps of modern-day gladiators. Here’s to hoping our prophetic gifts remain.
Not much time for Bad Movie Friday this week, as we’re scrambling on the Secret Major Project™. So this vintage anti-Soviet propaganda film about the travails of Laika will have to suffice. It gets really amazing around the 42-second mark, when one of Laika’s American peers dons granny glasses in order to peep the space-race news. Oh, the non-ironic sanctimony of it all…
These are not particularly joyous days for legal fans of a liberal bent, seeing as how SCOTUS has just brought us ever-closer to selling naming rights to federal buildings. (The “1-800-FLOWERS White House Rose Garden” has a nice ring to it.) If you fall into that ideological category, let us brighten your day a tad by recalling a triumph of yore: the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal’s landmark decision in Engblom v. Carey, which resulted in a more expansive understanding of the Third Amendment.
The case in question all started with a 1979 prison guard strike in upstate New York, during which 260 National Guardsmen was called in to watch after the inmates. The prison’s management decided to quarter these troops in a dormitory where the guards lived, a move that required the eviction of the striking workers. Among those kicked out of their government provided home were Marianne Engblom and Charles Palmer, a couple who would later go on to marry. They were forced to spend several nights in their car, an indignity that spurred them to sue New York State for $4 million.
Engblom and Palmer contended that the warden’s actions had violated the Third Amendment’s ban on the billeting of troops in private homes. (The amendment is tidily summed up in cartoon form here.) A lower court ruled against the couple, but the Court of Appeals saw it their way—despite the fact that the Third Amendment pretty explicitly states that it applies only to the owners of properties, not tenants.
We don’t know what became of Engblom and Palmer, but we hope they’ve gotten plenty of mileage out of telling folks about the role they played in legal history. And if they’ve passed on, we hope they’re sharing a tall cold one in the sky with James Madison, for whom the Third Amendment was of vital importance.
Living in Europe during the Middle Ages was certainly no picnic, given the abundance of horrid diseases, the precariousness of the food supply, and the constant threat of having one’s arms lopped off by a passing knight. Yet how much agony and anxiety did the denizens of Medieval fiefdoms really experience? Not bloody much, given their heroic consumption of alcohol. In fact, it sounds as if the average vassal or lord had more than a few purely sober minutes each day:
One of our treasured Japanese correspondents just have us a heads up about 
Apologies for being late with this year’s obligatory 
It should go without saying that we do our best to keep apprised of the goings-on in North-East India, a place 
With the possible exception of 
