At first glance, it seems odd that residents of Guayama, Puerto Rico, would object so strenuously to the construction of a new monkey-breeding facility—especially since, as opponents make clear, they don’t have a moral problem with vivisection. They’re instead spooked by the prospect of escapees.
“What’s the big deal?” you might ask. After all, it’s not like Bioculture Mauritius Ltd. is planning to breed super-intelligent mako sharks. But you have to realize that Puerto Rico has an ugly history with fugitive monkeys:
Authorities in Puerto Rico have resorted to shooting monkeys they catch that belong to an estimated population of 1,000 running around the Lajas Valley in the island’s southwest region.
The monkeys arrived in the 1960s and ’70s after escaping labs on nearby islands. They are blamed for causing nearly $300,000 in damage each year as they plunder crops such as pineapples and melons.
Puerto Rico is so anxious to get rid of those runaway primates that officials sent a group of them to a zoo in Iraq earlier this year.
More on Lajas’s war on the unfortunate (albeit destructive) monkeys here.
Though we’ve largely shifted over to using the Grooveshark widget when sharing music with y’all, YouTube remains a go-to place for some truly rare cuts. A good case in point is Spanky Wilson‘s “Kissing My Love,” which we recently heard while trolling through WEFUNK Show #246. It’s a great prime example of the sort of uptempo soul that puts a smile on our face when the world weighs too heavy.
The whole WEFUNK show is worth a listen, especially the interview with Daptone Records impresario Gabriel Roth, a man who obviously feel wholly blessed to be making a living off the music he loves.
So you think Medieval knights were condemned to lug around unwieldy swords, while their Renaissance counterparts bounced around with mere wisps of metal weaponry? Dr. Timothy Dawson believes you’ve been grossly misinformed—a fact he expounds upon at length in one of Microkhan’s all-time favorite publications, the Journal of Western Martial Art:
These results show that full size single-handed swords normally occur in the range of c.650g / 1lb 7oz to c.1400g / 3lb 1.5oz, with a few heavier examples, presumably made for men of greater strength. Weapons at the lower end of that range are extremely fine and light, and yet, as the present author’s own experiments have shown, they are nevertheless remarkably effective. Swords at the top of the range are still light enough that an average man can use them with dexterity and precision. Hand-and-a-half swords had to be capable of being used effectively with one hand, so it is no surprise to find that they fall largely within the same range as single-handed swords, albeit clustered at the top end – ~800g / 1lb 12oz to ~1400g / 3lb 1.5oz. The greater strength and control that can be exercised with two hands can lead to a more than doubling in weight – ~1500g / 3lb 3oz to (in this sample) just ~2600g / 5lb 8oz.
From these examples it can be seen that the idea that medieval and Renaissance swords were heavy, clumsy objects is far from true. Single-handed swords could be very light, and even the heaviest two-hander was amenable to dexterous use. And the evidence is clear that even quite early in the period there were sophisticated techniques available to best employ such finely made tools…but that is another story!
Dr. Dawson’s findings leave us somewhat aghast at the way in which Dungeons & Dragons lied to us.
One of our great journalistic mentors taught us that every saga is about money, at least on some level. That axiom certainly appears to hold true in Xinjiang, the western Chinese province that has suffered through days of deadly riots. As the Financial Timesexplained last year, Muslim Uighurs are incensed not only with the central government’s heavy-handed security apparatus, but also with economic discrimination in Xinjiang’s booming oil fields:
On Petrochemical Boulevard, the main street in Korla, the only visible Uighurs are street cleaners and the odd waiter hanging out in the doorway of a Muslim restaurant.
Locals say Uighurs are sometimes given low-level jobs in the oilfields, but there are none in management positions in Korla. In spite of affirmative action programmes that reserve a proportion of official posts for minority groups, all government and military positions with any real power are held by Han Chinese.
PetroChina and its Korla subsidiary refused to be interviewed, but one former employee said discrimination was rife within the company.
“There used to be two Uighurs driving for the oil company here,” said this former employee, who asked to be known only by his surname, Ma. “But they were moved to a different work unit because the bosses think Muslims are all terrorists and separatists.”
Also worth checking out: The AP’s profile of Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled Uighur leader now living in northern Virginia.
Reading Walter Kirn’s sharp review of Methland reminded us that speed scares are nothing new. In researching the history of Benzedrine for Now the Hell Will Start, we remember coming across this 1959 Time piece about Eisenhower-era addicts and their penchant for crime. With a few linguistic tweaks, it could easily have been written last week—right down to the hand-wringing over the moral harm caused to the Heartland:
“I was involved in a lot of burglaries,” the pretty blonde told Kansas City police, “and I couldn’t have done it without a shot. When you’re on that stuff, you just don’t care. I was even a prostitute for three months.” The “stuff,” explained Sharon Pollard, 21, and now in jail for smuggling a revolver to her jailed boy friend and partner in crime, comes from a 75¢ inhaler intended only for clearing stuffy noses. But if its active chemical ingredient, amphetamine, is dissolved and injected into a vein, it packs a wallop. Last week the abuse of amphetamine was growing so fast that it had the Kansas City police, Missouri legislators, federal officials, even the U.S. Congress seriously concerned.
Society’s troubles with amphetamine go back almost 20 years to a time when the most popular inhaler contained Benzedrine (Smith, Kline, & French Laboratories’ trade name for one form of amphetamine). Prison wardens complained that accordion-pleated paper fillers loaded with 250 mg. of amphetamine (15 times the average daily dose a doctor would prescribe for reducing or lethargic patients) were being smuggled to convicts, who chewed them and went on violent rampages. Then S.K.F. chemists found a better decongestant, propylhexedrine (not an amphetamine or a stimulant), to put in inhalers, and changed the name to Benze-drex. The problem died down until five years ago, when St. Louis’ Pfeiffer Co. began marketing a 200-mg. inhaler called Valo, once again containing amphetamine. It sold well, and the old problem of misuse soon recurred.
Among the hardcore Valo abusers? Novelist James Ellroy, who recounted his awful amphetamine years in My Dark Places.
We touched down on Spaceship Earth after the Vietnam War’s conclusion, so we can’t say that the late Robert McNamara ever loomed particularly large in our imagination. But we do recall being gobsmacked by The Fog of War, perhaps the most thought-provoking documentary we’ve encountered. As a small memorial to McNamara, the most memorable (and disturbing) segment from the film is excerpted above; the slow-motion footage of a busy, contemporary Japanese street haunted us for days.
Over the holiday weekend, in addition to bidding farewell to our dead-tree labor o’ love, we found a few spare moments to start reading The Snakehead, the new book from Chatter author Patrick Radden Keefe. We’re only 50 pages in, but so far this tome gets Microkhan’s equivalent of an Ebert-ian “thumbs way up” rave. Just an endlessly compelling account of the Golden Venture disaster, in which hundreds of Chinese immigrants washed ashore in Queens after their freighter ran aground.
What we really dig is the way Keefe uses that narrative as a way to explore immigration patterns&patterns which often defy our assumptions of what makes people “vote with their feet.” Early on, for example, Keefe adroitly explains why the vast majority of Chinese immigrants who’ve arrived in New York over the past few decades come from nothern Fujian, a relatively wealthy province:
Demographers who have researched migration find that it is not actually absolute poverty that drives people to leave one country for another. The poorest provinces in western China have rarely been a source of outmigration. When everyone around you shares your own meager lifestyle, there is actually less of an inclination to leave. Instead, it is “relative deprivation” that tends to drive migration: income disparities, the experience of watching your neighbor do better than you. So, ironically, economic development sometimes causes people to leave rather than stay put. Some did better than others when economic reforms came to Fujian, and those who did not fare as well—the subsistence farmers and schoolteachers, the local [Communist] Party officials who had fallen out of favor—were suddenly able to glimpse the kinds of material comforts they had lived without their whole lives.
We’ll certainly have more to say about The Snakehead as we keep plowing through. In the meantime, check out Keefe’s Slate dispatches from his reporting trip to China. And this recent documentary is worth a gander, too.
We normally assume that public health constantly improves, if only incrementally for long stretches. But then along comes a story like this, detailing how Delhi’s infant mortality rate has doubled since 2005. The obvious culprit is the continuing influx of rural migrants, few of whom seek professional medical care while pregnant—or, for that matter, for their deliveries.
The Indian government’s challenge, then, is to convince poorer citizens that hospital deliveries won’t saddle them with massive debt, and that trained doctors are actually more competent than practitioners of folk medicine. For efficiency’s sake, these lessons need to be taught in provincial communities, before women jet for megacity slums where social services are more difficult to deliver.
There is a national plan in place to make this a reality: Janani Suraksha Yojana, which literally pays women to use hospitals. The program claims to have made payouts to over 159 million women since its inception three years ago. But as is often the case with massive bureaucracies, Janani Suraksha Yojana may not work as well as advertised. This tragic tale from Kolkata makes that all-too-clear:
When I met Namita Murmu in Mallickpur in Hooghly’s Dhanekhali block to enquire about the Janani Suraksha Yojana, she began to tell me the story of the death of her child. After it was born — a pale, frail-looking creature — the doctors at the block hospital had informed Namita that she was entitled to a sum of Rs 500 for six months before and after childbirth under the JSY. Namita qualifies for the provisions of the JSY because she is the holder of a valid BPL card. Namita had carefully followed the procedure to avail herself of the benefits of this scheme. She had informed the block development office, filled the application form and was told that her name had been included in the list of beneficiaries. Yet, the money had not reached her, and one morning, she found her sickly child lying cold and still. She still believes that the money could have saved her child’s life. Namita is now a mother again, but she still does not know why she did not receive her dues.
As is so often the case with ambitious schemes that rely too heavily on human competence, the devil is in the details.
We’ve made a game-time decision to join our countrymen in taking today off—or, at the very least, to work a half day, then take Microkhan Jr. down to the Graffiti Hall of Fame for a look-see (to be followed, perhaps, by a top-notch $2 taco). But we couldn’t jet without noting Uncle Sam’s 233rd birthday, which we’ll officially celebrate tomorrow. Our small tribute is above—James Brown at his most patriotic, letting a dour Ivan Drago know that he ain’t in Chernenko-era Moscow any more. Because nothing says “America” more than a bunch of Vegas showgirls in skin-tight turquoise bodysuits.
To borrow a sentiment from Mötley Crüe, it’s time to turn the page on Now the Hell Will Start, our dead-tree labor o’ love. This Sunday, July 5th, we’ll be reading from the book for the very last time, amid the cozy waterfront confines of Sunny’s Bar in beautiful Red Hook. If you’re in New York and up for an afternoon of cold beer and jungle yarns, please swing by and help us celebrate this bittersweet occasion. The reading kicks off at 3 p.m., and will be followed by some celebratory pints. Hope to see some of y’all out there.
By the way, we snapped the above photo in late 2006, while traveling along the Ledo Road in search of Herman Perry‘s half-Naga son. That demonic cow really scared the bejesus out of us.
We’ve already expressed our boundless admiration for Madlib’s Beat Konducta in India album, arguably the most perfect slab of sonic creativity we’ve heard over the past five years. Thanks to this new Grooveshark widget, we can now bring you our favorite track off that opus—the song we’ve long imagined as playing over the credit sequence in the Now the Hell Will Start movie. It’s only 78-seconds long, but it’s about as glorious as tunes come nowadays. Please enjoy as you pack up for the holiday—a holiday we’ll be spending at our Harlem HQs, teaching Microkhan Jr. the basics of sepak takraw and hopefully downing a few of these along the way.
We were saddened to learn of the death of Alexis “The Explosive Thin Man” Arguello, one of our all-time favorite boxers. And we were surprised to discover that just a year before his passing, Arguello had been elected the mayor of Managua. (Okay, we admit it—we don’t keep up on Nicaraguan municipal politics like we should.)
Reading about Arguello’s transition into politics got us thinking about other athletes who’ve gotten the public-service itch after retiring from the court, field, or ring. ESPN recently did a brief rundown, naming such usual suspects as Bill Bradley and the great George Weah. But the standard lists only scratch the surface, as most athletes find their way into more obscure corners of politics than national legislatures or executive mansions. Mayor Kevin Johnson, anyone? And don’t forget our personal favorite athlete-turned-politician, the Great Sasuke, who was elected to a regional Japanese assembly in 2003.
There’s certainly a strain of pundit who blanches at the notion of jocks crafting policy. But we beg to differ. The two real keys to athletic success, other than natural talent, are dedication and the ability to perform under pressure. And both are great virtues when it comes to dealing with constituents, lobbyists, fellow lawmakers, and the zillion headaches that are part of modern politicking. Yes, there have been some notable failures in the athlete-turned-politician realm—don’t get us started on Steve Largent. But we’d wager the jocks’ success rate isn’t too different from that of, say, classically trained lawyers. And at the end of the day, we kind of like the idea of Peter Boulware types calling the shots rather than career politicians. If you can tackle Marshall Faulk in the open field, you can probably figure out how to fund vital public services through a mixture of bond issues and incrementally higher taxes—right?
It took us well over a week, but we finally got around to finishing Harp of Burma last night, while sitting on the 2 train back from Brooklyn. Yes, a week-plus is an awful long time to tackle a so-called children’s book, one which clocks in at a measly 132 pages. But such is life these days, with so many projects weighing us down and Microkhan Jr. causing plenty of mischief.
We’re glad we stuck with the book, though, because it’s a minor gem—an elegant anti-war fable, imbued with stinging criticism of Imperial Japan’s appetite for conquest. The tale doesn’t really gel until the final 30 pages or so, when the fate of the only named character—soldier-turned-monk Mizushima Yazuhiko—is revealed through a letter. There are plenty of great passages in this section, but the one that struck us most concerns Mizushima’s efforts to coax a battalion of cornered Japanese soldiers to surrender to the British. This seems like a no-brainer, given that a) the Japanese are malnourished, surrounded, and vastly outnumbered, and b) the war has been over for days. But the soldiers, hiding in a Burmese cave and drunk on sake, insist on dying rather than surrendering. And in this refusal, Mizushima makes an eloquent observation about mob psychology—and, perhaps, about the Japanese psyche:
As I listened I felt these raging men were controlled by a strange force. Perhaps they were thinking different thoughts, but as a group their individuality had faded away. Having incited one another with a false show of courage, they could no longer back down. They could no longer take a different attitude. Something other than the will of the individual was making decisions and manipulating the group. I was at a loss as to how to come to grips with this stubborn thing. No doubt some of the men were determined to fight to the death—yet there also seemed to be those who doubted if that was the right course of action. But they could not speak out. Besides being too weak to resist the crowd, they were ignorant of the actual situation. They had no way to judge it. Even if they wanted to assert their opinion, they had nothing solid to build on. That is why the spirited but reckless argument had won the day…
On the downside, Harp of Burma contains an anthropologically incorrect depiction of Burmese cannibals—they are said to enjoy the taste of dumplings soaked in human sweat, but we can find no independent source to verify this practice as anything more than a figment of the author’s imagination.
If a Massachusetts pigeon breeder gets his way, out-of-state squabs could soon be aves non grata on the state’s film and TV sets. Bill Desmarais has coaxed the Massachusetts House of Representatives into considering H816 (PDF), more colloquially known as “An act relative to pigeons in motion pictures.” The bill’s text reads in full:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:
SECTION 1. Not withstanding any General Laws to the contrary, all pigeons that are used in motion pictures within Massachusetts must be licensed and banded within Massachusetts.
Having learned years ago about the corrosive effects of Smoot-Hawley, we can’t help but think this protectionist measure bodes ill for the future of our great nation. First it’ll be pigeons, then canines, then non-human primates. If you value the free flow of labor, please write to H816’s sponsor, State Sen. Michael J. Rodrigues. Let the “winged rats” achieve their maximum economic potential, regardless of their birthplace. Anything less would be un-American.
In our never-ending quest to bring you the classic tracks behind our favorite hip-hop cuts, today we bring you the U-Roy and Hopeton Lewis collaboration “Tom Drunk.” It only takes a few seconds’ worth of listening to realize that the song’s best riff was long-ago copped by Reflection Eternal for “Fortified Live,” a tune notable for some of the ’90s greatest rhymes: To wit:
I’m sippin wishing well water imported from Pluto
That’s why my eyes is glassy, so ain’t got to ask me
The interplanetary Illuminati move your body
I trekked the stars first, so fuck Kirk and Scotty
And:
So gather ’round, to hear the profound brown vomiter
Absorb the sonic energy manifestin through your monitor
Reflection Eternal is back with a new video, by the way—can’t say we’re huge fans, but always nice to see the great James Worthy get a visual shout-out.
Also, please let us know how the new Grooveshark widget works for y’all. This could help liberate us from the tyranny of YouTube, provided it works as advertised.
Continuing our ongoing First Contact series, today we’re gonna look back at the 1576 encounter between the English and the Inuit of Baffin Island. The details of the meet-up were recorded by one Christopher Hall, a member of a Martin Frobisher-led expedition in search of the fabled Northwest Passage to China.
Upon first landing on Baffin Island and climbing a small hill in order to view the bay below, Frobisher and his men initially thought the surrounding waters were teeming with a novel form of seal. But upon closer inspection, these seaborne forms turned out to be Inuits in kayaks. And they were none-too-happy with the presence of the Westerners, who they instantly regarded as enemies. The landing party was chased back to their boat, the Gabriel, and Frobisher contemplated skedaddling at once. But Hall, an amateur anthropologist of sorts, volunteered to go back ashore and parlay with the Inuits (a meeting facilitated with an exchange of hostages). This led to an amicable encounter, in which Hall was able to record 17 Inuit words by pointing to objects. He also made note of the Inuits’ physical similarities to some of Genghis Khan’s most famous subjects:
They be like Tartars, with long black hair, broad faces, and flat noses, and tawney in color, wearing seal skins, and so do the women, not differing in the fashion, but the women are marked in the face with blue streaks down the cheeks, and round about the eyes. Their boats are made all of seal skins, with a keel of wood within the skin; the proportion of them is like a Spanish shallop, save only they be flat on the bottom, and sharp at both ends.
As it turns out, the Inuits were initially right to be afraid of Frobisher. After five of his men disappeared while returning an Inuit hostage—most likely on their own volition—Frobisher decided to split. But before he departed, he managed to kidnap a poor Inuit kayaker by using tinkling bells as a lure, then snatching him up with a hook on a pole. Frobisher dragged this Inuit (pictured above) all the way back to England, where he publicly displayed the captive as a “strange man of Cathay.” Neither English weather nor English food agreed with the Inuit, and he died within weeks of landing in London. Which, sadly, was probably the best fate he could have hoped for at that time—life as a sideshow in Stuart England must’ve been bleak, indeed.
There are some great nuggets throughout the document, such as the revelation that auto-theft cases are the easiest for prosecutors to win, and the fact that 97 percent of convictions stem from a guilty plea, rather than a trial verdict. But what left us gobsmacked was the sheer number of drug cases clogging up state courts. The bulletin explains the graph above:
Since 1990, defendants charged with a drug or property offense have comprised about two-thirds of felony cases in the 75 largest counties. From 1990 to 2004 the percentage of felony defendants charged with a violent offense has ranged from 23% to 27% (figure 5). Since 1994, drug
defendants have comprised the largest group, ranging from 35% to 37%. Property defendants have accounted for 29% to 31% of defendants during this time.
(Our bolding.) Additionally, it’s not clear what percentage of the violent felonies are related to the business of drugs. So that 37 percent figure may only be a baseline in terms of gauging the War on Drugs’ impact on our criminal justice system.
We’d love to know the economic affect of squeezing so many drug cases through the courts—not just in terms of the costs of prosecution and incarceration, but also the losses associated with removing people from the workforce and destabilizing their families. Please drop us a note if you’re aware of any researchers who’ve tackled that issue.
Bit of a rough day here ’round Microkhan HQs, alas—a potential project just fell through, so we’re suffering through one of our periodic bouts of creative moroseness. Hopefully we’ll rebound in an hour or two, but for the moment the well is nearly dry. As such, we’re gonna go the lazy khan’s route and kick you over to one of our favorite time shredders: The Virtual Apple II version of Karateka. We’re ashamed to admit how much of 1984 we spent trying to rescue Princess Mariko (who, we should note, was a much greater damsel-in-distress than Princess Toadstool).
Alas, all those Karateka hours were spent at our friend Jake’s place. Because in 1984, our household was still stuck in the lamentable VIC-20 era. And Vodoo Castle just didn’t do it for us.
Violence continues in rural West Bengal, where the Indian military is campaigning against a scrappy band of rebels referred to as “Maoists.” How do Maoists differ from your garden-variety followers of Marxist tenets? Microkhan broke it down a few years back, when the Nepalese civil war was in full swing. Seems like it’s mostly about the proletariat’s day-to-day jobs—if their people spend more time whacking the soil with sticks than manufacturing steel, insurgents are likely to come down on the Maoist side of the ideological equation.
(Image via this pro-Naxalite blog; caveat visitor if you have a low tolerance for the far left)
Back in our high school days, we often fantasized about ditching the classroom routine in favor of taking the GED test. (This daydream was usually strongest during double-period Calculus AB, by far the dreariest educational experience on the planet.) But the fantasy was always short-lived, in large part because of some negative stereotypes. The folks we knew with GEDs weren’t the most impressive lot, and the buzz was that having the letters “GED” on your resume virtually guaranteed that your glass ceiling would consist of a managerial position at Jack in the Box.
We admit those anti-GED feelings were rather wrongheaded—if Famous Amos and Mary Lou Retton can achieve A-plus success with GEDs, the educational alternative can’t be all bad. But we’ve also recently been wondering: How hard, exactly, is the test? And could we pass it tomorrow, without a single jot of study?
Last year’s GED stats (PDF) claim that the test’s failure rate is 27 percent. That makes it just a few percentage points harder than actually earning a four-year high school diploma; at last count, 30.8 percent of enrolled high schoolers fail to graduate.
Looking at practice GEDs, we were struck by how little specific knowledge the questions required. The science questions, for example, struck us more as brain teasers or reading-comp challenges than measures of material learned. Likewise, the math section focuses on spatial recognition and logic—along with one’s adroitness at punching keys on a Casio FX-260.
And that’s probably a good thing. As we’ve noted before, we’re firm believers in the theory that the majority of book knowledge acquired in classrooms seeps out of the brain within five years. (C’mon, how much do you really remember about the Thirty Years War, other than it had to do with Catholic-vs.-Protestant rivalry?) So the GED, for all of its seeming simplicity, strikes us as a pretty good measure of a test-taker’s ability to find their way in the world.
Think you could pass the GED tomorrow, perhaps with a hangover? Try your luck.
We’re prepping to head downtown for the 20th anniversary screening of Do the Right Thing, a momentous occasion that has us on yet another ’80s nostalgia kick. It thus bears mentioning that another great cultural artifact is celebrating an important milestone this year— turns 23! And what better way to mark the occasion than with the clip above. Seriously, we’ll defend the grandeur of the show’s opening theme until our dying breath. The Yngwie Malmsteen-inspired guitar solo that kicks in at the 34-second mark? Glorious. Absolutely glorious.
Tiny Togo joins the ranks of nations that have officially abolished capital punishment. Which means this list is now slightly out-of-date. Who will be next to do away with their (usually figurative) gallows? Our money’s on Burkina Faso. Or maybe another small African nation that’s trying to carve out better relations with Western Europe—the likes of Spain and France seem to make the ditching of the death-penalty a prerequisite for establishing tighter diplomatic ties.
There’s a great passage in Luc Sante‘s Low Life, in which he recounts the 19th-century New York City spectacle of man-versus-rat fights. A human competitor wearing heavy boots was placed in a ring with a swarm of hungry rats, and challenged to stomp as many to death as possible without suffering terrible injury. It’s quite a barbaric pastime, albeit one in which the primate usually emerged unscathed.
We couldn’t help but picture that bloody spectacle upon reading Jason Couch’s detailed account of “purring” in the Journal of Manly Arts. Like Sante, Couch is keenly interested in the violent sports of the 19th-century American working class. But his focus is instead drawn toward a sport that involved men kicking each other’s shins until the blood flowed:
Purring, or shin-kicking, was a popular English folk sport practiced from at least the 16th century and likely before. It existed both as a distinct contest of its own and as a facet of certain “loose hold” wrestling styles, such as Norfolk and Devonshire. By the mid-to-late 19th century, the sport was exported and practiced in America thanks to Cornish miners residing in Pennsylvania. By the end of that century the sport had all but disappeared, and now it exists only at fair exhibitions and in the mutated variants seen in children’s games.
Read down toward the end for a blow-by-blow rehash of the legendary 1883 purring match between David McWilliams and Robert Tavish. And thank your lucky stars that you aren’t a 19th-century Cornish mineworker in the Pennsylvania coal fields.
We’re fond of gently mocking those who seek to make teetotaling a legal requirement. The Eighteenth Amendment, after all, is widely regarded as a notable (even noble) failure, and we certainly can’t imagine life without the more-than-occasional bomber of Ballantine.
But does that mean all attempts at enforcing prohibition are doomed to have zero positive effect? That’s a big question in Alaska’s native villages, where alcohol abuse has long caused severe problems. That’s led several village governments to ban liquor, a decision that has created a considerable black market. Yet even with the underground hooch trade thriving, piecemeal prohibition in the Alaskan sticks may actually be working:
Villages that prohibited alcohol had lower age-adjusted rates of serious injury resulting from assault, motor vehicle collisions and ‘other causes’. Dry villages with a local police presence had a lower age-adjusted rate of serious injury caused by assault. Controlling for the relative effects of village isolation, access to alcohol markets and local demographic structures, local prohibition was associated with lower rates of assault injuries and ‘other causes’ injuries while local police presence was associated with lower rates of assault injuries.
Note, however, that police enforcement is key. We reckon that’s researcher-speak for noting that heavy-handed enforcement is the only way to make these regimes function properly. Otherwise, the bootleggers doubtless rule the roost in The Bush.
Apologies for the lighter-than-usual day on Microkhan. We’re actually prepping for the third annual celebration of our legal link-up with the missus, so our thoughts are mostly elsewhere. Don’t fret, we’ll be back at full strength come Monday. Promise.
In the meantime, please enjoy the clip above, the discovery of which stems from Wednesday’s Beatnuts post. We put out the call for someone to ID that piano-tinkle sample, and the commendable Matt came through like gangbusters. The riff in question kicks in around the 57-second mark, but the whole song’s worth a listen. It’s definitely the sort of track that Wilt Chamberlain would have found worthy of his bedroom mix.
One of our favorite means of procrastination is sifting through Nathan Rabin’s “My Year of Flops” series on The A.V. Club. That habit recently brought us in contact with this evisceration of The Real Cancun, which Rabin curtly derides as “a horrifying glimpse into the kiddie-pool-shallow minds of folks whose greatest ambition in life is to emulate the extras in Mystikal videos.”
To our complete shock, however, The Real Cancun has at least one notable fan who really should know better: the great Werner Herzog. Perhaps we’re missing the man’s dry Teutonic humor, but in this interview, Herzog seems genuinely enthusiastic about the flick:
Q At the [2006 SFIFF event] you mentioned liking a film about people in Mexico on spring break. Is that the Real World feature, The Real Cancun?
Herzog Yes, and I liked the film because it was so focused. There was no pretentiousness at all. The only question was who would get laid first. You see so many pretentious films and phony films, and I don’t like that.
We shudder to think of what Herzog might say were he somehow exposed to Hard Ticket to Hawaii.
In April, Fiji’s government declared a public emergency that has led to total media censorship, a ban on political meetings, and the sacking of judges. It’s increasingly clear that Commodore Frank Bainimarama, Fiji’s prime minister, intends for martial law to become permanent.
Fortunately, journalists are routing around the emergency rules on Coup Four and a Half, a new blog dedicated to disseminating info that Fiji’s censors would rather you didn’t see. Of particular note are the primary-source documents that the blog archives—if you ever wanted to see first-hand evidence of how much a Pacific Islands strongman makes, here’s your chance.
With so much focus on steroid scofflaws these past few years, it’s tough to remember that professional athletes are often forced to dabble in performance-sapping drugs, too. Such is currently the case with Spanish MotoGP star Dani Pedrosa, who’s been racing on painkillers since badly injuring his hip in a nasty spill. And while the pills enable him to sit atop his bike without feeling terrible discomfort, they also fray his reaction time by a few milliseconds—and thus consign him to more mediocrity than he can handle:
“I’m feeling positive about the weekend and we’ll just have to see how it goes when riding starts on Thursday,” said Pedrosa. “My intention would be to ride without receiving any pain-killing injections because gradually they lose their effectiveness and they are not something I want to rely on – we’ll see how the feeling is when I start to ride.”
Pedrosa has been taking the medication since a ‘tankslapper’ moment at the Italian round of the World Championship at Mugello, although the required sensitivity, grip and movement onboard a MotoGP machine has been lacking due to the nature of the injections.
Best of luck to Pedrosa in getting off the hard stuff, and getting his mojo back. We’re pretty sure he’ll emerge triumphant—only a truly strong soul could come back from an epic crash like this.
In the summer of 1983, my dad took me to the Sunset Boulevard Tower Records to purchase my first two audiocassettes. One was the eminently forgettable Cargo by Men at Work; the other, the legendary Thriller. By summer’s end, I knew every single lyric on that great album, and would watch MTV whenever possible in order to catch the “Billie Jean” video. A year later, when the long-awaited Victory Tour kicked off, I was distinctly jealous of a carpool-mate whose parents managed to score tickets for the Los Angeles Coliseum Dodger Stadium show.
So MJ’s sudden passing definitely leaves me feeling nostalgic for simpler times. And it also brings to mind my favorite MJ sidekick, Bubbles the Chimp. Check out the rare video above, in which Bubbles imitates his human friend’s most famous dance. Hopefully these two close pals will someday get to moonwalk together in Valhalla (or wherever pop-music titans and their higher-primate sidekicks end up).
Rest in peace, MJ. And stay strong, Bubbles, wherever you now roam.
This morning’s sumo-related post stirred up memories of another Hawaiian-born legend of the sport: Konishiki, aka “The Dump Truck.” Though he never attained the exalted rank of yokozuna—perhaps due to anti-foreigner prejudice among sumo’s elite—Konishiki never let the disappointment get in the way of his artistic ambitions. As evidenced by the above video, the truly gargantuan ex-wrestler is now a skilled MC, whose lyrics frequently refer to his love for Japanese culture:
Next on the menu, is a seven course meal
Sushi to start, raw tuna, and eel
That’s how we do it in the back of the club
Toast champagne as we get a backrub
Check out a clip of Konishiki’s athletic exploits here. Gastric-bypass surgery obviously did wonders for this man.
We were saddened to learn of the 
It took us well over a week, but we finally got around to finishing 
Bit of a rough day here ’round Microkhan HQs, alas—a potential project just fell through, so we’re suffering through one of our periodic bouts of creative moroseness. Hopefully we’ll rebound in an hour or two, but for the moment the well is nearly dry. As such, we’re gonna go the lazy khan’s route and kick you over to one of our favorite time shredders: The 
