Apologies for the slow start today, but we’re completely absorbed in the ever-changing situation in Iran—a situation that appears to be growing more violent by the hour. Packing up and heading to our mobile headquarters (i.e. the Columbia University library) in a matter of minutes. More soon.
Shutting it down early to prep for tonight’s reading at The Half King down in Chelsea. For those with easy access to New York’s wondrous subway system, please swing by if the spirit moves you. The address is 505 W. 23rd Street (just west of 10th Avenue), and the festivities kick off at 7 p.m. sharp. We’ll be reading passages describing the horrors of Burmese leeches and Naga tiger-hunting rituals. Hope to see y’all there.
Comments Off on Heading to the Half KingTags:housekeeping·Now the Hell Will Start·The Half King
It’s so hard to fathom why some talented folks decide to chuck it all in favor of more humdrum lives. Such is the case with the great Betty Harris, who recorded a bunch of outstanding soul sides in the 1960s, then mysteriously disappeared. The cut above was her last, and it’s a Microkhan favorite—an odd-yet-catching meditation on the vagaries of fate, featuring Harris’s trademark semi-growl.
Contrary to frequent rumors, Harris did not become an interstate trucker. Instead, she settled into a life of Nutmeg State motherhood, before mounting a comeback in 2005. A great piece on her journey back to the limelight is available here, via the Hartford Advocate. Our favorite tidbit:
Harris concerned herself with raising her two children. She went by her married name and dropped completely out of music. Living in Florida, she kept her vocal chords in shape in church and at community functions. She moved to Hartford eight years ago, seeking better educational opportunities for her daughter Christina. She started giving vocal lessons at the Artists Collective.
Right around that time, Nashville entertainment attorney Fred Wilhelms negotiated a settlement with one of Harris’ old labels. The artists would finally see some of the royalties they were owed. But when he tried to find Harris, he came up empty.
Four years ago, Christina moved away to college and Harris got her a computer. One day, Christina called: “Mom, you’re famous.”
Her daughter had found several Betty Harris tribute websites created by soul fans. Then Harris looked at eBay and found her old 45s going for up to $50 a pop. She shelled out $20 for a CD compilation of her own music, the UK-released Soul Perfection Plus. (“One dealer in Georgia, after I sent him my picture with my order, never cashed the check,” she laughs.)
Realizing she still had a fan base, Harris joined a Southern Soul e-mail list and announced her whereabouts. She also cleared up some Internet rumors. Some sites said she had started as a maid for Big Maybelle, roadied for James Carr, and was now a truck driver. In reality, Harris had gotten some early vocal tips from Maybelle, recorded a duet with Carr, and had been married to a trucker.
The big lesson here: The Tubes are not always the most reliable source of information about vanished artists.
We’ll admit, we were deeply skeptical of plans to rid Alaska’s Rat Island of its marauding rodents. But the airdropped brodifacoum actually seems to have done the trick. Execs at Club Med are surely licking their chops.
→ 1 CommentTags:Alaska·Rat Island·rats·rodents·wildlife management
Look, we’ve occasionally been as tempted as the next Mongolian monarch to pull up stakes and move to Arkansas. But every time the urge hits, we remember that Al Green’s birthplace boasts the toughest liquor laws in the nation—even tougher than those in Utah, where we once had a devil of a time finding an ice-cold beer. And while we’re all for the principle of local control over certain matters, we’d be none-too-enthused to live in a state where an entity called the Dry Counties Coalition can attract hundreds of enthusiastic demonstrators to the steps of the capitol building.
Click on the image above for the full map of Arkansas’s counties by relative wetness; 42 of the state’s 75 counties are dry, though there are usually exceptions made for “private clubs.” For the record, our objection to dryness is not entirely due to personal preference; we are also strong believers in the “beer theory of civilization”, and thus shudder to think of the consequences of ubiquitous sobriety.
→ 10 CommentsTags:alcohol·Arkansas·beer·Dry Counties Coalition·law
Given that the Iran hostage crisis is one of our formative memories, we’ve taken a keen interest in the recent tumult on the streets of Tehran. Of particular note has been the regime’s effective use of technology to foil grassroots communications. First the mullahs shut off text messaging and The Tubes, then they actually managed to squelch incoming satellite transmissions—thereby insuring that Iranian dish owners can’t get a Western perspective on the protests.
Satellite jamming is no mean feat, yet it’s something that Iran’s government has mastered over time:
An independent investigation by Britain’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in Worcesteshire confirmed that the television station was being jammed by a carrier wave in the Chamestan region of the Caspian Sea. DERA is affiliated to the British Ministry of Defence.
The Iranian government had previously jammed Simaye Azadi’s signals on PanAmSat, AsiaSat, Arabsat, and Eutelsat (W3 and Hotbird) carriers in June and August of 1997, June of 1998, March of 1999, and October of 2000, according to Pirhosseini.
Iran has even used third parties to jam satellite broadcasts in the past. In July 2003, Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of Voice of America’s Board of Governors, took the unusual step of publicly condemning the Cuban government for jamming all U.S. broadcasts into Iran. He denounced “deliberate and malicious” efforts “to block Iranian audiences from gaining access to truthful news and information.”
The carrier-wave jamming referenced above is actually somewhat unsophisticated by today’s standards. The favored method now is to spoof GPS signals, and thereby dupe receivers into locking onto fake sources of data. A full breakdown on the various jamming techs is available here (PDF).
The worst part is that such jamming is tough to route around, at least for individuals. But there appear to be ways for satellite owners to counter the measures—at least if they’re willing to shell out for the cause.
Comments Off on The Technology of TyrannyTags:Iran·satellites·technology
For this week’s Bad Movie Friday, we’re gonna hit the proverbial layup and call out 1997’s Double Team. (Tagline: “He’s a one-man arsenal…with enough voltage to rock the world!”) The film is notable primarily for oddball hoopster Dennis Rodman’s scenery-chewing co-lead performance, opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme on the verge of sliding into his cocaine phase. We not-so-fondly recall catching this abomination on cable some years back, and walking away from the experience with a Slurpee-like brain freeze. That said, we do give the final fight scene points for overkill—Mickey Rourke versus Van Damme in an empty Roman coliseum, featuring both huge explosions and poorly CGI’d maneating tigers. We kid you not.
→ 6 CommentsTags:Bad Movie Friday·Dennis Rodman·Double Team·Jean-Claude Van Damme·Mickey Rourke·movies
After last night’s Now the Hell Will Start reading out in Bed-Stuy, we spent an exceedingly pleasant few hours knocking back pints of Carlsberg with our comrade Ryan Nerz. The NBA Finals were playing on the bar’s TV, and so much of our conversation focused on hoops. And given Ryan’s origins in the Hoosier State, the talk eventually turned to Indiana’s peculiar madness for basketball. Really, the sport is almost like religion there—like what sepak takraw is to Malaysia, but even more so. As the slogan for the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame so elegantly puts it, “In 49 states, it’s just basketball…this is Indiana!”
But why is that? There appears to be nothing extraordinary about Indiana’s geography that would make it a hotbed of the sport. As it turns out, the madness is largely due to an accident of history—not to mention the extraordinary efforts of a traveling Presbyterian minister:
The vector of “Hoosier Hysteria” has been identified as the Reverend Nicholas McKay, a Presbyterian minister born in England. In 1893 McKay was assigned to a YMCA in Crawfordsville, Indiana. En route, he visited Dr. James Naismith’s YMCA camp in Springfield, Massachusetts, where a new winter game called basketball had been invented two years before.
McKay gave it mixed reviews. It was active enough but there were still bugs to shake out. After all, it was only be sheerest happenstance that they weren’t playing “boxball.” Naismith had told the janitor to bring out two boxes, but all he had been able to find were peach baskets. They had nailed the baskets to a balcony railing that went around the gym and placed a stepladder under each basket. After every goal someone had to climb up and toss down the ball.
Reverend McKay knew he could do better. After he found space above a tavern in Crawfordsville for his YMCA, he hired a blacksmith to forge two metal hoops, sewed coffee sacks around them and nailed them to the walls.
Plenty more here. If Rev. McKay hadn’t stopped over in Massachusetts, Indiana history would have been very, very different. And, of course, Gene Hackman’s body of work would be lacking one legendary monologue.
→ 2 CommentsTags:basketball·Gene Hackman·Hoosiers·Indiana·sepak takraw·sports
There are already so many reasons to love our Canadian brothers: poutine, Rush, Alex Trebek. But let’s add another to the lengthy list: The nation to our north makes PET scans possible, by producing the bulk of the world’s supply of medical isotopes. Chief among these isotopes is Technetium-99, which is key to safe pediatric bone scans.
But now it looks as if Canada may be getting out of the business, due to fears that its nuclear reactors are too aged to operate safely. Technetium-99 is produced at only one reactor, the Chalk River facility in Ontario, and it was recently shuttered due to maintenance problems. Hospitals are already feeling the pinch, and the situation seems certain to get worse as reactors in the Netherlands and South Africa slow down in their old age.
The long-term problem is that it’s far too expensive to build new reactors dedicated to medical isotopes—the multi-billion dollar investment doesn’t justify the current $10-per-pound price for molybdenum, the precursor for Technetium-99. So what to do? Maybe fire up those cyclotrons.
→ 5 CommentsTags:Canada·cyclotrons·medical science·nuclear power·Technetium-99
The response to yesterday’s post on smoking ballerinas got us thinking about other examples of folks who make their livings with their bodies, yet continue to puff away. And that train of thought inevitably led us to Phillies great Dick Allen, whose between-innings habit would never fly today. Then again, it’s unclear to us whether smoking is more harmful than the ingestion of massive quantities of human growth hormone.
→ 3 CommentsTags:baseball·cigarettes·Dick Allen·drugs·sports
We’re checking out a bit early today, as we’ve got to prepare ourselves for a long-awaited Now the Hell Will Start reading at Bed-Stuy’s primo Browntsone Books. Event details here; please come support The Cause if the spirit moves you.
Comments Off on Heading to Bed-StuyTags:housekeeping·Now the Hell Will Start
We’re in the midst of reading our pal Ulrich Boser’s book The Gardner Theft, which has taught us a heckuva lot about the art-crime world. One of the tome’s essential lessons is that 99.99 percent of art thieves are not experts, a la Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment. They instead tend to be lunkhead robbers who target paintings, statues, and fossils because such items are rarely well-guarded. Alas, this means the crooks usually have no idea how to care for the goodies they swipe—and, in many instances, no idea how to convert them into cash money.
These facts disturb in light of the recent theft of an entire cave-bear skeleton from the Orlovaca cave museum near Sarajevo. We reckon the thieves didn’t realize how fragile the bones are, nor how priceless—it is the second-largest cave-bear skeleton in the world, dating back some 16,000 years. Even if the fragile specimen survives the rough handling, it’ll be tough to fence at the local pawn shop. There is, however, something of a market for cave-bear bone fragments, so perhaps the thieves will be forced to go the destructive route in order to turn a profit. And paleontology will be much the poorer for their avarice.
The magic of Google Translate provides a Serbian take on the theft here. And, yes, we realize you probably can’t read the words “cave bear” without thinking of this 1986 Daryl Hannah vehicle.
→ 1 CommentTags:animals·art theft·cave bears·crime·paleontology·Sarajevo
As things get ever-weirder in the Hermit Kingdom, it’s worth remembering the gobsmacking tale of Shin Sang-ok, a Japanese filmmaker kidnapped by Kim Jong-il. Even if you’re already familiar with Shin’s ordeal, it’s worth revisiting this harrowing account from 2003. We could scarcely imagine a more savage indictment of Dear Leader’s crippling megalomania.
Forced to make movies for his captor, Shin’s most infamous work from his DPRK days is Pulgasari (above), a Godzilla-inspired mishmash of Korean folklore and Marxist dogma. But there’s an argument to be made that Shin managed to slip in more confrontational themes, in such a subtle manner that his insolence escaped the attention of Kim’s censors. John Gorenfeld explains:
As the farmers are starving under the king’s rule, the doll, Pulgasari, eats iron and grows. The cherubic toddler Pulgasari soon becomes a horned beast whose clawed foot is the size of a person. And since this is a movie made under the guidelines of On the Art of the Cinema, there are seemingly endless shots of the people’s folk dances.
Finally, Pulgasari leads the farmers’ army in an assault on the king’s fortress – and against thousands of North Korean military troops who were mobilised and dressed up as extras. Ultimately, the king uses his experimental anti-Pulgasari weapon, the lion gun. But the enterprising Pulgasari swallows the missile and shoots it back at his oppressors. Finally, the king is crushed beneath a huge falling column.
Then the movie becomes curiously ambiguous. The beloved Pulgasari turns on his own people. Still hungry for iron after his victory, Pulgasari begins eating the people’s tools. The confusing conclusion seems to find salvation in the spirit of the people.
When the blacksmith’s daughter tearfully pleads with Pulgasari to “go on a diet”, he seems to find his conscience, and puzzlingly shatters into a million slow-motion rocks. Then, inexplicably, a glowing blue Pulgasari child is born, waddling out of the ocean. It’s a terrifically bad movie.
On one hand, Pulgasari is a cautionary tale about what happens when the people leave their fate in the hands of the monster, a capitalist by dint of his insatiable consumption of iron. But it is also tempting to read the monster as a metaphor for Kim Il-sung, hijacking the “people’s revolution” to ultimately serve his purposes.
More Pulgasari clips here and here.
(h/t James Finn)
→ 1 CommentTags:Kim Jong-il·monsters·movies·North Korea·Pulgasari·Shin Sang-ok
Because they have unsually high discount rates (PDF)—which is econo-speak for, “Don’t give a sufficient damn about their future wage prospects.” Of course, if they knew what was good for them, these ballerinas would be studying actuarial science instead of practicing their arabesque positions.
(Image via George Simhoni)
We know we’re still a few days away from the week’s finale, and thus from the joys of Bad Movie Friday, but we couldn’t resist posting the trailer above. We’re in the midst of watching Werner Herzog’s My Best Fiend, a documentary about his rather insane working relationship with Klaus Kinski. From what we’ve gathered (and previously posted about), Kinski had a couple of screws loose; Herzog describes him as a total egomaniac, whose idea of perfect beauty was his own face.
We wonder, then, what the shoot for 1982’s Android was like. Kinski doing a thickly accented Dr. Frankenstein bit aboard a spaceship? With plenty of robot-on-human sex thrown in for good measure? Our hunch is that Kinski had his share of total flip-outs while bringing that crazy vision to fruition.
By the clips we’ve seen, the end result hasn’t aged well, even compared to such early ’80s sci-fi fare as Sean Connery’s Outland. The dialogue exhibits a certain Lucas-ian woodenness. But perhaps we’re missing out on some hidden Kinski genius.
→ 5 CommentsTags:Android·Klaus Kinski·My Best Fiend·robots·space·Werner Herzog
Jonah Lehrer, one of our most brilliant Wired colleagues, just posted about the infectious nature of bad dancing. Checking out his hilarious video evidence, we couldn’t help but think of this fictional antecedent. Who knew you could learn so much ’bout neuroscience by watching terrible ’80s sex romps?
→ 3 CommentsTags:1980s·Can't Buy Me Love·movies·neuroscience·Patrick Dempsey·Wired
Despite mankind’s best efforts, the ultra-aggressive quagga mussel continues to spread unabated across our great land. Gorgeous Lake Tahoe is the latest victim, while the shellfish invasion’s in full swing over near Cleveland. And could the mussels even dim the Sin City lights someday? Nothing, it seems, can stop the quagga mussel, given the species prodigious talent for reproduction—a single critter can lay upwards of 40,000 eggs.
But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up trying. And that’s surely great news for the folks at Hydro Engineering, the nation’s leading manufacturer of mussel-decontamination hardware. These are surely halcyon days for the company and its flagship decon package (a component of which is pictured above). Mandatory hydroblasting is becoming mandatory on many lakes suffering from quagga mussel infestations, and Hydro Engineering is the go-to source for the necessary tools.
Check out the interior of a full-blown decon unit here. (It reminds us of the interior of the Knight Rider trailer truck.) You have to request a price quote, but we gleaned from this article that a typical package goes for about $19,500—roughly the sticker price of a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. We know which gearhead goodies we’d rather have.
Oh, and apologies to anyone who thought this post would be about the extinct quagga rather than its shellfish namesake. Adding “mussels” to the title made it too much of a mouthful.
Comments Off on The Winner in the Quagga MessTags:animals·Cleveland·gadgets·Lake Tahoe·Las Vegas·maritime·quagga·quagga mussels·techonology
We were elated to arise this morning and discover that the Stanley Cup finals are headed toward a seventh and deciding game. This isnt because we’re huge hockey fans—in fact, we must confess general ignorance when it comes to the fastest game on ice. Having decided to go whole hog in support of Premiership laggard Sunderland these past few years, soccer has replaced hockey as our fourth sport. And the human mind just doesn’t have the capacity to go otaku on any more sports than that.
But we love the Stanley Cup playoffs due to the playoff beard tradition. There’s something wonderfully primal about letting the whiskers flourish while in the midst of a violent struggle for supremacy. And part of the appeal was our long-held belief that beards were first popularized by our barbarian ancestors—we remember learning that the word beard is derived from the Latin word for barbarian. And so whenever we’ve seen the likes of Mike Commodore rocking the facial tuft, we’ve smiled at the thought of such hirsuteness tracing back to the days of Visigoths and Vandals.
But, alas, we seem to have learned a false etymological lesson. It turns out the Romans were fans of beard themselves, and so would never deride an outsider for going the hairy route. A man skilled in Latin and Greek breaks down the whole story:
The Romans adopted the word barbarus directly from Greek barbaros, and applied it by extension to anyone who was not a Greek or Roman, although every Greek worth his salt probably felt in his heart of hearts that the Romans were barbarians, too, just as today supposedly cultivated Europeans look down their noses at upstart, boorish Americans.
The Romans wore beards during certain historical periods and were clean-shaven in others. In general, they wore beards before the second century B.C. and after the 2nd century A.D. Between those two periods, a smooth chin was the rule, although younger, foppish men sometimes went bearded, and poor men often couldn’t afford the two bits for a shave and a haircut.
This revelation is sure to make us reconsider our ZZ Top fandom.
→ 2 CommentsTags:barbarians·facial hair·hockey·playoff beards·Roman Empire·sports
We’re dog tired today due to Microkhan Jr.’s recent sleep woes. He woke up screaming at an ungodly hour, obviously having suffered through a terrible nightmare. And as we rocked him back into the Sandman’s embrace, we got to thinking—in our Reagan-era days as a wee bairn, what caused us to suffer similar night terrors?
One letter kept on popping to mind: V, a terrifying (albeit slightly cheesy) TV series about man-eating aliens who come to Earth under the guise of friendship. Seriously, there’s nothing on TV today that’s even remotely as terrifying—the thought of being on someone else’s menu evokes the most primal sort of fear. Check out the clip above if you dare. And consider yourself warned—Microkhan cannot be held responsible for any lost sleep tonight. (Also, we can’t say for sure whether or not any rodents were harmed in the making of the show.)
We also had a mega-crush on chief alien baddie Jane Badler. Can you blame us?
→ 9 CommentsTags:Jane Badler·sci-fi·TV·V
Big news out of North-East India, where the leader of the infamous Black Widow insurgency is finally in police custody. According to Indian officials, Mihir Barman (whose nom de guerre is Jewel Gorlosa) was picked up in Bangalore while awaiting delivery of a false passport—a document he needed to reach Nepal for romantic reasons:
Gorlosa used up a large fraction of money his field operatives collected on women. He had reportedly killed his Dimasa wife to carry on an affair with a Naga woman before falling for a Nepalese social worker and media activist in Kathmandu.
He also allegedly spent $1,200 a month on “anti-aging treatments, beautification, and facelifts.” Judge for yourself whether that was money well-spent.
→ 2 CommentsTags:Assam·Black Widow·crime·India·Jewel Gorlosa·Nepal·plastic surgery
Royal Dutch Shell’s decision to settle with the family of executed activist Ken Saro-Wiwa reminded us of this disturbringly prescient piece from a decade ago. It’s an account of all the dirty dealings that surround Nigeria’s oil wealth, and how oil companies and Big Men manage to keep enriching themselves despite frequent grassroots protests (or petty extortion). The thread running through the story is the tale of Leonard Hutto, a Chevron employee whose job was essentially to grease palms in the Niger Delta—and to secure the release of kidnapped workers. A typical negotiation for a colleague’s release seemed to go as so:
In the shade of a huge tree, [Hutto] sat on a folding chair through the afternoon, listening to the community’s grievances and demands: more scholarships for its youngsters and more regular meetings with Chevron, which the locals would get, and other demands, which they would not, including 25 jobs on the spot, about $27,000 in cash and an unspecified amount for the wages they had lost while busy invading the oil station. Hutto instead slipped $50 to the town chiefs for drinks, $20 to the youths and another $20 to a group of young men who had let the air out of the tires of the Toyota — to reinflate them.
His assistant was released, the valves were opened at the oil wells and crude began coursing through the pipelines to the flow station. A few thousand barrels had been lost.
”Not a big deal,” Hutto says.
If you have any interest in learning more about the Delta’s tragic situation, you should definitely check out the whole piece.
Comments Off on Rough Trade in the DeltaTags:activism·corruption·energy·Ken Saro-Wiwa·Nigeria
The missus isn’t due back from Vega$ ’til late tonight, which means we’re in extreme-parenting mode for one more day. Genuine posts up soon; in the interim, please enjoy the above vid of Burmese construction workers showing off their Eto’o-like skills. We wonder if any of these blokes are currently living the dream in the nation’s National League Cup.
Microkhan is big enough to admit when we were wrong. And so we must eat a bit of humble pie regarding Gabonese president Omar Bongo, who apparently wasn’t faking his illness. Last month, we opined that the timing of Bongo’s medical leave seemed curiously perfect, given that he was under French investigation.
Given Bongo’s horrendously kleptocratic ways, we expect a bevy of acerbic British obits (much like the Economist‘s devastating farewell to Prabhakaran). Until that happens, though, let’s shed a single tear for fans of the Stutz Royale Limousine; Bongo owned one of only two in existence. How he managed such luxury while ruling one of the planet’s poorest nation is a question for the ages.
→ 3 CommentsTags:cars·corruption·France·Gabon·Omar Bongo·Stutz
We’ve previously written about Allied mustard-gas experimentation during World War II, involving live human subjects who were occasionally given no protection whatsoever. But it wasn’t until we read about the Bari disaster that we realized hundreds of Allied troops perished from mustard-gas exposure. This wasn’t due to deliberate release, mind you, but rather a horrific side effect of a German bombing raid. An Army history page tells the tale:
During every campaign there was always the threat of the Germans using poison gas. By the end of 1943, the strategic initiative in the war had passed to the allies. The allies feared that Hitler could use poison gas to redress the strategic balance. While the United States condemned the use of poison gas, President Roosevelt pledged that the US would reply in kind if the Germans used poison gas first. In support of this pledge, the Liberty ship, John Harvey was selected to convey a shipment of mustard gas to Italy to be held in reserve.
The John Harvey was loaded with two thousand M41-A1 100 lb mustard bombs at the Baltimore cargo port. The John Harvey sailed for Norfolk on October 15, 1943 and then onto Oran, Algeria by convoy arriving on November 2, 1943. From Oran, it proceeded in convoy to Augusta, Sicily and then to Bari arriving at Bari on November 28, 1943…
The John Harvey was still waiting to unload on December 2, 1943. Since secrecy was paramount and few people knew of the mustard gas on board, the John Harvey was not given priority to unload its cargo of mustard bombs.
The German attack on Bari began at 7:20 in the evening on December 2, 1943. The planes flew in from the east. The docks were brilliantly lit and the East jetty was packed with ships. There was no time for the ships in the harbor to get underway.
Well over 600 soldiers lost their lives as a result. But Winston Churchill insisted that the incident be hushed up, even though such secrecy likely led to more post-incident deaths (since doctors weren’t aware of the blistering agent’s involvement). Churchill’s reasoning? “He believed that publicizing the fiasco would hand the Germans a propaganda victory.”
Of course, we can never read a mustard-gas account without thinking of Wilfred Owen’s haunting “Dulce et Decorum Est,” one of our favorite poems. Nothing has ever made us more grateful not to have been a trench dweller on the Western Front.
(Image via the National Museum of Health and Medicine)
→ 2 CommentsTags:chemical weapons·maritime·mustard gas·World War II
To celebrate the paperback release of Now the Hell Will Start, we’re gonna be hitting the subway system over the coming weeks, doing a trio of readings in our adopted hometown. If any of y’all are in the environs of Gotham, we’d be honored if you’d turn out to support The Cause. Come up and say hello, and maybe stick around for a pint—to our tremendous delight, two of the three events will be held at joints that serve booze. Here are the details, in order of the readings’ skedded days:
*Thursday, June 11th: Brownstone Books in Bed-Stuy, @ 7 p.m. Here’s the store’s event’s page, complete with all the goodies you’ll need to get there. Really looking forward to this one—tremendous thanks to our pal Anthony S. Calypso for setting the wheels in motion.
*Monday, June 15th: The Half King in Chelsea, @ 7 p.m. Tough to overstate how excited we are for this, and how much we hope y’all will turn out for a) the reading, and b) the killer beer on tap. If all goes well, Microkhan Jr. will hopefully be in the house, too.
*Sunday, July 5th: Sunny’s Readings Series in beautiful Red Hook, @ 3 p.m. We honestly can think of no better way to close out your Fourth of July weekend than with some Now the Hell Will Start goodness along the Brooklyn waterfront. The bar’s main page is here. (And, yes, we will post a reminder closer to the date.)
Hope to see some Microkhan frequenters in the crowd. Thanks a million for enduring one of our sporadic bouts of self-promotion. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming…
→ 2 CommentsTags:Brownstone Books·housekeeping·New York City·Now the Hell Will Start·Sunny's Reading Series·The Half King
We always love it when The Economist makes a cutting reference to Americans’ preference for bright shiny teeth. It’s almost as if the magazine takes pride in English teeth, as a sign of lack of vanity, wise allocation of health resources, or what have you.
The mag’s latest crack got Microkhan thinking about the reasons for England’s middling dental health. And that train of thought led us to the World Health Organization, which (bless its black-helicopter heart) actually tracks the concentration of dentists by country. You can use this online app to glean the raw data, or you can download a neatly collated Word document here. (The data in the document is all from 2004, the last year for which every country reported its dental statistics.)
As we suspected, there’s a relative dearth of dentists in Great Britain; the nation actually has fewer dentists per capita Belarus, Slovakia, and a whole throng of other less prosperous European peers. But what’s most surprising about the table is that, at least at the top, there appears to be little correlation between dentist prevalence and prosperity. Sure, Norway is tops, but the runner-up is Lebanon? What’s the deal in Uruguay? And while we understand how Soviet-style medical training would lead to a surfeit of dentists in Estonia and Cuba, what’s the explanation for the Domincan Republic’s bounty of teeth fixers? The DR has more than double the number of dentists per capita as Britain, and 43 percent more than the U.S.
There’s certainly no one right answer—is there ever?—but there are obviously cultural norms at work here. Once a society’s well-off become convinced that a perfect smile is integral to beauty—perhaps via an obsession with actresses who are held up as paragons of loveliness—demand is created virtually overnight. And we suspect that the profit margins on cosmetic dentistry are pretty high, as we’ll undoubtedly find out when Microkhan Jr. enters the Braces Years.
Please note that a high dentists-per-capita figure does not necessarily mean that a nation’s poor gets to have affordable dental care. In the DR, for example, local dentists don’t necessarily seem too interested in tending to the teeth of rural children.
→ 4 CommentsTags:Belarus·Britain·Cuba·dentistry·Dominican Republic·Estonia·Lebanon·medicine·Norway·Slovakia·Soviet Union·Uruguay·World Health Organization
Gonna be a late start today, due to the impossibility of blogging while simultaneously making sure Microkhan Jr. doesn’t throw toys out our fifth-floor window. Back in the game as soon as he decides to nap; ’til then, please enjoy the above video of Ulaan Baatar’s finest buskers. The YouTube poster’s whole channel is actually worth checking out—aside from Mongolian music, his other great passion appears to be old-school BMX racing. Highly recommended.
(Thanks, Andrew!)
Comments Off on Running Late to the GigTags:BMX·housekeeping·Mongolia·music·parenting·sports
Right around the time this post goes live, we’ll be handing in Act Three of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay—yes, the project we’ve been using as an excuse to get away with weak blogging for much of the last month. A momentous occasion, and one we would have toasted with copious pints of Guinness in our younger years. But, alas, the time isn’t right for such revelry—Mrs. Microkhan is off in Vega$, selling fine lingerie at Miss Exotic World, so we’re solely responsible for Microkhan Jr.’s care and feeding nowadays. And as the parents in the audience already know, a hangover makes dealing with a rambunctious 15-month-old that much tougher.
So we’re gonna celebrate in a more judicious manner—with a bottle of this, and by sharing our favorite Wu-Tang-related video ever. Speed Racer plus Tony Starks? Well nigh unbeatable.
Enjoy. And keep an eye peeled for the action-packed Now the Hell Will Start movie, hitting theaters in…uh, someday. We’ll obviously keep you posted.
→ 5 CommentsTags:Dirty Dolls Lingerie·Ghostface·hip-hop·housekeeping·music·Now the Hell Will Start·Wu-Tang
When we first established Microkhan HQs a few years back, we were immediately struck by the nabe’s vibrant cigarette bootlegging scene. For a while there, we couldn’t walk 10 feet without having someone pull up alongside us and whisper, “Newport, Newports.” (The pace of solicitations has since decreased a bit, in part due to mounting legal pressure.) We were always mystified as to how such semi-covert bootlegging could be a profitable enterprise, given the sellers’ relatively tiny markup. But then New York broke down the math, and we began to understand the enterprise’s upside.
Yet the Newport hawkers on Lenox Avenue are true small fry compared to their counterparts abroad. In fact, according to the latest report from CPI’s brilliant Tobacco Underground series, cigarette smuggling is almost solely responsible for a strongman’s reign in the Balkans. Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, the authors contend, continues to dominate his country due to the illicit wealth he’s accured from peddling bootleg cigarettes—primarily to the Italians across the Adriatic. And Italy ain’t too happy about the situation, especially since its Mafia is profiting like crazy:
According to the Italian indictment, from 1994 to 2002, during Djukanovic’s long tenure, Montenegro was a haven for cigarette smuggling by two of Italy’s mafia syndicates: the Neapolitan mafia, known as the Camorra; and the crime family of the Apulia region, in Italy’s boot heel — the Sacra Corona Unita. Both syndicates set up shop in Montenegro. Almost every night dozens of pilots steered a fleet of large speedboats crammed with cigarettes across the Adriatic from the Montenegrin port of Bar to the Italian city of Bari and nearby. According to court records, during those eight years an extraordinary one billion cigarettes per month — 100,000 cases — were smuggled out of Montenegro, most of them Marlboro and Marlboro Light. Once in Italy, the untaxed cigarettes were sold by the mafia on the black market…
Starting June 3, Bari Judge Rosa Calia Di Pinto will hold a preliminary hearing to decide whether or not the evidence gathered by prosecutors is enough to put the indicted on trial. The judge will hear a story of a “mafia war” stretching into 10 countries: not only Italy and Montenegro, but also Serbia, Croatia, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Aruba, and the United States. So far, two key witnesses and five others mentioned in the case have been murdered.
Read the whole thing. If you smoke, it might convince you to hang up your lighter.
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Although we realize that gluttony is one of the Seven Sins for a very good reason, we can’t help but be fascinated by the sport of competitive eating. We previously marveled at the gustatory prowess of Juris “Doctor Bigtime” Shibayama, a Tennessee orthopedist who can put away T-bones like nobody’s business. Today our adulatory gaze turns toward Eric “Badlands” Booker, a New York-based subway conductor currently ranked 13th by the International Federation of Competitive Eating. The heartfelt documentary above gives a good sense of what it’s like to be Badlands, who’s a renaissance man of sorts: In addition to steering the 7 train and downing mass quantities of corned-beef hash, he is also an accomplished rapper. Check out one of his finest public performances here, and pay a visit to his personal website here.
By the way, yes, we realize that competitive eating can seem grotesque in a world in which at least 800 million people are in danger of starvation. We therefore feel obligated to post this rightfully celebrated “Hungry Planet” slideshow as a much-needed corrective.
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