Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

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Keeping Tabs on Dear Leader’s Nukes

May 26th, 2009

ctbtogermanyIn devouring the weekend’s reports regarding North Korea’s latest atomic machinations, we were struck by the technological limits of the global monitoring system. Seismic readings indicate that something went down that Mother Nature didn’t intend, but such tremors can be caused by conventional explosions. (Yeah, that’s a lot of TNT, but it can be done.) We’ll need to get a whiff of radioactive gas before we know the true extent of Dear Leader’s naughtiness.

So how do we check for those traces? That’s the task before the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, which is charged with playing global referee in the nuclear game. It does so via a network of radionuclide monitoring stations spread throughout 27 nations. The CTBTO’s FAQ on the topic explains why nuke sniffing can take so long:

Most of the energy of a nuclear explosion is transformed into the immediate blast, shockwaves and heat—explosive energy that is released within less than a minute. Initial radiation accounts for another small fraction of the energy released during a nuclear explosion. The remaining 10% of the energy is released as residual radiation, which is emitted over time, mainly through radioactive decay of the explosion’s fission products.

Fission products, in solid and gaseous form, are isotopes generated during the nuclear chain reaction. Some of these isotopes are stable. Most are not and undergo radioactive decay, i.e. they are radioactive. Following an atmospheric nuclear explosion, solid fission products attach to dust particles that are propagated by prevailing winds over great distances.

The most advanced radionuclide stations are primed to hunt for traces of xenon.

A full list of CTBTO monitoring stations of all types—including those that detect seismic activity—can be found here. And, yes, those are pigs in the photo at above right—they’re gathered around a radionuclide station in Germany. Who says verification regimes can’t peacefully co-exist with living wursts?

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ID’ing in a Skeptical World

May 26th, 2009

Try as it might, the Sri Lankan government can’t quite convince everyone that its soldiers did, indeed, gun down Velupillai Prabhakaran. So a DNA test may be necessary to quell the few remaining naysayers. But how might such a test work, especially considering that Tiger 001‘s wife and daughters are nowhere to be found? Several years ago, amidst a false rumor of Saddam Hussein’s demise, Microkhan delved into the art of wartime corpse identification. The skinny? More distant male relatives can suffice as reference points, but 100 percent accuracy can never be achievable in such instances. And so the conspiracy theories will always find room to flourish.

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In Pace Requiescat

May 25th, 2009

perrygraveWe hope the vast majority of our American readers are enjoying the Memorial Day holiday outdoors, and thus won’t be reading these words ’til much later. Microkhan, alas, won’t be barbecuing with y’all—this is just another work day ’round here, as the screenplay deadline looms. We’re gonna devote the bulk of today’s energies to that project, but we realize that we’ve also got a pressing responsibility to round out our NtHWS Extras series. Tomorrow, after all, is when the Now the Hell Will Start paperback finally drops.

In Memorial Day’s somber spirit, our penultimate Extras installment is about the burial of Pvt. Herman Perry, the book’s main character. The picture at right is of his erstwhile grave near Ledo, India. We found it while combing through the archives of the Military History Institute; it was snapped by a soldier who had donated his papers to the Army. An inscription on the back reads:

These pictures speak for themselves, except for the one Perry’s Grave. This grave is on a plot away from all the others, because Perry was a deserter.

All of the American bodies at the Ledo Cemetery were disinterred in 1949 and moved to the Schofield Barracks Post Cemtery in Hawaii, where Perry was once again buried among the dishonored dead. In the process of writing Now the Hell Will Start, we had occasion to assist Perry’s sister in moving her brother’s remains for a final time. The full story on that is told in this Washington Post story from June 2008.

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Hop the Next Shark to the Bahamas

May 22nd, 2009


The holiday weekend’s just hours away, and we’re mighty spent from a long week of writing and tending to Microkhan Jr. So we’re gonna outsource this week’s Bad Movie Friday to the late Richard Jeni. His target? The egregiously awful Jaws: The Revenge (aka Jaws IV).

As Jeni rightfully points out in his routine, there are all sorts of logic problems with this movie. (Would you really become a marine biologist if your family had been tormented by sharks on multiple occasions?) But nothing in the film is more head-thunkingly stupid than the sequence in which the titular shark follows Lorraine Gray‘s plane to the Bahamas—and actually beats it there. Yes, when the plane lands, we get a shark’s POV shot of the arrival. We absolutely kid you not.

We can buy a lot of absurdities in the pursuit of a fine shark-eats-man flick. But a great white capable of traveling at over 500 miles per hour? And with the navigational sense to follow a plane located 35,000 feet above the ocean? We gotta draw the line somewhere.

The really sad part? Michael Caine wasn’t able to accept his Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters because he was off making this abomination. They were supposed to be finished in time, but they had some technical problems getting the animatronic shark’s eyes to roll back. Yeah, like that was the big hurdle to cinematic greatness.

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“Scattering Like a Pool of Animals”

May 22nd, 2009

blackgisOne of the greatest research challenges we faced while writing Now the Hell Will Start was the paucity of primary source material describing day-to-day life for African-American GIs. Enlisted men were discouraged from keeping diaries, literacy rates were low, and post-war archivists too often ignored black contributions to the Great Cause—an unholy trifecta for historians working today. So you can only imagine our joy upon discovering Phillip McGuire’s Taps for a Jim Crow Army, a compendium of letters that black soldiers wrote to a variety of newspapers, politicians, and African-American VIPs.

The most affecting letters are those that describe the stateside training camps, where racial tensions often boiled over into violence. One that sticks in our mind was written to the Baltimore Afro-American, by a Texas-based GI who chose to remain anonymous:

Is is “hell” in the Army and Texas. It isn’t that I am afraid to fight, but what are we fighting for? As far as I can see we will never be a free people for the simple reason a majority rules. They either rule in or out. In this respect, mostly out, because again a majority doesn’t speak up. We are supposed to be free to do as we desire, as long as we are within the law. Strange enough, we are not good enough to use the same toilets or “latrines,” to dispose of waste matter from our bodies, so you can very easy (sic) observe how much we are appreciated. If there is a “hell” we are now in it and surely after our work is finished here, heaven will be our home. God only knows how we are suffering.

Go check out the whole book. It’s an eye-opener, to be sure.

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Judge Kuffner’s Fifteen Minutes

May 22nd, 2009


With our compadre Ta-Nehisi thinking deep thoughts and WEFUNK providing our daily soundtrack, hip-hop’s been on Microkhan’s brain all week—yes, even more so than usual. And the question we’ve been asking ourselves is what, exactly, separates the wheat from the chaff in the land of lyricism? Is it pure mastery of metaphor? Yeats-like poetic timing? Reckless bravado? Or perhaps some witches brew that combines all three, along with myriad other ingredients that our musically ungifted mind will forever strain to identify.

We do know what we like, however, and one thing we’ve always adored is esoteric specificity. Such is the case with Ghostface’s rightly celebrated verse on “Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours” (above), in which he offers the following couplet:

This souped up, individual stuck, the new stuff
Same kid cryin’ on the stand with Judge Cuffner

We spent years wondering who this “Judge Cuffner” might be, if not a figment of Tony Starks’ fertile imagination. Well, mystery solved, by none other than the man’s son:

My father, while he was still a judge, once revoked ODB’s probation and sent him to prison. For his efforts, he became a lyric on “Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours” from the double CD “Wu-Tang Forever”.

That’s been the stuff of family legend ever since…According to Dad, ODB had a great lawyer (now a New York State Senator) who kept his client out of jail for quite some time by coming up with new and innovative rehab programs to replace the one ODB had just failed to meet, but Dad’s patience finally ran out, and the rest is history.

Somehow, this knowledge makes us love the song all the more. Why is that?

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A Mathematician’s Revenge

May 22nd, 2009

Delaware’s future as the new Vega$ East may well hinge on the microstate’s supreme court. A “sports lottery” law was recently passed, but the specifics of how it’ll work are still unclear. Yesterday, the Home of Tax-Free Shopping’s most learned judges heard arguments from two parties: Those in favor of single-game betting, and those who prefer a parlay system. The rub here is that Delaware’s constitution may ban games of skill. So does it take any mental chops to bet a single game? One lawyer’s argument went as so:

Bouchard attempted to establish that a single-game bet, also known as a straight bet, is permitted under the law and that a betting system that relies on a point-spread or “line” cancels out the skill necessary to win an athletic contest and makes chance the determining factor for a winning wager.

This, of course, is the genius of the point spread—in theory, if it’s perfectly set, there will be an equal number of winners and losers. This innovation has allowed sports gambling to grow exponentially around the world—you could very well argue that Vega$ couldn’t exist without it. And so Sin City’s fathers would do well to hold an annual parade in honor of the unjustly forgotten mathematician who invented the spread: Charles K. McNeil:

McNeil taught school for several years after graduation, then became a securities analyst for a Chicago bank in the early 1930s. His salary was scant, and he tried to supplement it on his days off by going to baseball games and betting with other spectators in the bleachers. He apparently was encouraged by the results because he quit the bank in the late ’30s and began to gamble full-time in Chicago’s bookie joints, which were widespread and wide open. As he later told it, he was such a successful gambler that, eventually, the biggest book in town put firm betting limits on him.

Peeved by this, McNeil opened his own bookmaking operation one fall in the early 1940s. There, he introduced his revolutionary form of betting on football games. He referred to it as “wholesaling odds.” Before McNeil, gamblers bet on football games using a standard system of odds—2 to 1 that USC would beat Notre Dame, 4 to 1 that Army would beat Navy, etc. McNeil’s idea was a variation of his own personal system for analyzing bets: He would rate two teams and then estimate by how many points one would defeat the other.

McNeil’s idea was an instant hit. Bettors crowded into his joint, eager to enjoy this novel way of gambling on football games. When his first football season was over, McNeil introduced point-spread betting to college basketball, too. Within a couple of months, his betting house had become so successful that it had driven out of business the one that put the clamps on him.

Actually, forget the parade. Dude deserves a gold statue in front of Caesar’s Palace.

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First Contact: New Guinea Highlands

May 22nd, 2009


For the second installment of our nascent First Contact series, we’re gonna hit the layup and blog about this classic culture-clash documentary. A prized Microkhan correspondent and former New Guinea resident summarizes the film with far more acumen than we could ever manage:

Basic story is that the initial European settlements in Papua (south side of the East part of the island by the British) and New Guinea (north side and surrounding islands by the Germans) hugged the coasts in part because the interior was rugged, mountainous and inaccessible. It was believed well into the 20th century that the island’s interior consisted solely of uninhabitable mountainous terrain. After gold was discovered in the Morobe ranges in the 1920s some enterprising Australian explorers commenced looking further inland. A party led by the Leahy brothers in the early 1930s discovered that the highlands consisted of a patchwork of large fertile valleys populated by up to a million people who of course had never laid eyes on a white man. Some of these initial contacts were filmed and are shown in First Contact, along with interviews done in the 1970s with some of the now elderly people who experienced first contact.

There’s all sorts of amusing side stories associated with this tale. One was the fact the Mick Leahy, the gold prospector who led the initial expedition, devoted a lot of his later life and fortune to an unsuccessful campaign to gain the respect and membership of the Royal Geographic Society for his discovery, Another of the more curious cross cultural effects of their late discovery was the fact that many highlanders saw an aeroplane before they saw a car – planes could land in the valleys while roads did not extend that far inland until they were built by US and Australian forces during World War II.

The 10-minute preview is above. If you get the itch (and we sense you very well might), you can check out the full flick here.

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A Feast Fit for Khans

May 21st, 2009

An American scholar digs into the sort of debauched Mongolian feast that, alas, we’ve only had in our wildest dreams:

Sheep fat! Stuffed beef intestine! Goat’s head! Petrified curds, harder than jawbreakers! And, of course, buuz. I ate them all, these foods that not so long ago had my fork shaking. Two bottles of vodka appeared, and were gone. In the corner, a newborn calf slept, then stood up; when it started to pee a boy put a jar beneath it as if it were a leaking roof. A little girl danced to techno music playing from a cell phone. Twenty-three people laid out blankets along the beds and floors of the one room cabin.

Plenty more “food of the nomads” here. And don’t forget the marmots.

(Thanks, Andrew!)

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Corporal Gee Eye

May 21st, 2009

geeeyeOkay, we’ve got a spare second while Microkhan Jr. roams about the Sandman’s domain, so it’s time to dash off today’s installment of NtHWS Extras. Our focus today is on the cartoon art of World War II—not the stuff from the homefront op-ed pages, but rather the quasi-humorous strips meant to bolster troop morale. The most famous of these, of course, is the work of Bill Mauldin, who slogged through Europe with the 45th Infantry Division. Mauldin’s work remains celebrated to this day, and the man was just honored with a new biography.

His forgotten counterpart in the China-Burma-India Theater of operations was a sergeant named Jack Nolan, creator of Cpl. Gee Eye. The typically one-panel strip appeared semi-regularly in CBI Roundup, the Army’s official newspaper in South Asia. Nolan’s career as chronicler of frontline life actually began aboard his troop transport:

It was on the Brazil that Cpl. Gee Eye was born in the bowels of a liner that in 12 hurry-up days was transformed into a troopship. During the 60-day period the vessel wandered the seas, Nolan drew the first Cpl. Gee Eye to illustrate a song the guys of his outfit were singing. His buddies tacked it on the bulletin board. Not long after, the C.O. called him into his office and asked him to draw four identical cartoons each day for the Brazil‘s bulletin boards.

Cpl. Gee Eye proved to be a tremendous morale factor during the trip, which was hardly what you could call a pleasure cruise. Quarters were cramped. Food spoiled. Hardboiled eggs were served so often everyone started sprouting feathers. Nolan lost 20 pounds because he couldn’t eat during the final 16 days of the historic journey.

Nolan used his cartoon character to introduce humor into situations that had many G.I.’s dauber down. At trip’s end, the C.O. presented him a written citation. That appeared to have written finis to Cpl. Gee Eye’s antics, but the Roundup was born and Nolan was recommended to be its staff artist.

We wish we could say that Nolan’s strip deserves the same contemporary adulation as Mauldin’s work, but that would be a lie. For starters, Cpl. Gee Eye was occasionally (to put it mildly) a bit un-PC in its depictions of Asians; see here and here. Also, a lot of them tend to baffle—try as we might, we still can’t make heads or tails of this.

But we love this wry whack at Dale Carnegie. And we’d be curious to know what happened to Nolan after the war, beyond returning to his Irish enclave in New York’s Inwood Heights. Anyone?

UPDATE: Jack Nolan today. (Thanks, Matt!)

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In Single Parenthood, There I Stood

May 21st, 2009


Apologies for the slow start today. As previously mentioned, Microkhan is solely in charge of Microkhan Jr. this week, due to the missus being off in Los Angeles hawking her fine, fine lingerie. Factor in the screenplay and our primary paying gig, and you’ve got a recipe for utter chaos and exhaustion.

As a small token of our gratitude for your patience, please accept the baffling Indonesian video above. Enjoy, and we’ll circle back to you in the p.m.

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Citizen Journalism in Sri Lanka

May 21st, 2009

The Sri Lankan government is sadly adept at squelching journalism, which makes the crowdsourced Groundviews a truly precious gem. Proudly calling itself “Sri Lanka’s first and only citizens journalism website,” Groundviews provides a rare English-language peek at the mood on Colombo’s streets. The site has been in peak form as the nation’s civil war has drawn to its bloody close, providing a series of posts examining Sri Lanka’s post-Tigers future. Of particular note is this sobering take on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s victory speech to Parliament:

Somewhere I hoped that this speech would signal a new chapter, a transformation in this Government that they wanted to begin a post-war phase. Instead the language of the War on Terror found its place once more. The President declared that the term ‘minorities’ is no longer part of the vocabulary of Sri Lanka. I don’t think he was speaking about the idea of each of the major communities being a nation or people in their own right. Instead, he continued there are only two peoples – those who love their country [read those supported the war] and those who “have no love for the land of their birth.” Essentially those who fail to gather around Government holding the national flag are classified as unpatriotic. So for a moment think of the Tamil family who has lost one member to the recent fighting, in a camp not allowed to leave and are not in a state of mind to choose to be patriotic. Those others who do not love their country according to this rule of patriotism must also include the dissenting media, opposition political parties and critical NGOs. So it unclear if there will be an end to the culture of fear, intimidation and violence by ‘unknown groups.’

Groundviews has a sister video channel here; it’s well worth your time even if your Sinhalese or Tamil language skills are negligible.

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When Monkeys Herald Death

May 20th, 2009


We’re gone for the day’s remainder, crashing on a Wired deadline. So we’ll leave you with the clip above from Werner Herzog’s classic Aguirre, The Wrath of God, which recently re-blew our collective mind. The final shot, in which the camera circles around the megalomaniacal conquistador’s monkey-infested raft? Beyond brilliant.

Read about the real Lope de Aguirre here. Turns out he was a bit more successful than Herzog gave him credit for.

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An Obscure Flashpoint

May 20th, 2009

arunachalpradeshdisputedToday’s NtHWS Extras installment will have some modern flavor, as we look at one of the planet’s most obscure—and potentially most lethal—territorial disputes: The Sino-Indian tussle over Arunachal Pradesh, where a fair chunk of Now the Hell Will Start is set.

The enormous Arunachal is arguably India’s most remote province, populated largely by tribal groups with historical roots in Tibet and Western China. During the Sino-Indian War of 1962, China occupied the province before unilaterally pulling back to its current borders. But the Communist titan has never relinquished its claim to Arunachal, and occasionally reminds India of its stubborness in the bluntest fashion possible. As a show of its displeasure over the situation, for example, China recently vetoed a key development loan destined for Arunachal.

Given China’s unofficial habit of referring to Arunachal as “South Tibet,” it seems clear that its claim is part of the grand strategy to hold on to the Dalai Lama’s domain. It’s a classic diplomatic ploy, really—changing the subject as a way of making a current controversy seem like a settled matter. We very much doubt that China has any genuine intentions of going Defcon One over Arunachal. But then again, the whole ballgame can change with the discovery of a key resource. If it turns out there’s a whole bunch of lithium in those mountains, watch out.

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The Bernie Madoff of Farming

May 20th, 2009

farmfraudWall Street certainly didn’t have a monopoly on moral decay during the run-up to Depression v2.0. There was also some jiggery-pokery going down in the Heartland, albeit of the modest seven-figure variety:

A man convicted in what prosecutors said was North Dakota’s largest farm fraud case has lost another appeal of the government’s attempt to collect money from him…

[Duane] Huber, who farmed and worked as an insurance agent in Wimbledon, in southeastern North Dakota, was accused of operating sham farms in the 1990s to exceed federal farm payment limits. He was convicted on 19 charges, including conspiracy to defraud the government, and was sent to a minimum-security prison in Duluth, Minn., in July 2003.

More on Huber’s surprisingly complex fraud here (PDF). We’d summarize, but the paperwork lost us at the mention of “flexible cash leases” and their attendant compliance forms (which, of course, must be filled out in triplicate).

There are plenty more tales of farmer’s bilking Uncle Sam out of millions, often by taking advantage of byzantine insurance schemes or faking subsidy applications. The problem’s gotten bad enough that anti-fraud measures have become a top priority for new SecAg Tom Vilsack.

(Image via Lara’s Travels)

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“Film Them…Film Them All!”

May 20th, 2009


“Harrowing” is probably the only word to describe the above trailer for Burma VJ, a new Danish film that consists largely of illicitly shot video of the 2007 protests. As we know from first-hand experience, Burma is one of the toughest reporting gigs around, which makes the proliferation of disruptive media all the more important to the nation’s struggle for political sanity. Unfortunately, as this film appears to so depressingly illustrate, anonymity remains a challenge no matter how well you think you control the bits. And journalists, whether amateur or pro, end up paying with their lives.

Burma VJ‘s director talks about the movie here. And the Burma slideshow we narrated for Magnum Photos last year can be found here.

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Money, Meet Mouth

May 20th, 2009

sepaktakrawmalaysiaA lighthearted pox on Harry Truman for coining the phrase “The buck stops here.” Our problem isn’t the sentiment itself, but rather the way it’s been glibly abused over the years. Countless beseiged executives have uttered those four words, only to go right on scapegoating when their situations inevitably worsen. Ever the skeptic, Microkhan reaction upon the hearing the phrase nowadays is to slap his mighty forehead and accept that ass-covering is sure to follow.

So when an exec genuinely places his job on the line, instead of just finding cover in words, we can’t help but tip our hats. And when that exec is involved in sepak takraw, the most awesome Frankenstein of soccer and volleyball on the planet? Well, then, perhaps we’ve found ourselves a new hero:

Datuk Ahmad Ismail said today that he would step down as president of the Malaysian Sepak Takraw Association (PSM) if Malaysia failed to clinch at least one gold medal at next year’s Asian Games in Guangzhou, China.

“I give this commitment (step down if the target was not met), let someone else take over,” he said when met by reporters by the Keramat Sports Complex here.

Okay, Datuk, we’re gonna hold you to that. Good luck getting past those super-talented Thais, who’ve given you fits in the past. If things don’t work out, we’ll try and score you a job with the American team, which appears to be in desperate need of players, let alone take-charge executives such as yourself.

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“This is for the Molokai Cops…”

May 19th, 2009


Screenplayin’ and parentin’ for the day’s remainder, so we’re gonna leave you with a follow-up to last week’s Bad Movie Friday winner, the seminal Hard Ticket to Hawaii. This particular scene does not feature unnecessary use of a rocket launcher, but it does teach us all a valuable lesson: When a stranger asks you to Frisbee, never lay down your submachine gun. (SFW, assuming your boss agrees with the FCC re: the word ass.)

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A Finer Lens on Housing

May 19th, 2009

monopolysneakersWe’re not ashamed to declare ourselves total stats geeks, which means we’re always curious about the stories behind Big Important Numbers. And occasionally in our mathematical wanderings, we come to realize that some of those Numbers are a heckuva lot less revealing than they’re cracked up to be—batting average, for example, or Gross Domestic Product.

After a delightful stretch of investigation, we’d now like to add housing starts to that ignoble list. We’ve always suspected the all-important yardstick had some holes, but we never realized just how “dumb” it was. The figure’s chief shortcoming is its total failure to account for the quality of starts, aside from measuring the number of units involved. Yet when the sheer number of starts falls short of expectations, as happened this morning, the widespread assumption is that the economy continues along its death spiral and investors (or, rather, CNBC talking heads) freak the hell out. More houses, good; fewer houses, bad. (And, yes, the Animal Farm echo was intentional.)

But construction jobs alone do not a recovery make. Let’s take a moment to ponder the downsides of obsessing over raw housing-start numbers:

*We’ve already got too many houses, with a record 19 million abodes now vacant. The decay of those homes has obviously negative consequences for tax revenues, community stability, etc. (If you haven’t read George Packer’s excellent piece on vacant exurban homes in Florida, please hop to.)

*The construction of homes in increasingly far-flung communities strains resources, especially public services such as water supply. This drives up costs across the board, adversely affecting consumer spending.

*When the majority of new homes are constructed at increasingly great distances from metropolitan centers, more starts means higher energy prices (not to mention the complication of any conceivable mass-transit plans).

*Renovations can have more positive impact on big retailers such as Lowe’s, since redo supplies are often purchased off the shelf rather than via wholesale by the likes of Toll Brothers. Yet HUD does not track renovations with the same zeal as new construction, for reasons that mystify Microkhan.

*We’re building homes way too big. And there are consequences, starting with wasted consumer dollars. That extra $30,000 you spent on the fourth bedroom that now contains nothing but broken Atari cartridges and t-ball trophies? It really could’ve been put to better use.

None of this is to imply that housing starts don’t have some value as a standalone figure. But would it really be that hard for HUD to zoom in on its numbers and provide context? Google Maps is easy to use, guys. And we assume you’re familiar with the splendor of zip codes. Refine your numbers a bit, and you’ll provide us with a much better idea of whether we should start building a raft for Cuba.

(Monopoly House sneaker image via KicksOnFire.com)

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“My War-Weary Willie…”

May 19th, 2009

smithdawlessSince the missus is gone and we’re dealing with Microkhan Jr. all by our lonesome, we’re gonna post today’s NtHWS Extras installment a bit earlier than usual. Don’t worry, there are non-book goodies to follow today—but those are more easily written when the kid is napping.

Today’s focus is the poet laureate of the Ledo Road: Sgt. Smith Dawless. He was beloved for his ability to capture the suffering of enlisted men in verse, most notably in the famous “Conversation Piece”. After the war, Dawless published a collection of his poems. The one that’s always stuck with us, because of the chilling way it captures a pre-Vietnam case of PTSD, is “Wail of a Beaten Woman”. After a lead-in describing that the poem is meant to be heard in the voice of a woman who’s hubby “was sent home from India because he had an uncontrollable desire to beat people,” the grimness truly begins:

My war-weary Willie is back home again,
Decidedly psychoneurotic.
Afflicted with strange paranoiac desires
Acquired in locations exotic.

Embittered, frustrated, he cannot relieve
His desperate nervous condition
Unless he is staging and amateur bout
With me on the floor of our kitchen.

Sounds depressingly familiar, eh?

It wasn’t until after we’d published Now the Hell Will Start that we learned of Dawless’s intriguing backstory. In 1931, as a Stanford undergrad, he published some erotic poetry about his male lover. He was forced to leave the university due to the backlash. His object of his literary affection, Harry Hay, would later go on to found the Mattachine Society.

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What About Bob?

May 19th, 2009

We cut our journalistic teeth on the information security beat, which means we’ll always have a soft spot for great hacker yarns (such as this one). Sometimes, of course, the greatest break-ins don’t start with port scans, but rather with a more archaic form of trespass. Such was the case at an anonymous company that hired these guys to vet their security. To start the so-called penetration test, an operative was dispatched to check out physical security at the company’s headquarters. The verdict? Epic, hilarious fail:

When he entered the building on day one, “Bob” walked by security and rode the elevator to the first available floor. Within minutes, he had located an empty cubicle, connected his laptop, and started scanning the network. On day two, he entered the building and successfully commandeered another floor and cubicle. Within the next few days, Bob was reserving conference rooms—and in some cases, asking occupants to leave when they overstayed their reserved time.

This madness continued for the next four weeks. When Bob was not scanning the network or trying to locate vulnerabilities, he started collaborating with employees. Within this short period of time, he was participating in birthday parties, pot luck lunches, and numerous other social events. Additionally, Bob was frequently seen rummaging through filing cabinets, taking pictures inside the facility, and moving floor to floor, working at his computer in different places.

(Our italics.) Folks, if you see a suspicious character rummaging around your company’s file cabinets, don’t be afraid to ask for ID. And for pete’s sake, don’t give ’em any cupcakes.

(h/t InfoSec News)

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Konyak Chest Tattoos

May 18th, 2009

konyakchesttattooOnce again we’re pressed for time as the screenplay calls, so today’s NtHWS Extra will be yet another visual quickie. The illustration at right, of a Konyak Naga chest tattoo circa 1923, comes courtesy of the great J.H. Hutton, arguably the great dean of Naga anthropology. Hutton did several tours up in the Indo-Burmese hills, and always brought along his sketchbook to record tribal ways. It is largely thanks to him that we learned about the Nagas’ Tibeto-Burman language(s), as well as their modes of agriculture, cuisine, metallurgy, and, of course, headhunting.

Learn more about Hutton’s career via the Pitt Rivers Museum, the recipient of much of the man’s Naga artifacts. And check out another Konyak Naga tatto, in a photograph snapped by the great Verrier Elwin.

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“That’s Why They Call Him Easy J”

May 18th, 2009


Apologies for failing to ease your case of the Mondays with today’s offerings so far—first corruption, then civil war. So we’re gonna try and make it up to y’all with the video above, featuring several of the gnarliest dunks ever committed to digital memory. They come courtesy of Guy Dupuy, a man who views Romanian Opels as no obstacle to athletic success.

On a related note, Microkhan pal Josh McHugh is currently in Cannes showing off Dunkumentary, a chronicle of his quest to learn the art of the dunk despite having drawn a genetic short straw at birth. The dream lives.

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After the Tigers

May 18th, 2009

srilankaflag
When we went to bed last night, we were all set to kick off the week’s blogging with a “Where’s Prabhakaran?” post. But during our all-too-fleeting stay with the Sandman, the Tamil Tigers leader’s fate became widely known. Contrary to expectations, Prabhakaran did not end it all with a bite of cyanide, but rather (at least according to the Sri Lankan government) was gunned down while attempting to flee his last scrap of territory. And so endeth one of the planet’s longest, bloodiest civil wars, though not before untold thousands of innocent civilians were forced to die for the cause.

Now that the Tigers are no longer, the really tough part begins—patching together a nation torn asunder by a quarter-century of ethnic conflict. A deft political touch will be required; alas, there are few signs that President Mahinda Rajapaksa has what it takes to convince Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority to buy into the unity concept. The Economist broke down the challenges last month:

Undoing the damage its campaign has done to Sri Lanka’s economy, reputation and democratic institutions will take years. But the government’s abuses against Tamils may prove even costlier. Annihilating the LTTE will work only if, as the government claims, they do not represent the aspirations of their marginalised community. But its ethnically-guided “control measures”, in Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s phrase, have suggested to many innocent Tamils that the government considers them terrorists. The internment of almost every resident of Mr Prabhakaran’s former northern fief, including some 70,000 before this week’s flood, provides a relatively mild, yet pressing, example of this.

Given that many of these people have grown up under the LTTE, the government obviously must vet them. It also reasonably notes that their mine-strewn paddy-fields may be unsafe for some time. Yet the government’s original plan, to keep this population penned up for a year or more, was outrageous. In a rare concession to its critics, the government has somewhat relented: it now aims to resettle 20% of the interns by the end of this month and 80% by the end of the year. Yet to members of a proud minority, almost without exception, such blundering confirms the government as just the sort of diehard Sinhalese overlord that drove the LTTE to take up arms in the first place. And indeed, some members of Mr Rajapaksa’s regime, including General Fonseka, are avowed Sinhalese chauvinists. So even moderate Tamils, their ranks severely thinned by LTTE assassins, say they will be worse off without Mr Prabhakaran as their champion.

The obvious solution is for the Sri Lankan government to find a way of redressing Tamil grievances through legal reform. But everything Microkhan hears out of Colombo indicates that such reform is not in the cards. The Rajapaksa government is enjoying a triumphal moment, one that is feeding an ugly form of jingoism that reviles not only Tamils, but anyone who dares question the absolute glory of the army’s victory.

That victory came at great cost—a cost we’ll never know in full, due to Sri Lanka’s policy of excluding journalists from the war zone (under pain of death in far too many cases). Microkhan worries that the government’s triumph will inspire other nation’s mired in civil war to adopt similar tactics. While one can’t question the Sri Lankan army’s right to crush a truly sinister Tamil insurgency-cum-death-cult, brutal force alone is never sufficient to erase decades or centuries of ethnic mistrust. There has to be more to Sri Lanka’s plans for peace. And the clock is already ticking.

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Department of Odd Timing

May 18th, 2009

gabonlimoAfter 42 years at the helm of Gabon, President Omar Bongo appears to be easing his way out the door. The official reason is declining health, but Microkhan finds it odds that Bongo seems to have taken ill after a French court lowered the investigative boom, in response to a complaint by Transparency International. The anti-corruption watchdog as long been on Bongo’s case, primarily about his lavish taste in European homes:

The African leaders stand accused of embezzlement, misuse of public funds and money-laundering in relation to “the acquisition of very substantial property and assets in France,” said the plaintiff’s lawyer William Bourdon when he announced the suit.

Transparency International had filed suit twice before, in March 2007 and July last year, to denounce the Gabonese president’s acquisition of luxury homes in France, sparking a wave of protests from his supporters at home…

Bongo and his family owned 33 properties in France, including a villa in Paris bought in 2007 for 18.8 million euros (24 million dollars), and that Sassou Nguesso owned at least three vast properties in the French capital.

Bongo is also mighty fond of fine automobiles; he owns one of only two Stutz Royale Limousines in existence (above); the other is in the garage of the king of Saudi Arabia.

You will likely be unsurprised to learn that Bongo has amassed these treasures despite ruling a desperately poor country, where an estimated 70 percent of the population live on less than $1.25 per day. That must make tough financial sledding for the workaday residents of Libreville, Gabon’s capital; it is currently ranked as the eighth most expensive city in the world, ahead of London and Geneva.

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Skate or Die…or, Both

May 15th, 2009

After a week’s hiatus, Bad Movie Friday returns with a vengeance, as well as the most unnecessary use of a rocket launcher ever committed to film (c. the 1:20 mark). The ridiculous clip above is plucked from the 1987 Skinemax anti-classic Hard Ticket to Hawaii, in which several Playboy centerfolds play badass DEA agents. The acting is beyond atrocious; we remain convinced that at least half the cast was functionally illiterate, and thus had to memorize their lines by rote. And the Deron McBee-style hair throughout is memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Still, we’ll confess—as horny junior-highers at the time, we were fans of this movie. The action may be lame, but the (decidedly soft-core) jiggle factor is absurdly high. And, really, that’s all we ever asked for from Skinemax, did we not?

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Chasing the Dragon

May 15th, 2009

opiumpoppyToday’s installment of NtHWS Extras is gonna have a past-is-prologue feel, as we look back at Japan’s alleged narcotics profiteering during World War II. We’re accustomed to hearing plenty about the Taliban’s reliance on narco-dollars, but Japan’s wartime opium production is now largely forgotten. At the time, however, American politicians were fond of harping on the Axis nation’s plot to hook our kids on smack, then use the profits to help establish the Co-Prosperity Sphere. From a 1938 Time piece:

Representative Fuller charged that Japan, financially hard-pressed, aims to sell as much opium as possible to Chinese to help pay for the war to conquer China. However, the impoverished Chinese under Japan’s occupation could never pay for such quantities. Japan’s secondary aim, Mr. Fuller said, is to build a factory in Shanghai—as the Japanese have done in Manchukuo—where opium can be converted into heroin, later exported to the U. S. and Europe. Representative Fuller revealed that a Japanese outfit had already made a start on this project by shipping, in 15 months preceding last December, from the Japanese Tientsin concession to the U. S., 1,430 pounds of heroin—two-thirds of the world’s legitimate yearly need, enough to supply 10,000 U. S. drug addicts for a year.

The Japanese were also said to have flood the streets of Nanjing with cut-rate heroin, a move which helped quell any possible resistance to the city’s puppet government.

Whenever Microkhan hears about alleged narco-state, of course, he can’t help but think of present-day North Korea, which appears to earn Kim Jong-Il’s cognac money in part by smuggling high-grade heroin to Australian shores.

(Image via Kenny’s Sideshow)

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Rough Side of the Weirdness

May 15th, 2009

reishimushroomWhile Microkhan fully supports the idea of physical autonomy, this case in Minneapolis skeeves us out to no end. A 13-year-old boy suffering from Hodgkin’s disease is fighting for his right to avoid chemotherapy, in favor of a homeopathic alternative. Unfortunately, that alternative seems to be peddled by a man who strikes us as nothing more than a rank con artist. In the late 1990s, Philip R. Landis (aka Cloudpiler, aka Peopeo) apparently ran afoul of the law due to a Reishi mushroom scheme in Montana. From his 2002 appeal:

On the morning of April 25, 1998, more than twenty people from the [mushroom] co-op, together with observers from an interested Idaho group, gathered at Parker’s nursery for the planting seminar. Just before the seminar was to begin, Landis telephoned both Larimer and Parker and stated he had been in a vehicle accident and did not know the location of his vehicle or the spawn the co-op had ordered. The group attempted to locate Landis’ wrecked vehicle and the spawn in order to carry on with the seminar, but were unable to obtain any information about the accident or the whereabouts of the vehicle. The training continued that day and members of the group planted spawn Parker had obtained from a company not pre-approved by Landis.

After Landis’ failure to attend the April 25, 1998 planting seminar, Parker stepped down as the leader of the co-op. James Myers (Myers), a licensed professional counselor, assumed the leadership role. Members of the co-op continued making inquiries into Landis’ accident in order to locate and retrieve the spawn, and the relationship between Landis and the co-op deteriorated rapidly. On April 30, 1998, Myers sent Landis a certified letter requesting return of the co-op’s money. When Myers did not receive the money by May 6, 1998, he notified the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, which initiated a criminal investigation.

Landis also claims to have discovered an ancient Mormon text.

More on Cloudpiler’s homeopathy business here. We find it sad and puzzling that anyone would entrust their lives to such an obvious charlatan. But then again, we’ve never suffered through a round of chemotherapy.

UPDATE: Somewhat to Microkhan’s surprise, the judge has ruled against the boy and his parents.

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Temple of Boom

May 14th, 2009


We’re so far behind on the screenplay it ain’t even funny, so we need to jet early today and focus on revising Act Three’s supremely clunky dialogue. We’re thus gonna leave you with a somewhat oddball NtHWS Extra: The promotional trailer for Madlib’s absolutely essential Beat Konducta in India. Yeah, it may seem like a stretch, seeing as how the Bollywood samples here come from films made a good three decades after Now the Hell Will Start‘s main narrative ends, but we insist there’s a connection. That’s because we were first exposed to a pre-release version of this album while slogging away on the book’s second draft, and it helped us get through the hard times. The track “Masala,” in particular, is something that played on our neural soundtrack a thousand times while refining the myriad jungle chase scenes.

It’s also the first song we listened to upon learning of Microkhan Jr.’s imminent arrival on Spaceship Earth, so it’s got some additional meaning ’round headquarters. In combination with several Jamesons, it definitely helped soothe our panic.

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The Battle of Balbriggan

May 14th, 2009

irishtravellersDuring our time in Ireland, we never ceased to be mystified by the venom spewed toward Travellers, perhaps the Emerald Isle’s largest ethnic minority. For starters, we had a tough time differentiating Travellers from their countrymen, although our Irish comrades never seemed to fail at the task. Alas, many of those comrades were barkeeps, and they’d often get the vapors when a group of Travellers showed up for pints. The saga apparently continues, judging by what went down during a recent Irish bank holiday:

Up to 50 gardaí from Balbriggan, Swords, Donabate, Baldoyle and Lusk were called to deal with a pub brawl that escalated into a siege in the north Dublin town after a number of the pub’s customers, believed to be members of the local Travelling community, were refused service.

Over a dozen customers of John D’s took over the pub and threatened staff after being refused further service there. Staff and some customers ran out of the pub and the dozen barricaded themselves inside with chairs and tables. They smashed windows and broke up furniture.

When gardaí arrived before 7pm people in the pub threw bottles, a fire extinguisher and other missiles out on to the street at them. The Garda Public Order Unit had to be called in and part of the town was closed off to traffic until 9pm. Following an initial stand-off, gardaí rushed the premises and 13 people were arrested.

Some rather unsympathetic Irish media reaction here and here. The latter commentary frowns on the willingness of some Travellers to earn their keep as bare-knuckle boxers. (See also: Brad Pitt’s character in Snatch.)

Learn more about the Travellers and their history as reviled outsiders in this slideshow. And learn a bit of their unique language.

(Image via Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More)

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