Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

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Prowlers of the Seven Seas

August 4th, 2009


In keeping with our vow to consume lots of classic flicks while banging out Draft Two of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, we launched into the uncut version of Das Boot. We hadn’t seen the movie in about a decade, so we’d largely forgotten about its splendor. It’s tough to imagine a better cinematic portrait of life aboard a vintage submarine—Wolfgang Petersen is an absolute master when it comes to conveying claustrophobia, boredom, and anxiety.

Yet our greatest joy in watching the film’s first hour came in marveling at the technology on display. Geeks that we are, we couldn’t help but fixate on the thousand-and-one gadgets that Petersen’s camera swoops by—the hydrophone, in particular, stayed in our dreams last night. And so we’ve accordingly spent much of the morning reading up on submarine tech, starting with the seaborne vehicle’s surprisingly lengthy history. (That William Bourne cat deserves far more credit.)

As fate would have it, The Providence Journal is also in the midst of a massive, multi-part account of the building of a $2.2 billion nuclear submarine. If you’re mechanically inclined, we highly recommend the step-by-step slideshow. We’re actually struck by the size of the hull; compared to those German U-boat crews, our contemporary submariners live large.

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Master at Work

August 3rd, 2009


So we’re back to working hard on the screenplay, trying to bang out a second draft by (gulp) August 28th. To get in the right frame of mind, then, we’ve started watching a bunch of cinematic classics that have resided too long on our “must see” list. Chief among these was Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, a noir that doubles as an Inferno-like journey through the seamy side of post-war Tokyo. Highly recommended, as it’s rife with scenes like those above—dreamy snapshots of a city on the mend from the worst brutality and deprivation imaginable.

Wish we could’ve dug up the celebrated baseball scene, but no dice. If anyone has that clip, please pass it along; we’ll try to get you an official Microkhan mesh hat in return.

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And Protector of Mexico, Too

August 3rd, 2009

EmperorNortonNote
Since the writing game puts food on our table, we currently have a somewhat complicated relationship with Google Books. Try as we might, we’ve yet to figure out a way we’ll be able to avoid starvation in a world where the sweat of our brow gets given away for free. Yet those concerns fall by the wayside when we stumble across primary source gems such as this 1876 account of Emperor Norton‘s odd habits.

For the uninitiated, Emperor Norton was a 19th-century San Franciscan who believed that America’s greatest shortcoming was its lack of a monarch. So, though penniless and mentally unstable, Norton decided to take that job for himself. As his contemporary so eloquently put it:

His hallucination is, that he is Emperor of California and Protector of Mexico. In accordance with this belief, his sole purpose in life is to properly administer to his subjects, and like a wise ruler should, do everything possible for the promotion of prosperity and the advancement of his dominions. His diplomatic relations with other countries are not lost sight of, and he profits by closely observing the progress or downfall of other nations, using their experience in his home policy. His power is duly recognized in times of international or civil wars. He claims to have reconciled the French and the Prussians, and brought about the peace that was established between them at the close of the late Franco-Prussian war. The war of the Rebellion was terminated through his interference, and the success attending the reconstruction of the Union, is due in a great part to his wise counsel.

Also check out the scanned version of Sandman #31, which features an awesome Emperor Norton vignette (complete with an appearance by Despair in full naked-with-a-finger-hook mode).

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Where Divorce Dare Not Speak Its Name

August 3rd, 2009

In response to our recent string of posts regarding the “Natural Rate of Divorce”, a commenter asked an interesting question: how might an examination of the situation in the Philippines shed some light on the topic? The Philippines, after all, is the only nation in the world, apart from the Vatican, where divorce continues to be entirely legally verboten. So how do Filipinos route around this, and how has the law affected the country’s social and economic fortunes?

We’ll start by tackling the latter question, and get to the former later in the week. While it’s obviously nigh impossible to quantify the misery endured by men or women trapped in failing marriages, the enforced stability of the institution is not without its financial benefits. As argued here, the Philippines resistance to divorce may contribute mightily to the nation’s ability to send workers abroad:

Overseas Filipino Workers working in advanced Western nations are witnesses to the deterioration of the family through divorce. I hope that our OFWs will be the very first ones to insist that we should always keep in our Constitution the statement that “marriage is an inviolable institution.” A stable and happy family is the very reason why OFWs sacrifice some of the best years of their lives literally slaving in some foreign country just to eke out a decent living for their loved ones. There are no so-called humanitarian reasons that should ever make us embrace the deadly consequences of divorce.

In other words, OFWs wouldn’t be so quick to spend years building skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi if they knew the missus back in Tagaytay might abandon them at any moment. And perhaps that’s part of the reason why OFWs are such might economic engines, accounting for a full eighth of the Philippines’ gross domestic product.

More on Filipino divorce later in the week. As you might have guessed, there are ways around that supposedly iron-clad constitutional stipulation.

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RIP Corazon Aquino

July 31st, 2009

Her story was amazing.

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“A Profound Instinct…for Vengeance!”

July 31st, 2009


Here’s a doozy of a me-too flick for Bad Movie Friday: 1977’s Orca, which tried oh-so-hard to copy the Jaws formula. But the film flopped miserably, in large part because its target audience wasn’t all that terrified by killer whales. (Thanks, Shamu.) Oh, and also because Richard Harris gnaws on the scenery like it was a plug of Skoal.

But Charlotte Rampling is great here. We totally get why rockers worship her from afar. Though we’re not huge fans of her way-too-earnest MC’ing.

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Divorce, Roman Style

July 31st, 2009

Continuing on with our recent divorce obsession, a reader comment inspired us to look at the split rate in ancient Rome. We recall that the union between Emperor Augustus and Livia came about only after the two lovebirds divorced their first spouses. (Livia’s husband, Nero, actually approved of the maneuver, and attended the ensuing wedding banquet.) But how common was such marital tumult? Susan Treggiari offered a guess in the book Marriage, Divorce and Children in Ancient Rome:

I suggest that many of those who think the Roman incidence high may have in mind something like the English rate between the Great War and the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969 for the senatorial class in general, although they might think (as I would) that the most ambitious dynasts and members of Augustus’ family would be nearer the current American rate. Statistical probabilities are beyond our reach. The nearest I would venture to a guess is that ordinary senators and equestrians might bet there was about one chance in six of a first marriage being dissolved by divorce within the first decade and about the same chance of its being dissolved by death.

That may be peanuts compared to the rate in West Java circa 1950. But it’s also worth noting that the latter-day Romans turned against divorce with a vengeance at some point; the practice was actually illegal in modern Italy until 1970.

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Jim Johnson and the Peter Principle

July 31st, 2009

JimJohnsonAs noted at the end of our mission statement, we reserve the right to occasionally veer away from the esoteric in favor of more mainstream topics that tickle our fancy. And so we’d like to spend a few minutes ruminating over the passing of Jim Johnson, arguably the greatest NFL defensive coordinator ever.

A bold claim, for sure—many an NFL fanatic would prefer to bestow that title upon the cantankerous Buddy Ryan, the brains behind the 46 defense. But what separates the two was Jonhson’s refusal, time and again, to leave the Philadelphia Eagles for a head coaching vacancy elsewhere. Ryan somewhat sullied his legacy with a couple of mediocre head coaching stints. (Do you remember his tumultous Arizona Cardinals days? Yeah, neither did we.) Johnson, by contrast, never showed the slightest iota of interest in a promotion; he was perfectly content to play second fiddle in Philly.

Media shy to the fault, Johnson never really explained why he didn’t aspire to become an NFL head coach. His boss, Andy Reid, attempted to address the issue in a press conference two days ago, but his words shed little light. (“I think he knew this was a great situation.” Yeah, thanks, Scoop.) Our own take, though, is that Johnson was blessed with that rarest of gifts: the self-awareness necessary to realize that he’d fall victim to the Peter Principle should he try to move up the ladder.

If that sounds like a slam, believe us, it’s not intended to be—quite the opposite, in fact. The Peter Principle, which postulates that workers are eventually promoted one notch above their competence level, applies to so many situations because so few people have the ability to understand their talents. And so countless of organizational disasters have ensued due to outsized ambitions.

Johnson may have known on some level that he lacked a certain skill set required to successfully head a team. Maybe he just didn’t want to spend time dealing with egos rather than focusing on X’s and O’s. Whatever—the point is, Johnson chose instead to pour everything he had into building and managing one of the most consistently feared defenses in NFL history. We’ll never know how he might’ve done at the helm, but we can all be certain that he was a blitzing genius.

Rest in peace, Coach Johnson. And may future executives in the non-sports world learn from your tremendous-yet-humble success.

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Your Friendly Neighborhood Birther

July 30th, 2009

Atlah Birther SignOn his way out of town, our pal Oken was sharp enough to snap the church sign to the right, which stands a mere block away from Microkhan world headquarters. This particular church, which gained some infamy during last year’s election, is evidently none too fond of the man currently occupying the White House.

Oh, and the “No Dew Nor Rain” quote at the bottom refers to the church’s ongoing three-year boycott of all goods and services in Harlem. It’s the brainchild of the church’s leader, Pastor James David Manning, whose biography includes this glorious tidbit regarding his educational background:

Manning graduated from The College of New Rochelle with a Bachelor of Arts degree and continued on to Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York where he was awarded a Master of Divinity. Manning also holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the ATLAH Theological Seminary, an unaccredited educational institution.

We are now sorely tempted to dub ourselves Dr. Microkhan.

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The Murder Project: “Doing the Big Job”

July 30th, 2009

FivePoints
Part of our goal with The Murder Project series is to assess how hitman prices have changed over time. Our assumption going in is that these prices shift according to the certainty (or lack thereof) of capture, and so more lawless epochs will be marked by lower murder-for-hire fees. A logical guess, perhaps, but does the evidence bear it out?

Today we start in the most obvious place for historical data of this nature: Luc Sante‘s classic Low Life, the preeminent non-fiction account of New York’s filthy, boozy expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the book’s chapter on the city’s pre-La Cosa Nostra gangster culture, Sante offers a couple of “menus” of thug-for-hire services. The first list, created by the notorious Whyos around 1883, quotes a price of “$100 and up” for “doing the big job.” (For comparison’s sake, a mere punching went for $2.)

Later on, Sante reprints this 1914 rate sheet from a Lower West Side gang—the prices quoted are maximums:

Stealing a horse and rig: $25
Poisoning one horse: $35
Poisoning team: $50
Non fatal shooting: $100
Fatal shooting: $500

Using our handy inflation calculator, we can see that the baseline for 1883 contract killings was about $2,300, while the high end for such a violent service some 31 years later was a little over $10,600. All in all, that doesn’t sound too terribly out of line with the 2004 Australian study we mentioned the other day.

So is it possible that murder-for-hire rates have actually remained static in the United States over the long haul? And if so, might this totally blow our original hypothesis out of the water? That’ll require knowing more about homicide case clearance rates in Old New York. And that’s a rich topic we’ll have to save for another post.

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Oken Goes to Oshkosh

July 30th, 2009


Apologies, but gonna be a slightly late start today. We’re in the process of helping our great pal from Arunachal Pradesh catch a plan from LaGuardia to Minneapolis, en route to the big Oshkosh air show.

So chew on the above Mood Swingaz track for the next hour or so, and we’ll be back at the keys as soon as Oken’s safely aboard the M60 bus. Got a Murder Project entry slated for the late morning, so a revisit will be well worth your trouble. Promise.

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Mr. T, Copyright Defender

July 29th, 2009


Huge apologies for the string of bummer posts over the past few days—murder-for-hire, arms smuggling, and gulags do not a happy Microkhan reader make, we now realize. So let us make it up to you by sharing an episode of Mr. T’s eponymous (and hugely underrated) Reagan-era cartoon. It involves stuntmen, ninjas, and movie piracy, as well as Laurence Tureaud trademark wit and wisdom. No one puts a self-righteous egghead in his place better than the man behind Clubber Lang.

Special Bonus: The young Mr. T also had a strong interest in ensuring that you enjoyed a complete and nutritious breakfast.

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Too Fat for the Fuzz?

July 29th, 2009

We’ve seen our fair share of portly policemen over the years, so were were a bit surprised to learn of Chris Parent’s strange saga. The Nebraskan cop was fired two years ago for being way too fat—so fat, in fact, that he couldn’t kneel down and shoot during the department’s firearms test. A protracted legal battle has Parent back on the force, but it looks like his chief is none too happy with the situation.

All of which raises the question: Can you really be too obese to police? We tend to think so, and believe that Parent would have been canned long ago had he served in a more demanding locale. We just don’t see him chasing too many perps in the mean streets of Bellevue. But perhaps we just need to work on our avoirdupois acceptance.

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Daily Bread

July 29th, 2009

GulagBread
Last night’s long subway ride afforded us an opportunity to start reading Ian Frazier’s Siberia travelogue in the latest New Yorker. So far, it’s every bit as astounding as we’d hoped—the long digression about Siberian butter, in particular, made our inner magazine geek nearly burst with glee. What can we say, we’re absolute suckers for Frazier’s brand of narrative non-fiction—and, of course, jealous of his gig. What Microkhan wouldn’t give to be dispatched to the frostiest reaches of the globe, and instructed not to come back until we had 20,000 words worth of killer material.

The surest sign of Frazier’s achievement, though, is the fact we spent much of the morning following up on one of his asides—namely, a brief comment that conditions at the Kolyma gold mines had arguably been the worst in human history. We couldn’t let a claim like that just dangle in the wind, so we’ve been busily reading up on Soviet forced labor while getting caffeinated for the day. We’ve been particularly absorbed in the site for The Gulag Museum at Perm-36, which bills itself as “the only Russian museum for the history of political repression.” Then there’s this online exhibit, from which the photo above is taken—that’s how much bread a gulag inmate received each day, assuming he or she had fulfilled their work quota.

If you’re a truly robust soul, also check out this account of female suffering in the gulag system. The color illustrations by former inmate Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia will stick with you for a long, long time.

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The Arms Trade, Illustrated

July 28th, 2009

SmallArmsSurveyComicIn the course of learning about contemporary cattle raiding in Sudan, we found ourselves sifting through a recent edition of the annual Small Arms Survey. It’s an informative publication, no doubt, but also mind-numbingly dense; our eyes glazed over midway through Chapter Three, during the extended exploration of “security enhancement projects.”

Thankfully, the survey’s authors must have realized the dryness of the material. And so they decided to break up the monotony with this eight-page comic booklet (PDF), entitled “Adventures of a Would-Be Arms Dealer.” Highly recommended if you’d like the quick-and-dirty version on how millions of assault rifles make their way across the globe. We especially liked the back-of-the-envelope calculation regarding the profit to be made from selling rifle bullets in Somalia, for 75 cents a piece.

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The Murder Project

July 28th, 2009

MurderInc
While scouring some FBI press releases last week, we came across this semi-comical gem from the Chicago field office. It announces the arrest of a Indiana tandem who stand accused of trying to arrange a contract killing. Note the details of their proposed payment for this risky task:

FRIEDBURG and ALEXANDER were both charged in a criminal complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Chicago with one count each of Conspiracy to use Interstate Commerce Facilities in the Commission of Murder-for-Hire, which is a felony offense. According to the complaint, FRIEDBURG approached a former co-worker, asking for their assistance in finding someone to kill her ex-boyfriend, who was the father of one of her children. The complaint further alleges that FRIEDBURG wanted her former boyfriend murdered as he was seeking to gain custody of the child that he fathered and that she wanted his death to look like an accident.

The former co-worker cooperated with the FBI and arranged for the introduction of an FBI undercover Special Agent (UCSA) to FRIEDBURG, who posed as a potential “hit man.” During subsequent conversations with the UCSA, FRIEDBURG provided essentially the same reason for wanting her former boyfriend killed and offered him $200 cash and an above-ground swimming pool as payment for the murder.

Our initial reaction was to chortle at the “fee”—is life really that cheap in New Carlisle? (Any Microkhan readers out there who can fill us in, perchance?) But on further reflection, we came to realize there was something worthy of study here—specifically the going rate for murders-for-hire in America today, and how it compares to both historical and international rates.

Believe it or not, our interest isn’t strictly prurient. We actually think such data can tell us something about the state of law enforcement in U.S., since murder-for-hire fees must obviously correlate with the degree of risk involved—the higher the likelihood of capture, the higher the fee. We’re also interested in how much prices range, depending on the desperation of the hired gun and the nature of the target—for example, do targets with higher incomes attract killers with higher fees?

And so we’re proud to announce the launch of The Murder Project, our second Microkhan series (the first being the semi-regular First Contact feature). We’ll be keeping an eye out for stories and studies regarding the murder-for-hire market, with the intent of establishing a reliable estimate of how much contract killings go for nowadays. In addition, we’ll be digging up prices from the olden days, as well data about fees in foreign lands.

We’ll start today with a slam dunk, courtesy of Microkhan ally Nina Shen Rastogi over at Slate. Her February “Explainer” column on the topic is a great place to start, especially this kicker factoid about an Australian study from 2004:

A few years ago, the Australian Institute of Criminology and South Australia’s major crime-investigation branch studied 163 attempted and actual contract killings between 1989 and 2002. The average rate received was 12,700 Australian dollars, or about $8,254. The lowest was 380 AUD (about $250), and the highest was 76,000 AUD (about $49,400).

We’ll have more later this week, as we plow through 108 FBI press releases about murder-for-hire arrests since 2007. Stay tuned.

(Photo above: Murder Inc. impresario Louis Buchalter on his way to court, 1941)

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Katowice Got It Goin’ On

July 27th, 2009


Poland’s funk era has often been described as “little known,” and not without good reason. We here at Microkhan are intent on correcting that egregious oversight by bringing you the cut above, complete with candy-colored Slavic montage. We’re big fans of the rhythm guitar work on this one, not to mention Irena’s breathy “ahs.”

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Sports Transition Fail

July 27th, 2009

WakanohanaFootballIn response to our recent post about Japanese tackle football, a commenter asked a salient question:

I’ve always wondered if some of the high-ranking sumo wrestlers could make it in the NFL as blitzing specialists. There’s been a long history of association between football and wrestling in the US, with a lot of highschool wrestling teams serving as off-season training programs for the football team. I wonder if the Japanese national Football team is stocked with washed out sumo wrestlers?

Microkhan did a little digging, and it turns out that a former yokozuna once got pretty close to making it in the NFL. Masaru Hanada (above), who wrestled under the name Wakanohana, tried out for a couple of teams back in 2001. He was considered a good candidate to make the transition because, as far as sumos go, he was pretty light—he usually wrestled at a mere 285 pounds, and relied on his natural athleticism to defeat far heavier opponents.

But things just didn’t work out, largely because he was so far behind on technique. We reckon that those blitzing maneuvers that look so facile on TV are actually a lot trickier than they seem. And if you don’t grow up playing the sport, your nose for the ball probably isn’t to sharp.

Hanada ended up on the Arizona Rattlers for a brief time, but he washed out (though his agent claimed that visa and insurance problems were to blame). He had a chance to start a rung lower, in Arena Football’s second-tier league, but he wisely passed. Why get pounded in the American sticks when you can own a successful chain of hot-pot restaurants back home?

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Divorce in Ye Olden Tymes

July 27th, 2009

Following up on last week’s divorce theme, we thought we’d take a look back at pre-modern marital splits. While divorce may not have been common in the West until the advent of women’s lib, it was apparently a staple of several Asian and Middle Eastern societies for centuries:

The outpouring of scholarly and popular works dealing with the rise of divorce in the West all but disregards the historical examples of past societies in which divorce rates have been consistently high. Two major examples are pre-modern Japan and Islamic Southeast Asia. In nineteenth-century Japan at least one in eight marriages ended in divorce. In West Java and the Malay Peninsula divorce rates were even higher, reaching 70 percent in some villages, as late as the middle of the twentieth century. In these societies divorce was part and parcel of tradition; it was frequent and normative, and did not involve any stigma that would hinder the remarriage of divorced persons. In direct opposition to developments in the West, modernity brought with it greater stability in marriage and a sharp decline in divorce rates.

The pre-modern Middle East was another traditional society that had consistently high rates of divorce over long periods of time. Despite some current misgivings over the imminent disintegration of the Muslim family as a result of frequent divorces, the fact is that divorce rates were higher in Ottoman or medieval Muslim societies than they are today. A decade of research on the history of Ottoman families, mostly drawing on the abundant court registers, has shown that divorce was a common feature of family life. In eighteenth-century Aleppo divorce was a “fairly common occurrence,” with at least 300 divorces registered annually, and many more going on unregistered. The court of Ottoman Nablus recorded as many marriages as divorces, which shows “relatively high rates of divorce.” A similar picture of high divorce rates and a normative attitude to divorce emerges from studies of Ottoman court records in Istanbul, Cairo, Cyprus, Sofia and Ayntab.

(Our bolding.) The paper is particularly concerned with Ottoman divorces, and the difference between consensual separation (khul) and splits in which the husband basically said, “Screw this” (talaq). To our great surprise, the latter wasn’t necessarily more common than the former.

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Don’t Shake Henry’s Hand

July 24th, 2009


Yesterday we noted a mid-1980s toothpaste commercial that still freaks us out to this day. Now, in the space normally reserved for Bad Movie Friday, we’d like to recall the celluloid character who creeped us out more than Freddy and Jason combined: Henry Kane, the demonic cult leader who menaces the Freeling family in Poltergeist II.

Sadly, part of what makes Kane such a terrifying character is the ill health of the man who played him, the late, great Julian Beck. He was actually suffering from late-stage stomach cancer while shooting this movie, so his skeleton-like appearance required little in the way of makeup. Just before his death, Beck said that the Kane role was all that kept him going during his roughest days; he passed away shortly after the movie wrapped. That end-of-days intensity certainly comes across on the screen—watch the whole clip and you’ll see what we mean. And please forgive Craig T. Nelson, who seems like a high-school thespian in comparison to Beck.

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Clarification on Divorce

July 24th, 2009

Due to some less-than-stellar writing on our parts, we attracted some mystified “huhs?” regarding yesterday’s post on arranged-marriage divorce rates versus those for “love” marriages. That admittedly confusing post, in turn, referred back to a concept we mentioned about two months back: what we’ve termed the natural rate of divorce.

Okay, let’s slow down and explain what we mean here. By “natural rate of divorce,” we’re asserting that mankind must accept that a certain percentage of marriages are better off ending then limping along for decades. Human beings make mistakes, and though marriage is supposedly forever, it’s ludicrous to expect folks to stay in partnerships that are detrimental to their well-being. In other words, let’s all be thankful that we live in a society where divorce isn’t completely verboten on idealistic grounds.

At the same time, policymakers shouldn’t make divorce too easy of a process. Reconciliations happen, people change, and splits can obviously wreak havoc on children and extended families. So as we see it, the law must be finely tuned so that it provides an out for the desperate, but doesn’t create too much familiar instability.

To cobble together such laws, then, we must have an idea of what percent of marriages should end in divorce—that “natural rate” to which we’ve referred. And based on our analysis of divorce rates from nations with both unusually permissive and unusually strict matrimonial laws, our guess is that somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of marriages should be terminated, for the benefit of the maximum number of people involved in the arrangements.

What say you? Is that too low a figure? Too high? Microkhan’s expertise is more invasion than matrimony, so we’re definitely open to learned quibbles here.

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“Speed Like the Wind”

July 24th, 2009


After receiving word that a team of Notre Dame pigskin alums will soon take on Japan’s national football team, we got to wondering about the uniquely American sport’s history in the Land of the Rising Sun. Our natural assumption was that it was brought over during the post-World War II occupation. But it was, in fact, another cataclysm that ushered in the gridiron era in Japan:

The history of American Football in Japan goes back to 1934 when Paul Rusch, a teacher and missionary from Kentucky (USA), who came to Japan in 1925 to help rebuild the Yokohama and Tokyo YMCAs that were destroyed in a 1923 earthquake, George Marshall, an athletic teacher at Tokyo based Rikkyo University, and two military attaches at the US embassy, Alexander George and Merritt Booth, helped to form the first football teams at three universities in Tokyo (Waseda, Meiji, Rikkyo). In November of 1934 the first football game was played between an all-star team of the three Tokyo universities and a team of the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club consisting of Americans and Britains living in Japan. The Japanese college team won the game.

American Football quickly gained popularity in Japan. In 1937 a game between college all-star teams from eastern and western Japan drew a crowd of about 25.000 spectators.

Yet as in the rest of the world, football has remained a minor sport in Japan—certainly far outshone by that other American export, baseball, which came to Japan during the Meiji Era.

So what is it about pigskin that has made it so difficult to translate to other cultures? The stock explanation is that soccer got most places first, and thus crowded out the demand for similar sports. But that doesn’t appear to have been the case in Japan.

Could it be that even America’s (and Microkhan’s) love affair with tackle football is something of an accident? It’s easy to forget that professional football was a minor sport until the 1960s, outshone by baseball, boxing, and even horse racing. We wonder if our early adoption of television (and, in turn, couch potato-ism) came just in time to lift football to the exalted heights of America’s favorite spectator sport—if nothing else, the pastime is perfectly tailored for the tube.

Also, the way our colleges and universities get funded seems to have played a key role. Alumni donations and corporate funding are so key to swelling endowments, and the competition for students (especially those willing to pay the full sticker price) is intense. Pumping up football teams has always been an excellent way for schools to bring in dollars, since the relatively rare games (just eleven or twelve per year) can double as alcohol-laced brand builders/fundraisers.

We do wonder whether we’ll ever live to see a pigskin World Cup. If one were held today, who would make the semifinals other than the U.S. and Canada? Judging by the footage above, the Japanese teams seem to have some, uh, interior size issues.

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Motrin, Motrin Everywhere

July 24th, 2009

Apologies for the super-late start today. Microkhan Jr.’s struggling with an aggressive virus that landed the whole crew in the ER last night. Naps, kiddie Motrin, and maybe a touch of kumis are in order, then we hope to catch y’all in a few. In the meantime, reward yourself with a week well done by revisiting the glory of Automan.

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The Monsters in Your Teeth

July 23rd, 2009


Microkhan Jr. stunned us yesterday by yelping out “Elmo!” upon seeing the ubiquitous monster on Sesame Street. That incident has got us thinking about how brands weasel their way into young minds, a train of thought that in turn led us to dig up the classic Crest commercial above. We’ve been Crest-loyal for years because we saw these as wee bairns, and we’re totally creeped out by the prospect of drill-wielding beasts attacking our molars. Show this to your young’uns, then watch ’em run screaming for the medicine cabinet.

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More on Marriage

July 23rd, 2009

Staying on the marriage string, we wanted to note a stat we found buried in this recent piece on Unification Church mass weddings. The reporter found a figure that Microkhan has long been on the hunt for, regarding the divorce rate for arranged marriages (of the non-Moonie sort):

Amitrajeet A. Batabyal, an economics professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who has studied arranged marriages in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, said he believes about 15 percent to 20 percent of arranged marriages around the world end in divorce…By contrast, a 2005 National Center for Health Statistics report showed that 35 percent of women and 31 percent of men in the United States had ended their first marriages after 10 years.

The standard caveats apply, of course: the data is highly suspect because divorce is both legally tougher and more socially stigmatized in nations where its commonly practiced. We’d love to know if Batabyal has any way of breaking out the U.S. figures alone, which we’d assume involve first-generation immigrants of the sort mentioned in the post below.

On the flip side, divorces are on the rise in India, the arranged-marriage heartland. And the U.S. divorce rate has simultaneously been falling, in part because couples of cohabiting longer before tying the knot (and thus getting better at figuring out who ain’t worth the plunge).

We still stand by our earlier assertion that there’s a “natural rate” of divorce which both laws and societal norms should view as a sensible target. How does 22.5 percent strike y’all?

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“Prefer Saturn 7”

July 23rd, 2009

An eagle-eyed reader, obviously aware of Microkhan’s longtime obsession with all things Sri Lanka, recently turned us on the marriage-proposal ads in one of the island nation’s leading papers. They make for fascinating reading, in part as evidence of how closely first-generation immigrants remain tied to the marital practices of their homelands; the bulk of ads seem to be placed by parents seeking partners for their sons and daughters abroad. Our hunch is that there’s a real fear that kids who leave the nest will end up marrying Westerners.

We’re also puzzled by the ads’ emphasis on astrological compatibility. Now, let us come right out and state our prejudice here: we absolutely, positively do not believe in astrology. While we can understand how earlier societies might’ve thought that distant stars played some role in Earthly affairs, we’re just not buying that there’s any validity to such claims. But ad after ad makes very stringent horoscope requests: “Horoscopes compatible with seventh house Ravi, Shani or Rahu may respond,” or “Prefer Saturn 7 or the 8 houses in horoscope.” And these vestiges of tradition persist even as the importance of caste diminishes—note the large number of ads that declare that any caste is welcome to apply.

Then again, such strong emphasis on astrology shouldn’t really surprise us—not in a nation where a prominent celestial diviner was just arrested for predicting political upheaval.

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The Red Sultan’s Legacy

July 23rd, 2009

MorgenthauArmenianWe find ourselves completely baffled by the uproar over the publication of the Turkish-language “Blue Book,” a once-secret British dossier that chronicled the Armenian genocide some 93 years ago. The Turkish government’s griping is predictable enough, of course, given its long history of chafing at public mention of the slaughter. But we’re mystified as to why anyone thinks the Blue Book could possible contain explosive revelations, given that Henry Morgenthau‘s 1918 account of the genocide could scarcely be more detailed or more damning. The American diplomat, who server as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I, pulled no punches in his memoir, quoting directly from internal Turkish figures on the number of Armenian deportees who were murdered en route to their new homes—homes they were never meant to reach in the first place:

It is absurd for the Turkish Government to assert that it ever seriously intended to “deport the Armenians to new homes”; the treatment which was given the convoys clearly shows that extermination was the real purpose of Enver and Talaat. How many exiled to the south under these revolting conditions ever reached their destinations? The experiences of a single caravan show how completely this plan of deportation developed into one of annihilation…Out of the combined convoy of 18,000 souls just 150 women and children reached their destination. A few of the rest, the most attractive, were still living as captives of the Kurds and Turks; all the rest were dead.

Morgenthau’s entire chapter on the Turks’ machinery of death is worth reading. As is the follow-up chapter in which the leader of the Young Turks tries to justify the massacres on the grounds that the “deportations” were necessary for self-defense. Color us deeply unconvinced.

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“They Do That to Taunt Me”

July 22nd, 2009


We’re about to jet downtown for an all-important meeting regarding the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay, so we’ll call it a day with this super-classic clip from Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Though we’re no great fans of the band, we swoon over the doc—a probing portrait of creative minds in crisis, brought on by age, ego clashes, and way too much money. The scene above is perhaps our favorite in the whole film—ex-Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine lets loose his innermost feelings about being a heavy metal also-ran. Must be hard selling a measly 15 million albums—not to mention keeping those flowing locks so healthy.

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The Mammoths’ Last Stand

July 22nd, 2009

WrangelIslandMammothYesterday’s news that a comet helped kill off the Ice Age’s most glorious creatures reminded us of this groundbreaking 1995 paper from the journal Radiocarbon. While most of the world’s mammoths disappeared long before mankind figured out the rudiments of civilization, a small pack of the elephant-like beasts survived until 2000 B.C. or later. Their location? The ceaselessly amazing Wrangel Island:

During the last glacial maximum (ca. 20 ka ago), environmental conditions on Wrangel Island proved capable of sustaining habitation by mammoths. Our data show that woolly mammoths persisted on Wrangel Island in the mid-Holocene, from 7390-3730 yr ago. 14C dating has shown that mammoths inhabited Wrangel Island for as long as 6000 yr after the estimated extinction of Mammuthus primigenius on the Siberian continent.

It’s worth noting that the Wrangel Island mammoths were relatively small, at least compared to their cousins who clomped about Europe and North America. And their small size may have accounted for their post-comet adaptability—just as furry little rodents managed to survive the dinosaur-slaying cataclysm of c. 65 million B.C., and thus usher in the age of mammals.

Well, at least that’s what we learned in school. Has the mammalian theory changed since we closed our paleontology textbooks?

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Married Priests Now

July 22nd, 2009

Given the rapid growth of Catholicism in Africa, it’s certain that the continent’s clergymen are set to play an increasingly large role at the Vatican. (Cardinal Francis Arinze, for example, has already been mentioned as a possible future pope.) But while the majority of Africa’s priests and bishops hew closely to Chruch orthodoxy, there are plenty of radicals, too. And the most notable of these might be Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo of Zambia, founder of Married Priests Now. Though excommunicated, Milingo appears to be winning some high-level converts to his cause:

Yesterday, Bishop Daniel Kasomo of Machakos crossed over to become among Milingo’s first Kenyan harvest.

Milingo presided over Kasomo’s ordination as Kenya’s new Bishop of the Married Priests Now faction of the Catholic Church. Immediately after his ordination, Kasomo challenged former colleagues in the Catholic Church to “not to be ashamed and come clean on their “secret multiple relationships”

“If you cannot do without it, please get married,” challenged Kasomo.

Presiding over Kasomo’s ordination, Milingo claimed that 150,000 priests the world over are secretly married or have relationships. Milingo explained that he opted to marry Maria because he did not want to live a lie.

Milingo, however, is categorical that theirs is not about or justification of virility: “We are not here to demonstrate that we are champion bulls, neither is ours a club of priests who love the easy ways of life.”

It’s obviously impossible to confirm Milingo’s claims of priestly indiscretions. But in light of the Father Maciel scandal from earlier this year, it is getting tougher to deny his charges that hypocrisy is commonplace.

It’s also worth noting something truly odd about Milingo’s marriage: his wedding was conducted by the eternally weird Unification Church. Which, of course, is responsible for supplying you with cut-rate sushi.

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