Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

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The Herminator Bids Auf Wiedersehen

October 13th, 2009


Our first-ever overseas assignment was covering the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. We thus have incredibly vivid memories of Hermann Maier, the celebrated Austrian skiier who just decided to call it a career. We were at the downhill slopes the day of the crash shown above, and remember instantly thinking “He must be dead” upon witnessing the carnage. (The rough stuff starts about the 25-second mark.) But not only did Maier survive the high-speed wreck—he went on to win a pair of golds (though not in the downhill, of course). Suffice to say the favorite son of Altenmarkt im Pongau is made of sterner stuff than us.

Oh, yeah, he also survived a 2001 motorcycle crash that almost led to the amputation of his legs; three years later, he was once again a World Cup champion. Puts our struggle to complete a 5,000-word article in perspective. Too much perspective, perhaps.

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A Ninja’s Flighty Ideas

October 13th, 2009

BloodsportSplits
In response to our recent placeholder extolling the virtues of Stan Bush’s work on Bloodsport, one of our faithful Virginia correspondents turned us on to this 1988 exposé, which argues that the film’s biographical subject is a huckster. The piece is behind a subscription wall, so those without a ProQuest account will have to make do with our favorite excerpt regarding the alleged mendacity of Frank Dux:

A brochure for Dux’s ninjitsu schools lists him as “one of the most decorated veterans of the Southeast Asian conflict.” Visitors to his home were shown newspaper articles about him, including an editorial titled “A Silent Hero” that Dux said he clipped from the Washington Star. Told later that the newspaper’s archives have no clippings about him, Dux said he could not remember the source of the editorial.

The piece quotes from a commanding officer’s diary: “We’re hungry. We’re tired. We’re all out of ammo. We all might go mad if not for a spunky kid named Duke for short.” The diary describes Dux crawling through a mine field to rescue an Asian baby that he later turned over to a Taoist priest…

The story evaporates upon inspection, according to military records. The Marine Corps said that Dux served from 1975 to 1981 and that there is no indication he ever left the United States. His military medical file, according to those who saw it, said that on Jan. 22, 1978, he was referred for psychiatric evaluation for expressing “flighty and disconnected ideas.” Though a member of the reserves, which meant he was on active duty only a short time, he reportedly insisted that he was working for an intelligence agency.

A follow-up medical evaluation at a military psychiatric clinic in Long Beach on April 18 of that year found him normal, but seemed to scotch any further talk about his intelligence work, saying that his only possible intelligence work was being “cursorily” involved in gathering information about one individual.

Dux said the military ordered his record sabotaged to discredit him. The government did not know how much he knew about other covert operations, he said, so they placed information in his file to destroy his credibility.

In the interest of fairness, a slightly more sympathetic take on the controversy can be found here. We like the detail about the trophy receipt the best.

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The Waga Toso Loophole

October 13th, 2009

MeinKampfMangaWe’re in the midst of watching The Nazis: A Warning from History, which really should be required viewing for anyone who casually throws around Hitler analogies when discussing contemporary politicians. It’s chilling stuff through-and-through, loaded with interviews with unrepentant party members and victims of persecution alike. The series essentially argues that the Third Reich was enabled by the pettiness of workaday Germans, who took advantage of the Nazis’ obsession with policing-by-proxy to settle personal scores. In one scene we caught last night, for example, an interviewer confronts an elderly lady with damning evidence that she informed on an eccentric neighbor—a neighbor who was soon thereafter sent to perish in a concentration camp. The guilty lady just smiles and denies the whole thing, then tries to change the subject to the weather. Few documentary scenes of recent vintage have left us so ashamed of our speceis’ propensity for cowardice.

Oddly, the show has also given us a yen to read Mein Kampf, though only to gain some insight into how so obvious a megalomaniacal charlatan could have dragged the entire planet to the edge of the abyss. We obviously have mixed feelings about our desire, though, as we’d never want anyone to confuse our genuine intellectual curiosity with an endorsement of evil. If we do take the plunge, for example, we certainly won’t read the book on the 2 train, lest we suffer a beatdown between 96th and 125th Streets. (We somehow don’t think our intellectual-curiosity argument will fly on the subway.)

But in doing a little digging about the current Mein Kampf publication landscape, we were surprised to learn that the book’s a hit in Japan—albeit in manga form. This really surprised us, as we know that the Bavarian government, which currently holds the copyright on the infamous tome, has aggressively gone after foreign publishers of the work. But as it turns out, there’s a weird little loophole in the law that makes the Japanese edition copacetic:

The Finance Ministry of the state of Bavaria, which holds the copyright to the book, has refused to grant permission to reprint it out of sensitivity to victims of Nazi atrocities. The ministry lodged a strong protest when a Czech-language edition was published without permission in 2000.

Under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, however, Japanese publishers are entitled to publish a translation of a foreign-language book released in 1970 or earlier as long as no other translation was published within the first 10 years of release.

The manga version, known in Japanese as Waga Toso, has sold 45,000 copies in six months. We do wonder who the primary audience is—people who wish to gain a better understanding of evil so that history will not repeat, or quasi-Fascist flunkies. We sure hope it’s the former.

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Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Airlines?

October 12th, 2009

AngelaDavisPoster
We’re extremely curious to learn the backstory on why Louis Armando Peña Soltren decided to return to the U.S. from Cuba yesterday. He’d been hiding in Fidel Castro’s alleged proletarian paradise for over four decades, and now seems likely to spend the rest of his days in a federal penitentiary for orchestrating a 1968 skyjacking. Or perhaps not—though it’s tough to imagine the U.S. government forgiving such a crime, perhaps they’re willing to let bygones be bygones given the rather archaic politics that motivated the act.

Soltren’s return did remind us that hijackings to Havana were once considered a grave national security threat, ended only by the FAA’s insistence that all airports in the Western Hemisphere comply with basic security principles. (The majority of the hijackers boarded American aircraft in Latin American capitals, where screening procedures were lax.) Yet that security beef-up came to late for some smaller airlines that suffered at the hands of hijackers. Case in point: defunct Capitol Air, which had to empty its small coffers to ensure that its waylaid passengers were taken care of:

No one is able to put an exact price tag on a hijacking, but one unscheduled stop at Jose Marti International Airport can chew as much as $25,000 from an airline’s budget.

The latest hijacking, Thursday night’s diversion of a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Miami, ended up costing Capitol Airlines an extra $10,000 to $15,000 because the hijacked jet blew a tire and another plane had to be chartered to bring back some passengers.

“Poor Capitol. It really impacted them,” said a sympathetic Jim Ashlock, spokesman for Miami-based Eastern Airlines.

In other words, though the Cuban-bound hijackers may never have succeeded in bringing about revolution, at least they helped drive some small commuter airlines out of business. Che Guevara would be proud.

More vintage hijack goodness here, via the great Everything Pan Am. Old-school commercial pilots knew how to live.

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Blue Screen Blues

October 9th, 2009


A quick Bad Movie Friday this week, as we’re absorbed in the game of narrative non-fiction writing (i.e. the gig that pays the bills ’round here). Let’s just say that we probably owe Krull another look; we saw it at a grade-school birthday party back when it came out, and probably didn’t yet have the mental faculties to process the concept of the glaive. But if this clip is any indication, the special effects are bound to leave us cold. Plus that line about getting inside before the twin suns rise? That’s edging into Revenge of the Sith territory.

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Official Sport of the Health Care Debacle

October 9th, 2009


When folks ask us about out take on the health care mess, we always bring up the tale of our pal “Lancer.” (Names have been Robotech-ed to protect the potentially moritified.) A few years back, poor Lancer was playing a little pickup basketball when his ACL decided that it no longer enjoyed being a complete entity. Alas, Lancer was temping at the time, and thus among the ranks of the uninsured. The ensuing surgery landed him in mammoth credit-card debt, which we believe he’s still trying to climb out of ’til this day.

As self-employed khans, we’ve wavered between being uninsured and terribly insured for the past nine years. (We’re currently in the latter category, thanks the Mrs. Microkhan’s small business.) As such, we’ve kept Lancer’s experience in mind and avoided physical activities that might lead to financial ruin. That means no pickup basketball, no BASE jumping, and no luge. (We did try our hand at a biathlon last winter, but we skied slowly.) Fortunately, while in Kenya we encountered a sport that seems perfectly designed for Americans who are one sports injury away from bankruptcy: tchoukball. It is a sport that was specifically designed to reduce the risk of bodily harm:

Dr Brandt noticed that many sports produced shocking injuries that stopped even the toughest of athletes from participating further. After discussing these concerns in the book ‘From Physical Education to Sport Through Biology’, Dr Brandt presented his now famous paper ‘A Scientific Criticism of Team Games’. This won him the coveted ‘Annual World Prize of the FIEP’ (International Physical Education Federation).

Within this paper, Dr Brandt explored ways in which to construct the perfect team game whilst paying heed to his key concern of reducing injury. The practical expression of his ideas, stemming from his critical study of existing games, is the game we have come to know as TCHOUKBALL.

How incredibly Swiss of Dr. Brandt. Also noteworthy is his hope that tchoukball would lead to world peace:

The objective of human physical activities is not to make champions, but make a contribution to building a harmonious society.

It’s probably a good thing that Dr. Brandt never crossed paths with Red Sanders.

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Controversial Prizes

October 9th, 2009

CarlVonOssietzkyWe usually care little for news of prizes—we refuse to watch the Academy Awards, for example, and we’re always hard-pressed to name the regining National Hockey League MVP. But we can’t help but take note of this morning’s news regarding our president’s newly minted Nobel laureate status. Talk about a topic sure to stay on people’s lips for days or weeks…

Much of the forthcoming chatter, of course, will center on whether or not President Obama deserves the prize. To us, however, the more interesting question is why the voting committee opted for such an unusual choice—a man who cannot be connected to a specific diplomatic or humanitarian achievement, but rather embodies the hope many have for the creation of a more harmonious international system. In that sense, we see Obama’s victory as echoing an even more controversial episode in Nobel history: the 1935 awarding of the Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky.

On the surface, Obama and Ossietzky would seem to have little in common: one is a pragmatic American politician, the other a pacifist (and tragically consumptive) German journalist. But the similarity comes in how the Nobel committee viewed their selection of these men—as acts of symbolism. And if you think we’re being derogatory in using that “S” word, think again—the 1935 presentation speech does a good job of explaining why symbolism matters:

But, many people ask, has Ossietzky really contributed so much to peace? Has he not become a symbol of the struggle for peace rather than its champion?

In my opinion this is not so. But even if it were, how great is the significance of the symbol in our life! In religion, in politics, in public affairs, in peace and war, we rally round symbols. We understand the power they hold over us. Moreover, as a rallying point, a symbol may well be preferable to a personality. Men can all too often be compared to the «hulder», the wicked Norwegian fairy, beautiful when looked at from the front, but hollow in the back. Such is not the case with the symbol because the symbol is born of an idea and is the bearer of an idea. It exists through the idea which first created it and reflects it faithfully and without distortion.

It also bears mentioning that Ossietzky’s victory was far more controversial than Obama’s can ever be—so controversial, in fact, that it led to a wholesale revamp of the voting rules, so that politics would be excised from the process.

Yet we’re a political species. And if one of our highest prizes remains infused with politics despite mighty efforts to the contrary, is that really the worst thing in the world?

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Fighting to Survive (Journalism Edition)

October 8th, 2009


We’re up to our eyeballs with the day job, though happy to report that last night’s moderate alcohol consumption helped us overcome a serious creative block. This afternoon’s all about moving the narrative forward and avoiding mixed metaphors; in our absence, please enjoy what is inarguably Stan Bush‘s finest work. Not safe for the squeamish, though—kumite apparently encourages gory leg-breaking maneuvers.

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The Insects Cannot Hold

October 8th, 2009

DesertLocust
The fact the map above is entirely green-and-white attests to the success of one of modern history’s great international projects: the FAO‘s Locust Watch. When the project started in 1979, the ravenous critters were a regular menace from Mali to eastern India, in large part because of a lack of information flow—countries were seldom aware of nascent plagues in their neighbors. So the FAO developed a hierarchical system, equipping local officials throughout Saharan Africa and Asia with the tools necessary to note conditions in which locusts might thrive, and whether there were hoppers about. (Case in point: This recent Mauritanian alarm.) Local surveyors were then asked to send their field notes to national authorities, who in turn collated the data and passed it along to FAO. When done with appropriate alacrity, pesticides could be applied to problem areas, before the locusts could mass and move eastward.

There have been subsequent improvements in modeling and surveying technology—the development of remote sensors capable of detecting hopper activity in remote areas, for example, or satellite imagery that can discern when certain areas of vegetation are ripe for infestation. But the core of the project remains the open communication between locals, national, and international authorities. That’s no mean feat—our species is naturally reticent to share data, paranoid as we are that such information might someday be used against us. Locust Watch was able to overcome those suspicions thanks to the efforts of FAO officials who were able to explain the cost/benefit analysis in a way that made the investment a no-brainer for some very poor nations. As such, this wasn’t just a triumph of technology—it was a triumph of politics, too. Because as much as we’ve been duped into thinking that politics is the art of destroying one’s intellectual enemies, it’s really something much more noble in its ideal form—the art of convincing everyone that they have something to gain.

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The Walls Tell All

October 8th, 2009

We’ve long believed that there’s far more wisdom scrawled on bathroom walls than is to be found in, say, the average self-help manual or Chick tract. And we know we’re certainly not alone in that contrarian assessment. But until this morning, we never realized that loo graffiti was also a subject of serious academic discourse (PDF) out in our native state:

Whether or not graffiti writers take the permanence of their writing implement into consideration can only be definitively proven by acquiring the identities of the graffiti writers and asking them if they take this into consideration. Without the ability to do this, based on my research findings I think graffiti writers do consider the temporary/permanence of their messages dependent upon the importance of the message to themselves. A graffiti image such as the grout theme messages written on the grout of the tile are not very serious messages. These messages are often a play on the word grout and how that word can be substituted for other words in a popularly known statement such as “ the grout lebowski; grout expectations, oscar the grout; Wayne Groutski; etc.” These messages were mostly written with pencil. I propose two reasons for the use of pencil in writing grout messages. 1) The messages are not very personal to the writer. 2) The messages are less likely of being spotted by the custodial staff and removed. These two variables would appear to be the basis for the use of pencil in grout writing as opposed to pencil being used in writing on stall walls.

Plenty more interesting factoids throughout the thesis. We had no idea, for example, that our XX-chromosome peers were so fond of penning vulgar ditties regarding ovulatory cycles. So much for our sugar-and-spice illusions.

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The Situation Overpowers My Imagination

October 7th, 2009


Writing up the Kenya piece through the lunch hour; hopefully back to Microkhan-ing in the mid-p.m. In the meantime, enjoy a little Syl Johnson—yet another soul nugget that the RZA feasted upon during the Wu-Tang Golden Age. This came on Radio Nova last night just as our stress level was beginning to peak; rarely has a shot of sonic calmness been so welcome.

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Rejecting Baal

October 7th, 2009

BikersforChristUpon reading this morning’s news that the Feds have moved against the Pagan Motorcycle Club, we cracked via Twitter that two-wheeled outlaws would do well to choose less obviously evil names. It doesn’t take a genius to wonder whether the Pagans might be up to no good; might the cops be less likely to bat an eye at the Care Bears?

A close Microkhan ally responded to our jest by rightly pointing out that such a theme already exists in the motorcycle world: the existence of a mighty evangelical movement, headed by the Bikers for Christ. The organization’s amazing story can only be told through the awakening of its founder, Fred Zariczny, who experienced an epiphany after a horrendous 1973 crash:

For eight months after the accident, Zariczny began thinking about God and what life is all about. Then, on May 5, 1977, he followed an attractive young woman to the Abbott Loop Christian Center in Anchorage, where he was living at the time.

“I got stoned, and I figured I would tell them they were geeks and hypocrites,” he said recently of that day in church.

But instead, he found himself walking down the aisle for the altar call after the sermon. “I accepted the Lord, then was baptized in the water and filled with the Holy Spirit,” he said. “I did a 180 in one night.”

Though he had been a self-confessed addict and pusher from the age of 13, Zariczny, 54, said he changed his life completely that May day.

“I went home and threw out all of the drugs,” he said, adding that almost immediately he felt liberated for the first time in his life. “I didn’t need the drugs, alcohol and sex anymore, because I had peace in my heart.”

Yet that internal peace doesn’t always translate into a total renunciation of external violence. Even the saved get stabby from time to time.

Plenty more on the evangelical movement among bikers here, via Rich Remsberg’s Riders for God. In doing a quick sweep through the book this morning, what struck us most was the similarity in the conversion tales told by the various born-again bikers. Virtually all of them talk about how they were “searchers” from a very young age—not meatheads, but intelligent young men who’s rage was linked to an emptiness born out of curiosity regarding the meaning of life. And when it became clear that drugs and violence couldn’t fill that void, they turned to faith.

Though, to be frank, the book’s accounts of straight-up brutality certainly titillate:

So then I thought I’m gonna strangle this guy til he passes our. ‘Cause he was a redneck and he didn’t have no hair, so I couldn’t pull his hair back. I just, I beat this guy. He was just gone. He was out of it. The guy was nuts.

And I remember having ahold of his Adam’s apple until I could almost touch my forefinger and my thumb. I mean I was ripping his Adam’s apple out. But I remember thinking, I don’t want to kill this guy.

Lovely. We can only imagine that the victim here wasn’t able to perform the the “Tequila” dance after this particular ordeal.

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Counting the Jumbos

October 6th, 2009

JumboInDanger
While perusing this AFP piece about a poaching bust in the Central African Republic, we stopped and mumbled “hmmmmm” upon reading this hard-to-swallow stat:

Experts say some 38,000 African elephants are killed each year for their tusks.

Really? That seems like such a ridiculously high figure; at that clip, wouldn’t the species (or, to be precise, the genus) be entirely extinct before the next Summer Olympics, if not sooner?

As it turns out, African elephants are seemingly much more plentiful than their Asian brethren. But we must take the estimate of 600,000 survivors with a grain of salt, because counting pachyderms is a tricky, tricky business. The animals not only hide from aerial surveyors but, as we’ve noted previously, may conceal the corpses of their deceased relatives. So what’s the solution? Using sound:

Geophones were used to record the footfalls of elephants and other large mammal species at a water hole in Etosha National Park, Namibia. We were able to discriminate between species using the spectral content of their footfalls with an 85% accuracy rate while only using a single geophone. This was done using correlation coefficients comparing the shape of the spectra for various species. An ANOVA found significant differences between these correlation coefficients (F4,1785 = 147.78, P = 0.000). An estimate of the energy created by passing elephants (the area under the amplitude envelope) can be used to estimate the number of elephants passing the geophone.

We do wonder, however, if such a method is able to account for the footfalls of babies—or, for that matter, how it differentiates between the sounds made by elephants, hippos, and rhinos in areas where the giant mammals co-exist.

(Image via Sideshow World)

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Be Thankful for What We’ve Got

October 6th, 2009

TrialByOrdealA pal of ours is on jury duty this week, and reminded us of one of the great pleasures of the process (at least in New York): getting to view Enter the Jury Room on your first morning. Narrated by the late Ed Bradley, the short film is surprisingly witty and informative, especially for those potential jurors whose legal knowledge may be close to nil. The best part undoubtedly comes toward the beginning, as Bradley describes the bad ol’ days of trial by ordeal. The point is clear—while we may grumble at the prospect of spending several days listening to testimony in a slip-and-fall case, it beats reverting back to a sytem that relies upon witch flotation tests.

But Enter the Jury Room errs in insisting that trial by ordeal was a vestige of Medieval Europe. In fact, the practice persisted well into the 19th century in Burma, where the Konbaung Dynasty employed four brutal methods of settling cases. The one that strikes us as the most nonsensical (albeit disturbingly well thought out)? Trial by lead:

In the ordeal by lead, the accuser and the accused wrapped their forefingers of right hand with split bamboo, and thrust them in molten lead weighed 333.3 kyats heavy. One who injured his forefinger was regarded guilty, and the other innocent.

Read about the other ordeals here. (PDF of the Japanese/Burmese version here.) Sadly, though Burma may have abandoned such wantonly cruel methods of dispensing justice, its current system doesn’t seem all that less capricious.

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Renewal to the North

October 6th, 2009

BhutaneseAlaskans
Aware of our fascination with the current wave of Bhutanese refugees alighting in the U.S., our favorite correspondent from the Nushagak Bay area alerted us to this great A/V feature from the Anchorage Daily News. Apparently a small group of the Lhotshampas have landed in the Land of the Midnight Sun, after a gobsmacking 17 years spent in refugee camps along the Bhutan-Nepal border. Now they’re finally free to celebrate Dashain in the proper manner.

The slide show got us thinking about Alaska’s recent history as a destination for refugees. That curiousity led us to this fascinating chart from the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Perhaps not surprisingly, the lion’s share of Alaska’s refugees were from the (ex)-Soviet Union between 1983 and 2005; the state also played host to 32 Romanians, 4 Cambodians, and a single Burmese (who we hope didn’t get too lonely).

Lots of other great stats in the chart, which provides some key insight into which states have become home-away-from-home for two or three generations of immigrants. We all knew about the Somali community in the Twin Cities, for example. But who knew that the lone Botswanan granted refugee status last year made his way to…Nebraska? Anyone know his story?

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But Do They Know About the Rubio Mess?

October 5th, 2009

T'Wolves Matatu
The NBA fans in the audience are surely aware that the Minnesota Timberwolves are about as hapless as they come nowadays—an even less promising squad than Microkhan’s beloved Los Angeles Clipppers, a team once declared “The Worst Franchise Ever” by Sports Illustrated. But the T’wolves’ woeful prospects haven’t affected the loyalty of a certain Nairobi matatu driver, whose vehicular tribute we snapped on Saturday. Perhaps he was just a big Kevin McHale fan back in the day? Or, more likely, he just liked the look of that fearsome Canis lupus.

More tomorrow, after we’ve fully recovered from our travels—and, more importantly, finished transcribing these hours worth of interviews. Perfect speech-recognition software can’t be developed soon enough…

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In Tragedy, Inspiration

October 5th, 2009

Tusker
For those of us who worship at the altar of hops and malted barley, no trip to Kenya can be complete without sampling a bottle or twelve of Tusker, East African Breweries’ flagship beer. It’s by no means a great lager—when served cold, it reminded us of the thin-yet-refreshing Brazilian brew Antarctica. But Tusker gets point for its intriguing back label, which declares that the beer is named after the elephant that killed one of the drink’s creators.

Really? Such an explanation struck us as apocryphal, so we felt compelled to do some research upon returning stateside. Sure enough, the Tusker folks don’t lie—we’ll pick up the historical action on a farm in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater:

The neglected farm contained little but a pack of equally neglected Australian Kangaroo hounds. Their master, Captain G.H.R. (George) Hurst, had moved into Ngorongoro as a rancher soon after the First World War, hoping to persuade the Custodian of Enemy Property to let him buy a farm on the far side of the Crater, appropriated from its German owner.

His dream of living out his life in that wild and glorious arena was brought to a very tragic end, for his application for legal ownership was turned down on favour of Sir Charles Ross. Hurst, perhaps to alleviate his disappointment, set off on a hunting safari and was killed by an elephant, on the Tanganyika coast.

This wasn’t Hurst’s first negative experience with East Africa’s wildlife, though—he was apparently mauled by a lion several months prior to his final demise at the tusks of Tusker.

At least one account of Hurst’s death claims that he wasn’t hunting his pachyderm killer, but merely photographing it. Yet as this Sri Lankan video amply demonstrates, some elephants can take offense to seemingly random slights.

(Image via Todd’s Photo World)

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Mzungu Back on the Scene

October 5th, 2009

ZebraBacks
After an interminable 27-plus hours in transit from Nairobi, punctuated by some dire experiences aboard Swiss Air, we finally made it back to Microkhan HQs late yesterday. Great to be back in sunny Atlah, though an enjoyable and productive time was had by all in Kenya. We’ll be posting plenty of East Africa-related material in the coming days, but let’s just start with a few quick observations as we recharge the mental batteries:

*The Kenyan drought is a true disaster—driving across the nation’s south, you just see mile after mile after mile of singed crops (primarily maize) and bone-dry brush. This Time dispatch blames the severity of the drought’s impact in part on a jatropha fad. Our sense, however, is that government incompetence is more to blame—it seems no Kenyans have kind words to offer about the way in which the troubled Mwai Kibaki administration has responded to the crisis.

*Nairobi traffic is quite likely the worst we’ve ever encountered. We were told that few, if any, improvements in traffic control have been made since the 1970s, despite the city adding untold millions of cars between then and now. As a result, matatus are forced to deposit morning commuters at the edge of the city; people then walk or run the rest of the way, often many kilometers. As a result, the dusty road shoulders on Nairobi’s outskirts are clogged with office workers at 6 a.m. Night owls must find it tough to compete in the Kenyan economy.

*Olive baboons are some of the coolest, craftiest creatures ever.

*Ketchup on pizza? Really?

More soon. Just have to readjust to North America for a short spell, then we’re back in the game.

(Photo by Microkhan)

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Truly Unsafe at Any Speed

October 2nd, 2009


This is the last post we scheduled before departing for Kenya last weekend—a Bad Movie Friday entry that rankles with its unrealistic depiction of vehicular combustion. Even the 1971 Ford Pinto wasn’t quite this fragile.

Thanks to those of you stuck with us this week, despite knowing that a WordPress bot was at the posting controls. Transportation deities willing, we’ll be back at the helm on Monday. Wish us luck, especially with avoiding lethal boredom at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. We’re gonna be stuck there for hours, waiting for a killer red eye via Zurich. Good thing we’ll have The Power Broker to keep us company.

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Misled by Nicholas of Cologne

October 1st, 2009

ChildCrusaderWe can’t say we’re utterly convinced as to the verisimilitude of the Children’s Crusade. But there is, at the very least, a primary source. And it doesn’t mince words:

About the time of Easter and Pentecost,without anyone having preached or called for it and prompted by I know not what spirit, many thousands of boys, ranging in age from six years to full maturity, left the plows or carts which they were driving, the flocks which they were pasturing, and anything else which they were doing. This they did despite the wishes of their parents, relatives, and friends who sought to make them draw back. Suddenly one ran after another to take the cross…One thing is sure: that of the many thousands who rose up, only very few returned.

The kids turned back at Metz or Marseille? We have a feeling they were the lucky ones.

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At Play in the Fields of the Crow

September 30th, 2009

AmericanWest
An absolutely haunting collection of photographs that document America’s push westward. The one above is by no means the most dramatic, but something about the facial expressions stuck with us. The caption simply reads:

A noon meal in Ferdinand V. Hayden’s camp of the U.S. Geological Survey. Red Buttes, Wyo. Terr., August 24, 1870. Hayden sits at far end of table in dark jacket; W. H. Jackson stands at far right. By Jackson. 57-HS-282.

Hayden, it turns out, has his share of avid fans.

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Escape from Cat Island

September 29th, 2009

FeralCatBack in March, we brought you news of mankind’s triumph over the rodent denizens of Rat Island, Alaska. Now comes word that many thousands of miles to the south, a veritable Cat Island (aka Wake Atoll) has been similarly scourged of its furry invaders (PDF):

At the end of the second week in July, we had completed 343 trap nights, caught 37 cats and shot 39 for a total of 76. By the end of the first month, 104 cats had been removed. In the fifth week, we resumed trapping but cats were wary. Nevertheless, previously unknown cats were discovered and lured into live traps. By the end of the sixth week, 120 cats had been removed. We finished the first phase knowing that about 20 cats remained.

And what happened to those 20 survivors? Read the rest—though probably not if you’re a cat lover. Suffice to say that a contraption dubbed the “hard jaw” is involved.

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“Took the Dodge Dart, a ’74”

September 28th, 2009


If all goes precisely according to plan, this post will publish at the exact moment our flight departs Zurich for Nairobi. But we scheduled some goodies to keep you tantalized in our absence. And we’ll also try to post an update or two from the road, assuming something noteworthy happens as we journey west from the capital. So, please, keep checking this space at semi-regular intervals. And know that we should be back to full strength next week.

In the meantime, enjoy the above song, perhaps the finest traveling tune ever written (and our favorite lullaby for Microkhan Jr.). Un-emeddable video here.

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Packing Music

September 25th, 2009


Via Radio Nova. The soundtrack for the stacking of shirts. And if you’re a soul music fan, GStrongRaw’s entire channel is well worth a visit.

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“It’s Dangerous for Strangers in Atlantis”

September 25th, 2009


On our forthcoming trip to Africa, we certainly hope we don’t suffer Kathy Ireland’s fate and slip into an underground realm populated by refugees from an Olivia Newton-John video. But we reckon anything’s possible, so we’ll be sure to conceal our surface-world origins should foam columns give way.

Believe it or not, we actually saw this whole dog back in ’88; we were big fans of Ireland’s work in the swimsuit oeuvre. Alas, our only memory of the movie is of being vaguely disappointed in the lack of jiggle. Suffice to say that the experience forever soured us on Ms. Ireland’s skills as a producer of area rugs and carpets.

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The Literacy Laggard

September 25th, 2009

We have to think there’s some sort of correlation between Pakistan’s persistent internal turmoil and its atrociously bad system of primary education. The nation may have one of the world’s top fifty economies, but its literacy rate officially languishes around the 50 percent mark. That makes Pakistan’s population less bookish than such poverty-stricken countries as Haiti, Liberia, and Malawi, all of which presumably have far less public lucre to spend on educating their children.

Yet is the Pakistani literacy rate even lower than advertised? A columnist for the Pakistan Observer makes the case:

The result of the above efforts have been that during 1981 and 1998 (17 years) the literacy rate in Pakistan increased from 26.2% in 1981 to 45% in 1998 which means an average of 1.1 points every year between 1981 to 1998. It was, therefore, very surprising when the Prime Minister of Pakistan recently announced the literacy rate in Pakistan being 56%. The same figure appears in the “Pakistan Economic Survey 2008-09”. It is interesting that from 1998 to 2008, a period of ten years multiplied by an average increase of 1.1 points every year comes to 11 points. Added to the 45% literacy rate in 1998 it also comes to 56%. This has been the practice of the Ministry of Education to add every year 1.1 points to the previous year’s literacy rate and make an announcement of the increased ratio of literacy in the country. The announcement of literacy ratio had been only a “desk exercise”. This can be verified from the Pakistan Economic Surveys of the previous years.

The writer blames the low literacy rate on a deliberate government scheme to keep the masses ignorant, and therefore less likely to “ask many questions for which our Rulers have no answers.” That explanation actually strikes us as overly cynical; our own take is that Pakistan’s central government simply prefers to focus on petty squabbling. It thus gives local ministers inordinate power of primary education, with no system of checks to ensure that basic standards are being met. But with statistical sleight of hand making the situation look far better on paper than on the ground, there is far too little pressure for Pakistan to change.

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Slack, Please

September 24th, 2009


Though we recently vowed to avoid apologizing for light posting, we can’t help ourselves today. Sorry, just swamped with prepping for our East Africa trip—gotta pick up our doxycycline, along with a host of other odds and ends. For the moment, though, we’ll leave you with sonic stylings of the late Joe Higgs. And we’ll return soon.

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A Hole in the Happiness Theory?

September 24th, 2009

BhutanAsylum
So many statistical goodies to sift through in the latest report on American asylum cases (PDF). But by far our favorite oddity can be glimpsed in the chart above. What’s going on with the Bhutanese? Only three citizens of the isolated kingdom claimed asylum in the U.S. three years ago, and then none in 2007. But then the hordes came last year. What gives? Are the Bhutanese masses far less happy than their monarchical government so famously claims?

In searching for the answer, we noted this cryptic paragraph in the report:

In 2008, the leading countries of nationality for refugee admissions were Burma (30 percent), Iraq (23 percent), and Bhutan (8.9 per cent) (see Table 3). Sixty-two percent of refugees were from these three countries. Iraqi refugee admissions increased over eight-fold from 1,608 in 2007 to 13,823 in 2008. The number of refugees from Bhutan increased from 0 in 2007 to 5,320 in 2008. As part of a 2008 multilateral agreement with six other nations, the United States agreed to resettle up to 60,000 Bhutanese refugees.

It turns out those refugees are part of a persecuted ethnic minority, the Lhotshampas, who’ve spent years living in refugee camps.

Getting those Lhotshampas out of immigration purgatory is an obvious good. But we’re curious regarding the politics of the agreement; the U.S. has recently been relatively hostile to asylum seekers from several other nations with more transparent relevance to our national interests, so why did the Lhotshampas receive such positive treatment? We didn’t realize that our government had such a keen interest in quelling Nepalese-Bhutanese tensions.

Read more about the Lhotshampas resettlement in the U.S. here; many of them are ending up as farm laborers in Vermont.

Update Down in comments, a wise counselor points out that some of the Bhutanese refugees are alighting across the Harlem River from Microkhan HQs.

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“With the Priest Holmes Fakeout”

September 23rd, 2009


On a crushing Wired deadline right now, made all the worse by the fact we’re still trying to figure out our Africa logistics. (Anyone know the intercity bus situation in southern Kenya?) But no reason you should have to feel our stress—sit back and enjoy the classic cut above (which we’re pretty sure features a Remo Fernandes sample). Lyrics NSFW, but you probably knew that already.

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Can Nicorette Be Righteous?

September 23rd, 2009

NicoretteAd
As we’ve given ever-deeper thought to our nation’s distressingly high infant morality rate, we’ve started to wonder how best to address the problem. Everything we’ve read in recent days seems to indicate that the rate could be dramatically lowered if more expectant mothers took better care of their bodies—specifically by quitting smoking, which pretty clearly results in low birth weights (and thus increased risk of death in the first year of life).

But we realize those cancer sticks can be mighty tough to give up, especially when a smoker feels unduly stressed—say, by the imminent arrival of a young’un and all the attendant madness that entails. So how about prescribing nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs) to pregnant women, instead of insisting that they go cold turkey?

The argument against this is pretty easy to discern: Nicorette and similar products contain a healthy dollop of nicotine, and so may still pose a threat to fetal health. But how much of a threat? We could only dig up one study on the topic, from Denmark, and it came down pretty clearly on the side of NRTs:

Of the 2% of women who had used NRT during pregnancy, 56% had continued to smoke during pregnancy, while 30% had stopped smoking for the duration of the pregnancy and 14% had quit smoking. A total of 495 of the 87,032 pregnancies (5.7 per 1000 births) ended in stillbirth. Among NRT users, the rate of stillbirth was 4.2 in 1000 births. Compared to nonusers, women using NRT had an unadjusted HR of 0.75 (95% CI 0.37-1.15) for stillbirth. The risk of stillbirth was not affected by the type of NRT used (patches only, chewing gum only, inhaling substances only, and various combinations of NRT products). Adjustment for smoking habits during pregnancy lowered the estimated risk, while adjustment for household socio-occupational status and maternal age did not change the estimate. Consistent with previous studies, the risk of stillbirth was increased during pregnancy among smokers who did not use NRT (HR 1.46, 95% CI 1.17-1.82). Women who both smoked and used NRT during pregnancy had a HR of 0.83 (95% CI 0.34-2.00).

While such a study only serves to get the research ball rolling, it does make us wonder about the potential for using NRTs to lower the American IM rate. The stumbling block, of course, will be the objections of idealists, who insist on cold turkey as the only truly safe means. But would a harm reduction strategy here really be immoral? The cold-turkey effectiveness rate is just so low, we almost feel as if more lives could be saved by going the pragmatic route. Yet we fear that such a thing can never come to pass, simply because of the all-or-nothing mindset that so many health practitioners favor.

When in doubt, we favor the policy that can save the maximum number of lives. But we also understand how such pragmatism might strike our more idealistic counterparts as cold-hearted. Who here is truly on the side of the angels? And how do we convince the opposing team of the righteousness of our views?

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