Our recent post about the hazards of whale burial attracted a celebrity commenter: Steve O’Shea of the Auckland University of Technology. Best known for his squid-hunting endeavors, O’Shea is also overseeing the research into the public-health consequences of interring beached whales. He takes us to school thusly:
I can assure you that E. coli is the very least of our concerns; there’s some real bad stuff in there.
The reason for burial is not because of maori insistence; burial is commonplace worldwide, and probably the most economic solution to the problem of ‘what to do’ with a large carcass. The problem with burial is that the gravesites are unmarked, and massive spikes in bacteria persist in the sands to some depth (4 metres) for at least 18 months (this is the latest data we have). Given ~ 8000 whales have been buried in our beaches since 1978 alone, that’s a lot of potential beach contamination, and a lot of these bacteria can cause very serious health issues. Thus, our major concern is the health and safety implications of this practice; at the very lease the grave sites should be marked. The danger is, of course, that people then will dig the carcasses up to recover teeth or bone; both are important to maori.
One thing that O’Shea didn’t mention, however: the potential for buried whales to attract sharks. That possibility was explored in a 2008 Surfer magazine article, which kicked off with this memorable lede:
Burying whales in the sand close to popular surf spots in the middle of white shark season is not so smart. In landed terms, it is the equivalent of placing a 70 foot pepperoni pizza between a Boy Scout troop and a den of hungry grizzly bears – in the spring…when the bears are hungry.
Okay, color us convinced. But this leaves us with a question: Is the solution to simply bury the whales much deeper, or is there a non-burial alternative that should be employed instead? Cremation strikes us as unfeasible, given the vast amounts of energy that would be required. But harvesting the unfortunate cetaceans for usable by-products may violate international law. Who’s got the$64,000 solution to this one?
A dastardly confluence of events has prevented us from Microkhaning to our full potential today. Back as soon as circumstances allow. In the meantime, take a break from the Game of Life by learning more about Ham the Chimp, one of the great unsung heroes of the American space program. Okay, perhaps “unsung” is a bit of a stretch—he did, after all, receive a proper burial beneath the lawn of the Space Hall of Fame. We wonder if Robert Vince has ever wandered over that way to pay his respects.
Also, the music in this film is fantastic. Check out the mirthful tune that kicks in around the 36-second mark, in particular.
More than we might care to admit, cultures are defined by their attitudes toward alcohol consumption. And so it makes sense that amateur anthropologists can learn a lot by paying attention not only to consumption habits, but to the psychological tactics that societies use to scare folks away from Demon Rum.
Those tactics are on display in this engrossing gallery of public service ads from the National Institutes of Health. Take, for example, the brutal earnestness of Dutch anti-drinking ads, which hint at a society that recognizes the centrality of alcohol to youthful social life, but also recognizes the substance’s dangers. That approach is a far cry from the more comical one favored in France, or the Scandinavian habit of making the sermon all about the kids.
In terms of sheer beauty, though, nothing can compete with the Soviet anti-drinking PSAs from the 1920s. Our inability to grok the Cyrillic alphabet obviously affects our processing of the poster above, which apparently warns against the impact that the overconsumption of vodka can have on a tippler’s financial fortunes. But upon first seeing the ad, we actually thought it was advertising a brand of absinthe that promised to release one from worldly cares. The artistry certainly makes it a lot more ambiguous than this.
When we were just a few years older than Microkhan Jr. is now, we developed a serious fascination with the Pippi Longstocking movies. At the time, it didn’t occur to us that the characters’ voices were dubbed, or that Pippi’s Popeye-liked strength defied logical explanation. All we cared about was the special bond that “the world’s strongest girl” shared with Mr. Nilsson, her crafty monkey sidekick. Their irresistible relationship convinced us at an early age of the veracity of a Hollywood axiom: There is no story that cannot be improved by the addition of a non-human primate.
Sticking to that credo has worked wonders for Robert Vince, the unjustly unheralded master of the talented animal movie. Though perhaps best known for his canine-centric Air Bud franchise (which has now morphed into more of an ensemble enterprise), Vince’s most memorable work has involved chimpanzees. We’re speaking, of course, about the Most Valuable Primate trilogy, in which well-trained chimps have variously engaged in ice hockey, skateboarding, and snowboarding.
Now, let us be clear—none of these flicks are “good” in the classic sense, and we’d certainly be bucking for a lightning bolt were we to compare Vince’s directorial prowess to that of, say, Akira Kurosawa. But we do admire Vince’s business acumen—like the Pippi Longstocking movies, the Most Valuable Primate installments are perfectly built to work as cash machines. Here’s the quick breakdown on why:
Low Budget We’re not sure what the union scale is for chimpanzee actors, but we’re guessing it’s on the low end of the spectrum. Vince’s movies also eschew expensive special effects in favor of letting the well-trained primates take center stage.
Global Appeal Note that Vince’s trilogy deliberately focuses on sports that are popular not just in North America, but in multiple nations that have a strong affinity for athletic chimpanzees. (Think Northern Hemisphere.) And as the dubbed clip above shows, entertainment of this ilk translates well between languages—just like Pippi.
High Replay Value Are sports movies predictable? Sure, and that applies even when the main character is a chimpanzee. But for viewers in the 4-to-9 age range, the buzz of seeing the good guys triumph doesn’t wear off for many, many viewings. And Vince certainly realizes that the home video market is where it’s at for his cinematic output.
While Vince will likely never receive a lifetime achievement Oscar for his work, we can pay his talents this great compliment: All of his sports chimp movies are vastly superior to baseball-themed Ed, which may have driven co-star Matt LeBlanc into the nefarious clutches of cocaine.
We were all set to start the morning on a light-hearted note, but then we stumbled across this eye-popping (and curiously underreported) Richard Holbrooke quote:
“Karachi, the world’s largest Muslim city, 18 million people, had about four hours of electricity a day during the worst of the summer months. And we want to do things to help address that problem,” he said.
This reminded us of something we once heard Robert D. Kaplan utter about Pakistan, several years prior to the coining of the term “Af-Pak.” In predicting that Pakistan would no longer exist by roughly 2020, Kaplan said that much of the nation’s violence can be traced back to the government’s failure to deliver basic services. Who wouldn’t be inclined to riot, he said, if forced to endure a week’s worth of 110-degree days without electric fans or running water?
Alas, we can’t say we’re optimistic about the future of Karachi’s power grid. The local electricity company is now being run by a private equity firm from Dubai, an outfit that presumably has larger fish to fry back home as the city-state slips into the economic abyss. Meanwhile, the national overseer seems far more interested in fining minor scofflaws than actually improving infrastructure.
Some added perspective on the economic impact of poor electricity delivery here, in an article that notes that power in Pakistan also costs 40 to 60 percent more than in India, China, Turkey, and Bangladesh.
Looking to use some Amazon credit we scored over the holidays, we flirted with the idea of finally picking up an album that we’ve long coveted: Sean Price‘s ultra-rare Donkey Sean Jr. mixtape, which features the oft-remixed (and eternally amazing) “60 Bar Dash.” Lo and behold, however, we’re not the only folks with such ideas in mind, as evidenced by the hefty price tag for the mix CD—$199.87 as of this posting, up $8 over night. Either something is askew with Amazon’s pricing software, or this is a CD whose collectibility exceeds that of many an original Elvis Presley pressing. And, alas, the album does not appear to have been digitized for sale by any commercial outlets.
Hate to say this, but given the choice between $200 and free, we’ll probably opt for the latter. Can’t you meet us closer to the $10 mark, oh lords of the music biz? We’re trying to do the right thing here, but $8.75 per song for an unwieldy hard-media version strikes us as a bit excessive, even for an artist of Sean Price’s exalted caliber.
We’re certainly all for the Czech Republic’s willingness to step up to the plate and become a laboratory for drug-policy reform. But in their haste to craft decriminalization legislation that could kick in with the New Year, Czech lawmakers appear to have done a grave disservice to a rising agricultural sector: the cactus industry:
A week ago, the government approved the list of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms, including hemp, coca, mescaline cactus and magic mushrooms, and decided that people would be allowed to grow up to five pieces of such plants and keep 40 magic mushrooms at home.
Shortly after the list was released, Czech cacti growers voiced concern about the new government’s directive which set limits to growing plants containing mescaline.
Mescaline is a type of hallucinogen which is illegal in most countries.
The growers of cacti intend to hand over a petition to the government that has been signed by 450 people already.
“Many cacti growers have been immediately criminalised with the approval of the limits set by the Justice Ministry as there are some 4000 types of cacti in the world and some of them can contain a certain amount of mescaline,” the organisers of the petition which has been placed on the Internet say.
The government has assured cactus farmers that they can apply for exemptions from the rule, but the bureaucratic red tape will doubtless be an impediment to the industry’s growth. And that’s a pity, seeing as how the humble cactus looks poised to have its golden moment as the hog, cow, and chicken feed of the future. Plenty of technical information on that score available via the Chinese company that started the cactus trend. (Delightfully earnest corporate slogan: “Improving your quality of life with cactus.”)
We can’t vouch for the validity of the company’s claims, particularly in terms of cactus feed being better for porcine health than the slop of yore. But if that’s true, will American farmers adopt the practice? Or will the fact that it was created in China give many of them pause? China’s agricultural industry has some black marks against it in recent years, which will make it difficult for the likes of China Kangtai Catcus Bio-tech Inc. to export its technologies.
Seems like a potential opening for the Czechs to swoop in. As soon as we find that cactus petition on The Tubes, we’re signing.
But is the Maori insistence on proper burials posing a threat to beachgoers’ health?:
Whales buried beneath New Zealand beaches could be releasing harmful toxins into the sand, a new study has concluded.
A 2009 thesis by AUT masters student Ann Bui studied the chemical effects of whale burial at Pakiri beach and Muriwai beach over six months in 2008.
Oceanographer Steve O’Shea, who was overseeing the project, said initial results show “massive spikes” in E coli bacteria 18 months after burial. He also suspected graves could house listeria bacteria.
“We’ve got 8000 whales buried under our beaches,” he said. “Is there a ticking time bomb beneath the sand?”
It’s also worth noting that during last month’s mass beaching, guards were posted in order to prevent local fishermen from removing the whales’ teeth—presumably because they wished to manufacture some of these powerful talismans.
Hopefully y’all are far away from the screen today, though we certainly know what it’s like to labor for a heartless boss who shrugs his shoulders at MLK Jr. Day. If you’re toiling for a paycheck today, please take a 2:42 respite to enjoy El Michaels Affair’s take on “C.R.E.A.M.” (above). Live version featuring Raekwon (and lamentably mediocre audio) here.
As for ourselves, we’re stealing the holiday to continue work on our Secret Major Project™, then spend a few hours teaching Microkhan Jr. how to backpedal like a pro. We still have high hopes that he’ll develop into a ballhawking safety in the Ed Reed model. Though, granted, it’ll probably help if he learns to talk first.
Sorry, but we just couldn’t bear to have that dreadful Cathy clip atop the blog all weekend. So we’ll instead leave you with this 1970 campaign ad, which we discovered while reading about Spiro Agnew’s proto-Tipper Gore act in the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune. Ms. Dickinson eventually lost this election in a landslide, but we still admire her moxie to the utmost. And we imagine the Sherwood Road bedroom she shared with her husband was an icy place well into 1971.
One of the greatest movie-review slams we’ve come across in recent months is Nathan Rabin’s brutal takedown of I Hate Valentine’s Day, the latest project from My Big, Fat Greek Wedding mastermind Nia Vardalos. The whole pan is full of choice insults, but the apex comes in the kicker: “If the comic strip character Cathy were to make a movie, this would be it.”
We share Rabin’s loathing of Cathy and her strip, which struck us as deeply, almost embarrassingly unfunny even during our grade-school days. And so imagine our mix of horror and glee upon discovering that America’s “favorite” neurotic singeton starred in a made-for-TV animated special back in 1987. Based on the few minutes of alleged comedy available in the clip above, we knew we’d stumbled upon an ideal candidate for Bad Movie Friday. (Yes, we realize that a TV special may not precisely qualify as a “movie,” but cut us some slack.)
All of the lazy “men are like this, women are like this” jokes you know and hate are on display here, as well as dubious notions about the societal worth of women who refuse to settle for obvious duds. That said, we wouldn’t be wholly unopposed to an NC-17-rated update on this material—perhaps what’s missing isn’t necessarily sharper humor, but more explicit eroticism.
“There is nothing sadder than an aging hipster,” Lenny Bruce once opined. While there’s certainly a kernel of truth to that statement, we believe the late comedian missed the mark by just a few degrees. Far sadder, in our estimation, is an aging drug addict, whose aims to recapture lost glory not by feigning interest in the musical trend du jour, but rather by plunging a heroin needle into their arm ad infinitum.
Such gloomy souls haunt the streets and “estates” of Edinburgh, Scotland, the city whose taste for debauchery was made famous by one of our favorite writers. But keep in mind that Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting was set in the mid-to-late 1980s, and even then the main characters realized that their heydays had long past. Rent Boy and his mates would now be in their early 50s, as are many of the folks who fell in love with heroin as youths. But getting older doesn’t mean that love wears off, as Scottish health authorities are now discovering:
Research also shows there are 15,000 older drug users – around 26% of Scotland’s serious drug-using population – but this relatively small group makes up nearly half of all drug-related deaths.
The General Register Office for Scotland revealed drug-related fatalities increased by 26% in 2007/08 to 574 – the highest number to date. The biggest increase in deaths came among older users.
Much more on the matter here, from a researcher who specializes in older drug users.
The pathetic withering of the so-called Trainspotting Generation got us thinking about why, exactly, so many young Scots got caught up in junk. As it turns out, the roots of the epidemic stretch back to the 19th century, when Edinburgh was the capital of Britain’s opium production industry. With so ready a supply of the drug at corner pharmacies, the city’s culture quickly became accustomed to its charms:
It was no surprise the use of the wonderful new drugs continued to spread, especially among respectable middle-class families with money to spend. In 1877 the Edinburgh Medical Journal published an article on the implications for health of changing social habits, saying opium “is regularly put on the table on the removal of the cloth after dinner”…
Like the drug barons of today, the city’s pharmacists made huge profits out of the drugs they sold. With their top hats, black frock-coats and membership of the Free Church of Scotland, they saw it as a sign of divine favour when they were able to expand from mere retailing into manufacturing of their own. Duncan Flockhart set up a factory in Holyrood Road, Macfarlan’s at Canonmills and T&H Smith at Gorgie..
By the end of the 19th century Edinburgh produced most of the world’s opiate drugs, heroin included. This was big business in the capital, one answer to the coal, steel and shipbuilding of the rival conurbation on the Clyde.
Between the ongoing drug scourge and the consumption of these, it’s little wonder that Scotland’s life expectancy stats lag behind those of other Western European nations—though they’re basically on par with those of the United States.
The way that Civil War history is written, you’d think that the conflict was confined to the easternmost quarter of the nation. But though few significant battles took place on the western frontier, the region wasn’t exactly unscathed. In the vast area known then simply as “Indian Country,” for example, tribes split along factional lines—many chieftains entered into alliances with the Confederacy, lured in by promises of territorial protection should the South emerge victorious. But some Creek and Seminole leaders refused to go along with this plan, and led thousands of followers into Kansas to join forces with the Union.
The first of these “refugee Indians” mustered out of Leroy, Kansas, in 1862. As the First Indian Home Guard Regiment prepared to enter the war on the Union’s behalf, The New York Times posted an eyewitness (and somewhat racist) account of their pre-battle religious rites. What draws our interest here, of course, is the allusion to magic rendering human flesh immune to bullets—a topic of great fascination ’round Microkhan HQs every since we embarked on our semi-regular Bulletproof Project:
They first have a preparation of roots, boiled up in two large kettles; they take a pint cup full of each, which produces immediate and violent vomiting; then they have prepared a camp fire and a large circle; around it they dance a very laborious and ludicrous dance, keeping up a song or kind of “yahoo,” responded to or echoed by all the dancers, which frequently number three or four hundred. The music resembles the corn songs at corn-huskings in the South. During their exercises they have their enchanters around at different points, to invoke the good spirits to aid them in their orgies. They keep this up all night, vomiting and dancing, and just at daylight they all run to the river and jump in, and remain some minutes in the water, no matter how cold; this, they think, makes them impervious to bullets or sickness; and should any die that have gone through the operation, he had either not vomited enough, ot danced hard enough, not stayed in the water long enough, or some other defect in performance.
Is it just us, or are does the state of intoxication here sound an awful like the result of peyote consumption? If so, the use of the drug for religious rites was far more widespread in the mid-19th century than we previously realized.
Whenever the stress of big-city living starts to wear us down—which seems to be happening an awful lot these days—we briefly fantasize about chucking it all in favor of life as a shepherd. We can trace this pipe dream back to our grade-school viewing of Fletch, in which Chevy Chase’s titular character facetiously replies “I’m a shepherd” to the main villain’s query regarding his occupation. Ever since, the pull of green mountains and woolly ruminant mammals has been awfully strong at times.
Alas, it turns out that shepherding may not be the enjoyably contemplative pastime we’ve long envisioned. In fact, according to this exposé, the job sounds downright terrible—at least way up in the Rockies:
They work seven days a week and are on call 24 hours a day, the survey found. In some cases they are miles from the nearest town, living in small, often shabby trailers with room only for a bed, a woodburning stove and 5-gallon water coolers.
Seventy percent of workers interviewed said they didn’t have a toilet and 54 percent said they had no electricity. Forty-two percent said their employers kept their passports and other documents and that they feared deportation if they complained about conditions…
“Based on what I know about the minimum wage, what they pay us is very little,” [Pepe] Cruz said as he drove one frigid day along the Wyoming plains spotted with snow and sagebrush, a rifle on the front seat of his truck for marauding coyotes.
Okay, so scratch “shepherd” off the dream-job list. Which bumps up our number-two choice in the “pastoral” category: falcon handler.
This morning’s news that Teddy Pendergrass has passed on comes just months after we first started to discover his silky genius. For years, we considered Teddy Bear the epitome of old-person music, and rarely listened to the records of his that we’d somehow accumulated over the years. (When you’re a vinyl geek, you have a way of accruing random albums—often because you volunteer to take throwaways off folks’ hands.) But then back in October we heard Big Boi’s “Shine Blockas”, which uses a sped-up sample of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “I Miss You” (above) as its sonic essence. We were stunned to discover that Pendergrass did lead vocals on that tune, and we’ve since been diving into mid-to-late-’70s heyday. Perhaps it’s because we’re becoming old-tymers ourselves, but that voice of his has now wormed itself into corners of our heart that we’re previously closed to crooners of his ilk.
In reading the New York Times obit, we were struck by Teddy Bear’s philosophical approach to the physical challenges he faced over the past three decades:
Pendergrass, who was born in Philadelphia in 1950, suffered a spinal cord injury in a 1982 car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down — still able to sing but without his signature power. The image of the strong, virile lover was replaced with one that drew sympathy.
But instead of becoming bitter or depressed, Pendergrass created a new identity — that as a role model, friend and longtime collaborator Kenny Gamble said.
”He never showed me that he was angry at all about his accident,” Gamble said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. ”In fact, he was very courageous…He used to say something in his act in the wheelchair, ‘Don’t let the wheelchair fool you,’ because he still proclaimed he was a lover.”
As always, we are humbled by reading about people with the mental fortitude to move past the cataclysmic. The fact that Pendergrass was able to do so and make some killer music along the way speaks volumes about his greatness. He’ll be missed.
William Wordworth’s “To Toussaint L’ouverture” works beautifully today as a meditation on loss and rebirth:
TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den; –
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.
L’ouverture’s incredible life is chronicled here. We particularly recommend the brief memoir he wrote while imprisoned in France.
One of the most ghoulish-yet-wise sayings we’ve ever heard is “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” (Or, a bit more accurately, “poorly constructed buildings do.”) So as soon as we heard news of Haiti’s latest natural catastrophe yesterday, we knew the death toll would be high. There is little chance that the nation’s relatively weak government has made the enforcement of building codes a top priority, and poverty has doubtless compelled most builders to resort to the cheapest, least stable materials imaginable—notably reinforced concrete, or bricks held together by inferior mortar. To our knowledge, there is no low-cost alternative to these materials that can be easily subbed into building projects in the developing world. The only real solution remains widescale retrofitting with steel or iron bars, a project far too complex and expensive for the destitute Haitis of the world.
What strikes us as particularly sad is how seismologists have turned fatality prediction into a relatively simple formula, based primarily the material composition of a nation’s building stock. As the map above shows, the United States Geological Survey has developed a model for estimating just how many souls will perish in a given country should an earthquake of a certain magnitude occur. The vast discrepany between the Western and Eastern Hemisphere is solely due to the latter’s greater reliance on concrete and brick. This observation really jumped out at us:
It is evident from large deadly historical earthquakes that the distribution of vulnerable structures and their occupancy level during an earthquake control the severity of human losses. For example, though the number of strong earthquakes in California is comparable to that of Iran, the total earthquake-related casualties in California during the last 100 years are dramatically lower than the casualties from several individual Iranian earthquakes. The relatively low casualties count in California is attributed mainly to the fact that more than 90 percent of the building stock in California is made of wood and is designed to withstand moderate to large earthquakes. In contrast, the 80 percent adobe and or non-engineered masonry building stock with poor lateral load resisting systems in Iran succumbs even for moderate levels of ground shaking. Consequently, the heavy death toll for the 2003 Bam, Iran earthquake, which claimed 31,828 lives, is directly attributable to such poorly resistant construction, and future events will produce comparable losses unless practices change.
A Nobel Prize certainly awaits the man or woman who can come up with a low-cost building material capable of mimicking timber’s strength. Though, as always, innovating is only half the battle—the tougher part is convincing scores of nations to make the switch. And for that to be the case, the material has to beat reinforced concrete on price. We fear we’re years away from such an R&D achievement.
Update It probably bears adding that we remain deeply skeptical of mankind’s ability to predict earthquakes, at least in the next 30 to 40 years. However, we did write a 2004 Wired piece about one ongoing effort to “create a model that predicts not only the timing of earthquakes, but also the severity.”
We’re gonna use the khan’s prerogative to spend the rest of today on our ongoing Secret Major Project™. In our brief absence, please take a few seconds to check out Big Daddy Kane at his finest. While we may heartily disagree with his eschewment of escargot and the word “rendezvous,” we can scarcely deny that he is one of the finest rappers to ever walk Spaceship Earth. Enjoy, and please keep in mind that his obvious call-out of Michael Jackson in the second verse was just par for the course back in early nineties. We’re sure that Kane now misses the King of Pop just as much as the rest of us.
For reasons too drab to mention, we recently stumbled across this sordid 1982 tale about a self-described “mountain man” who turned murderous. We were struck not so much by the brutality of Henry Burton Merrill’s crimes, but rather by the media’s insistence on referring to him as a “hermit.” And that got us thinking, naturally, about the American tradition of eremitism, and how it has come to take on very different dimensions than back in the days of Walden Pond.
When we usually think of hermits, we think of bearded men living alone in the wilderness. And for most of America’s lifespan, that stereotype has certainly held true. But with the rise of the city came an attendant rise in a very different sort of hermit—a character more akin to the holy fools of bygone Christianity. These men—and, yes, we’re largely talking blokes here—were able to create mental isolation amidst the bustle of urban landscapes, in large part by making it very clear they refused to abide by society’s strictures.
Our favorite early example of this phenomenon comes from our blessed hometown of Los Angeles, California, where all manner of urban hermits flourished during the 1930s. Perhaps the most celebrated of these chaps was one Harry Hermann, aka “Herman the Hermit,” who is pictured above in his natural habitat: walking semi-nude down Hollywood Boulevard. Like many of his fellow ascetics, Herman came to his oddball habits late in life, to the great chagrin of his poor wife:
Harry Hermann, 79-year-old “Hermit of Hollywood,” was divorced today because he refused to wear pants.
“When we were married in 1920,” Mrs. Pearl Hermann told the court, “he wore pants just like any other men. Now he goes around nude and wants me to do the same.”
Hermann brought almost nude guests to their tin and tarpaper home in the Hollywood hills, Mrs. Hermann said.
So great was Herman’s fame that he was eventually featured in a 1938 Life spread entitled “Cuckooland,” about the weirdos who inhabited Southern California. (We recommend flipping a few pages forward to check out the tale of the massive Estes clan.)
Herman was apparently not a man of letters, so we cannot know whether his hermit-in-the-big-city routine brought him true happiness. But we do hope he appreciated the namecheck he eventually received on Deputy Dawg.
Medical history’s dustbin is full of well-meaning treatments that were basically guaranteed to increase a patient’s misery. Several months back, for example, we wrote about the use of Torpillage to treat victims of shell shock. Now, via the journals of the great Irish explorer John Palliser, comes news of a 19th-century Native American rabies remedy that strikes us as exceedingly tough to take:
I saw great numbers of the case wolf (mischechogonis or togonie) prowling about. This is the wolf proper to the partially wooded country, and is about twice the size of a fox, with a tail shaped likethe brush of that animal. The real thick-wood wolf is grey or black, and very much larger. In spring, Hardesty tells me, the latter are often very dangerous, as they go mad, and then do not scruple to attack any one they meet with. Hydrophobia results from their bite, and the Indian cure for it is to sew the patient up in an old buffalo robe and to fling him on a large fire until it is well singed, when he is considered done. I should think that if the person survived this, it must produce violent diaphoresis, which with the fright, may produce a salutary effect on the disease.
Atop one of our record shelves sits a fossilized trilobite, given to us by a dear friend of the Grand Empress. We’ve long cherished the gift, but as we went about some cleaning chores while catching yesterday’s Ravens-Patriots tilt, a troubling thought entered our consciousness while giving the arthropod a shine: how do we know it’s genuine? It is such a perfect-looking specimen, we now wonder whether the ridges of its exoskeleton were created by human hands.
Alas, we certainly lack the expertise necessary to make such a determination—as do the vast majority of consumers who annually sink millions of dollars into the fossil market. That is why fakes flourish in Morocco, the global capital of trilobites, where the fossil industry employs an estimated 50,000 people. Gathering high-quality trilobites from the Atlas Mountains has become increasingly expensive, since the most accessible specimens were sold off years ago. And so counterfeiting has become something like an art form, albeit with an assembly-line flavor:
Entire specialty workshops have been set up in Morocco to fabricate specific genres of fossils (and artifacts). Now, the suppliers of these fakes are like physicians – each one specializes in a type of trilobite or technique. You have some that only deal in Cambrian fakes, some in Ordovician fakes, this guy makes complete specimens of partial ones, this guy supplies the fake spines, that guy is making complete fakes of free-standing spiny Devonian trilobites. They even package the fakes in the same way, for instance. You will find complete fakes of what seem like meticulously prepared spiny trilobites with all the spines exposed packaged in the same plastic containers that the real specimens come in.
These recommended techniques for sussing out fakes begin with the simple (looking for air bubbles) and move onward to the drastic (sawing a specimen in half). We reckon that few collectors have the wherewithal to try any of these, though. As in all markets dealing with artifacts of globe-crossing provenance, tremendous trust must be placed in middlemen. Fortunately, the bulk of our species tends toward honesty.
(Image via Heinrich Harder, the greatest German paleo artist of the 20th century)
We here at Microkhan headquarters have been been shy about expressing our love for modern pentathlon, by far the most underrated sport in the Summer Olympics. And so we were recently overjoyed to discover that none other than Dolph Lundgren, one of the finest actors of the past half century, shares our affinity for the awesome combo of running, swimming, fencing, shooting, and horseback riding. He’s such a supporter, in fact, that he made a little-seen movie about the sport 16 years ago, co-starring the indomitable Roger E. Mosley (best known for his stellar work on Magnum P.I.).
While we must confess that we’ve yet to see the appropriately titled Pentathlon in its entirety, the trailer makes it seem like a worthy addition to our semi-regular Bad Movie Friday lineup. Two things stand out to us in the clip above:
1. The film’s slogan: “The most challenging sport is about to become…the deadliest game!”
2. The unnecessary use of a rocket launcher, a bad-film phenomenon we’ve previously noted in such gems as Hard Ticket to Hawaii and Invasion U.S.A..
Sadly, Pentathlon does not appear to have yet made the leap to DVD. Perhaps this finally gives us an excuse to dig our VHS player out of storage, provided we can find an analog copy of the film. Might any Microkhan loyalists have a copy lying around? We’ll pay postage.
During one of our recent discussions about food taboos, a sage commenter noted that one of the theories regarding such prohibitions is that they aid social cohesion—if we can all agree to, say, eschew beef or Funyuns, we instantly have something that defines us in opposition to “The Other.” Given the inherent creepiness of that tactic, the commenter wondered, was there perhaps a history of cult leaders using food taboos to bind together their flocks?
Well, as it turns out, the answer appears to be a resounding “Yes!” A surprisingly large number of cults insist on austere vegetarian diets—if not in their formal literature, then at least in practice. The first example that springs to mind is the Unification Church, which has been known to feed its recruits a high-carb, low-protein diet consisting largely of rice and mashed legumes. The denizens of Jonestown subsisted on a similarly bland diet, as attested to by a very fortunate escapee:
The food was woefully inadequate. There was rice for breakfast, rice water soup for lunch, and rice and beans for dinner. On Sunday, we each received an egg and a cookie. Two or three times a week we had vegetables. Some very weak and elderly members received one egg per day. However, the food did improve markedly on the few occasions when there were outside visitors.
This dietary restrictions seem to have less to do with social cohesion, though, than with social control. Constantly hungry followers lack the energy to rebel, or even question. In fact, we reckon this applies to non-religious institutions as well—if you looked at successful political revolutions throughout history, don’t most of them take place in countries with at least a modicum of wealth? It’s tough to riot in the streets on an empty stomach.
The irony about the Unification Church’s dietary tactics, of course, is that the organization is a major player in the food industry. That sushi you had the other week? Chances are its passage from ocean to table benefited Rev. Moon in some small way, due to his control of True World Group.
Of the twenty abandoned cities chronicled on this list, none seems quite as spooky as Agdam. Once home to 150,000 Azerbaijanis, the city’s population is now officially zero, thanks to the ravages of the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Agdam was supposed to the capital of a new republic, but was instead destroyed by retreating Armenian soldiers in the waning days of the conflict. The residents who fled didn’t bother returning to rebuild, leaving a bombed-out husk of a city that would’ve made an excellent setting for the film version of The Road.
An Agdam travelogue can be found here, and an eerie photo set here. Kudos to whoever added this lone splash of color to the shattered landscape—without it, Agdam would be a good candidate for bleakest locale on the planet.
Last night while cooking dinner, we decided to rev up a documentary that’s been languishing on our Netflix Instant queue for ages: Witch Hunt. Suffice to say that we weren’t anywhere near prepared for the ensuing 90 minutes, in which the filmmakers unwind a completely devastating J’accuse regarding the Kern County child-abuse panic of the 1980s. By the end, we were ready to tote our pitchfork to Bakersfield so that we could exact vengeance upon Ed Jagels, the district attorney who let this travesty happen.
Yet our outrage stands in stark contrast to the more philosophical outlooks of the hysteria’s main victims—the men and women who lost years of their lives to unjust incarceration. We couldn’t believe how devoid of rage these people are—some because they have faith that they’ll receive celestial justice when the Reaper eventually comes calling, and others because they’ve made a conscious choice not to wallow in bitterness during their remaining years on Earth. We can’t imagine having the mental fortitude to attain inner peace in such circumstances, but perhaps decades of suffering bestow a sort of wisdom that we can’t even begin to understand.
We were at least a little heartened to learn that John Stoll, the primary focus of Witch Hunt, recently settled a wrongful conviction lawsuit with Kern County that will net him a $5 million payout—or $400,000 for each year he spent in prison. A nice little chunk of change, but is it enough? That’s where things get interesting, because how do we begin to put a price tag on making up for such abominations? Do we follow “the market,” as defined by average life-insurance payouts? Or do we need to add on a significant amount for subjecting innocent citizens to a Kafkaesque nightmare?
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently tackled this question, while considering the case of Peter Limone. They concluded:
We think it important to make clear that the $1,000,000 annuity selected by the district court as the baseline for its calculation should not be understood as a carob seed for measuring the harm caused by wrongful incarceration generally. Applying a literal reading of the statement in Limone IV that “wrongfully imprisoned plaintiffs were entitled to compensation of at least $1 million per year of imprisonment,” 497 F. Supp. 2d at 243 (emphasis supplied), one district court recently has treated the $1,000,000 per year baseline as a floor for damages arising out of wrongful incarceration. See Smith v. City of Oakland, 538 F. Supp. 2d 1217, 1242-43 (N.D. Cal. 2008) (citing Limone IV). We regard that characterization as unfortunate. As we have emphasized, the district court’s awards are at the outer edge of the universe of permissible awards and survive scrutiny, though barely, only because of the deferential nature of the standard of review and the unique circumstances of the case.
So $1 million per year may soon become the ceiling for these cases, regardless of the circumstances. Does that strike you as fair? (We don’t mean that as a loaded question—we’re genuinely curious as to what the right price for this sort of compensation should be.)
Meanwhile, over in South Korea, wrongful-imprisonment compensation is pretty much identical to what it is here in the U.S. Which we reckon is some sort of exceedingly minor victory for the universality of human worth.
Just before we broke for Christmas, we posted about the possibility that America’s recent love affair with unsaturated fatty acids may be part of the reason our crime rates have dropped so precipitously. Now comes word that fat may have another positive application: curing folks afflicted with witiko psychosis, which (allegedly) causes a sudden craving for human flesh.
In a 1970 American Anthropologist article, a professor at San Diego State University related the typical Ojibwa cure for this malady:
When one is caught in time, that’s before going berserk, they’d give him or her large quantities of fat after it was melted and this was supposed to melt the crazed demon in the person who was going to turn into windigo…The melted fat was a sure cure for any one turning to a windigo.
The author opines that this fat, traditionally taken from bears, acts as a sedative, due to the source animals’ propensity for eating berries rich in Vitamin C (said to have calming properties).
A recent witiko sighting on a Texan military base is described here. And you can read Algernon Blackwood’s fictionalized take on the mythical backwoods beast here.
In the midst of prepping a forthcoming post on urban population trends, we randomly stumbled across this 1959 video from the Bureau of Mines, in which asbestos gets its praises sung by an amazingly eloquent narrator. Historical curios such as this can only make us wonder which of today’s miracle products will eventually be revealed to be far more harmful than we ever anticipated.
Contrary to what we learned in Mrs. Glickman’s Algebra II class lo those many years ago, mathematics is not a language that transcends all cultural barriers. That’s because tackling math problems requires a willingness to give in to abstraction, a leap that not all cultures are equipped to make. Just check out how the Saora people of Orissa, India, react to word problems:
Saora school children took more interest in mathematical problems that depicted actual local events/facts rather than abstract problems. If it was a hypothetical question completely divorced from reality, the Saoras showed little interest in indulging in related mathematical discourses and to stretch their imagination to arrive at a mathematical solution. This confirmed our assumption that the physical and social realities constitute the ultimate metaphor with which the children and adults in this culture think and act.
So strong is the reality orientation that the Saora children and adults raise moral questions when the mathematical problems assume violations of social norms. For example, given the following question, three Saora children reacted to the moral assumptions rather than to the mathematical problem:
“A man named Raghu bought 100 kgs of rice at the rate of Rs4/- per kg. He mixed 5 kgs of stones with the rice and sold them at the same rate of Rs.4 a kg. How much of profit Raghu made at the end?”
The initial reaction of these Saora children was “why should anyone mix stones in rice? They should be punished by the village Mukhia (village head)”. However, two non-tribal Oriya children and one Saora child did attend to the mathematical problem going along with the “if” assumption therein. When the same question was asked of Saora adults, their first reaction was that such a man should be driven out of the village. None showed any interest in treating it as a hypothetical mathematical question. Nontribal children and adults did not raise such a value question as they treated it as a hypothetical mathematical problem. This makes it evident that cultural values and norms play an important role in determining the willingness among children to participate in a mathematical discourse. Clearly, mathematics does not mean the same to everyone.
The Saora are also well-known among anthropologists for occasionally suffering from a unique mental disorder, which can only be cured through “marriage” to an invisible spirit.
We’re in the midst of trying to close two Wired pieces, including the gargantuan epic that took us out to Kenya last fall. More soon, honest—in the meantime, a sonic rarity worthy of your highly valued ears.
Over the past several days, no ad campaign has been as inescapable as the one hyping Food Network’s recently aired “Super Chef Battle”. The innumerable commercials and Web banners that ran in support of the event made it seem like a culinary version of a Thunderdome match, crossed with the Apollo Creed versus Ivan Drago bout from Rocky IV. P.T. Barnum would be proud.
But whenever one of the Food Network ads popped up, we couldn’t help but think of the decline and fall of ancient civilizations, and what their missteps might teach us about the perils of gluttony. Many years ago, we remember reading that Ancient Rome started heading downhill once its patricians started building statues of their favorite chefs. Alas, we’ve since been unable to verify the veracity of this claim, though tales of Roman gustatory excess are legion. But we can certainly point the finger at one ancient celebrity for going one step too far in honoring his cook: the Lydian king Croesus. The utterly fantastic 1914 booklet Roman Cooks pointed us toward Herodotus’s account of the king’s adulatory nod toward a favored food provider:
Besides these various offerings, Croesus sent to Delphi many others of less account, among the rest a number of round silver basins. Also he dedicated a female figure in gold, three cubits high, which is said by the Delphians to be the statue of his baking-woman; and further, he presented the necklace and the girdles of his wife.
Shortly thereafter, Croesus was defeated by the Persians, and Lydia’s great age of power came to an end. Could our current chef idolatry be a harbinger of similar decline?
For reasons too drab to mention, we recently stumbled across 
