During 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.)
For the moment, the only real option is to leave the waste where it was created, encased in metal cylinders and stowed in concrete bunkers. Barring the machinations of some truly ingenious evildoers, that approach should get us safely through the next century or so. Unfortunately, we’ll still have another 9,900 years to go until the waste becomes no more radioactive than unmined uranium. So, we better hope that over the next 100 years, our nation’s best and brightest figure out a feasible workaround—one that may involve proton beams or (we kid you not) extremely hardy microbes.
Read the whole thing. For the record, we’re highly skeptical of this solution, so frequently touted by Nevada’s junior senator.
We’re swamped with Wired reporting duties for the remainder of the day, so today’s NtHWS Extras installment must once again be a visual quickie. The photo above depicts several African-American GIs enjoying rickshaw rides in Calcutta, the only Indian city with a nearby rest camp willing to accept black soldiers. White American officers, by contrast, were given a choice of a dozen vacation spots, including the famous ski slopes of Kashmir. Because Calcutta at that time was suffering through a terrible famine, many black GIs chose to forgo their R&R opportunities and keep working in the Indo-Burmese jungle. For some young men, cracking rocks on the Ledo Road apparently beat stepping over fetid corpses in Howrah.
For reasons best left unsaid, Microkhan found himself watching Bundesliga highlights yesterday evening. Not a bad time at all, but the Germans’ post-goal celebrations really disappoint. The whole running-toward-the-crowd-with-spread-arms thing is almost wholly lacking in imagination, and does little to express the pure joy of athletic genius.
This got us thinking about the celebratory dance that we’ve often wanted to perform after finishing a really good blog post: The legendary Merton Hanks chicken dance (above). It’s by no means as complex as several more revered post-touchdown shimmies (see: the Icky Shuffle), but there was something about Hanks’ raw agility that got to us every time.
In other words—totally, totally badass. We may have to bust this one out on May 26th, when our paperback finally drops. Don’t worry, though—we’ll be doing it in the privacy of our headquarters, with only Microkhan Jr. around to bear witness.
Perhaps our favorite passage in all of American literature can be found on the last page of The Great Gatsby. No, not that celebrated last line about boats fighting the current. Rather it’s the snippet located a few paragraphs before the end, in which Nick Carraway waxes rhapsodic about Dutch explorers:
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Like Carraway, Microkhan also envies those humans fortunate enough to have made First Contact with peoples and lands who exceeded their wildest imaginings. One of the tragedies of our age is that no Earthly journey can ever reveal something truly alien. Even if Microkhan someday makes it to his beloved Mongolia, for example, the experience won’t be totally full of wonder—National Geographic has made sure of that. No matter where we roam, we have some inkling of what to expect—we know what the people will look like, we are familiar with their technologies and customs. But that was not the case for true explorers in eras past, when sallying forth invariably meant risking one’s life, and destinations were always a surprise.
In the spirit of Carraway’s lament, then, Microkhan would proudly like to announce the launch of a new, semi-regular series on this blog: First Contact, a chronicle of (mostly) primary-source accounts of accidental culture clashes. We hinted at this series last week, when we shouted out the work of John Webber. That’s his work at the top of this post, too—an antique illustration from his series on Alaskan natives. And it’s what gave us the inspiration to start First Contact in the Land of the Midnight Sun, among the Dena’ina people.
[The ship] was like a giant bird with great white wings…All the Tyonek men were very frightened and ran and hid in the woods, except one brave man. He paddled out in his baidarka to see what it was. The strange people on the boat traded him some clothes for what he was wearing. When the courageous native returned to the shore he was a hero to his people, and the costume he brought back with him [the uniform of an English sailor] was faithfully copied down through the years, to wear in ceremonial dances.
Microkhan must wonder what the English sailor did with his Dena’ina garments.
Have any leads on great First Contact tales? Please let us know. We’re gonna try and run a First Contact installment at least once a week for the foreseeable future.
We have to jet downtown for an evening of semi-responsible alcohol consumption, so today’s edition of NtHWS Extras will be exceedingly brief. It consists, in fact, of little more than the cartoon at right, which Microkhan discovered in the archives of the United States Army Military History Institute. It comes from a scrapbook donated by a veteran of OSS Detachment 101, an intelligence unit dedicated to training the Kachin Rangers in Burma. The unit’s members were known as real work hard, play hard types, as evidenced by the cartoonish inebriation depicted at right. Hey, more power to ’em.
More on OSS Detachment 101 here. We only mention the unit briefly in the pages of Now the Hell Will Start, most memorably in describing how one member used a pair of makeshift forceps to remove a leech from his pal’s most vulnerable orifice.
A veteran caver has a theory about the scourge of White Nose Syndrome. Meanwhile, farmers are starting to fret. Nature’s bug zappers are a lot cheaper than pesticides.
America’s sky-high divorce rate is often cited as a prime example of our moral decay. But how many other nations avoid such matrimonial chaos only through the maintenance of draconian laws? Microkhan would like to direct your attention toward Uganda, which has recently experienced a surge in divorces. The culprit seems to be the repeal of a law that strikes us as only slightly less unfair than the ending of Paths of Glory:
The criminal adultery law was scrapped on April 5, 2007 in a land mark ruling by the Constitutional Court. The Court ruled that section 154 of the Penal Code Act was unconstitutional because it treated men and women differently.
The old law gave the married man leeway to sleep around as long as the women he was involved with were not another man’s wife. A married woman, on the other hand, could not have sex with any man other than her husband.
In case of divorce, a woman had to prove multiple grounds, such as cruelty and desertion in addition to adultery, while the man only had to prove adultery. Now men and women alike only need to prove a single ground.
Also recently scrapped in Uganda: A law that enabled cuckolded men to sue their wives’ lovers.
All of this raises a vital question: Is there a “natural” rate of divorce that nations should aim for as a target, and then tweak their laws accordingly until they hit it? Perhaps the rate in the U.S. is too high, but the pre-2007 rate in Uganda was obviously too low. And while we obviously want to encourage the stability of marriage, we also have to accept that humans make mistakes, and should be granted leeway to start over—for the good of themselves, and for the good of society.
So, what might the natural rate of divorce be? Twenty percent? Twenty-five?
Microkhan’s in the midst of a vintage programming kick, and so we’ve inevitably turned out thoughts to Logo in recent days. We have incredibly fond memories of clustering around a battered Tandy in the early 1980s, to watch our school’s lone computer-proficient teacher demonstrate how simple commands could push a turtle-shaped cursor around. We’ve been hooked on the dynamics of human-machine interface ever since.
Our fandom’s led us to waste more than a few hours on this Logo emulator (which includes a valuable memory-refresher on commands). And we’ve enjoyed digging into the language’s lengthy history, which included many years in which the turtle was actually a tangible gizmo. The photo above, borrowed from the fantastic MIT Museum, is of a turtle robot named Arthur—the first such device designed specifically to respond to Logo commands.
When Microkhan Jr. is finally old enough to understand that computers are for more than keyboard banging, we’ll try to get him into Logo. Though our hunch is that, having grown up amongst wall-to-wall gadgets, he’ll be on to Java before he’s figured out that the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist.
In today’s installment of NtHWS Extras, we’re gonna revisit one of Microkhan’s very favorite topics: headhunting.
Perhaps the most famous anthropological study of the practice is Renato Rosaldo’s Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974. The Ilongot, who inhabit the Filipino island of Luzon, are peculiar in that they don’t preserve their captured heads as keepsakes. Rather, they discard the heads, literally tossing the grisly objects into remote corners of the forest where they’ll never be discovered. As Rosaldo recounts, there is deep symbolic meaning in this act:
To take a head is, in Ilongot terms, not to capture a trophy, but to “throw away” a body part, which by a principle of sympathetic magic represents the cathartic throwing away of certain burdens of life—the grudge an insult has created, or the grief over the death in the family, or the increasing “weight” of remaining a novice when one’s peers have left that status.
Regarded as a ritual, headhunting resembles a piacular sacrifice: it involves the taking of a human life with a view toward cleansing the participants of the contaminating burdens of their own lives. Taking a head is a symbolic process designed less to acquire anything (where so-called soul stuff or fertility) than to remove something. What is ritually removed, Ilongots say, is the weight that grows on one’s life like vines on a tree.
More on Ilongot headhunting here and here. And if anyone ever tries to sell you an Ilongot skull trophy, you now know they’re hucksters.
Last night, Microkhan finally got around to completing the Stanley Kubrick circuit by watching Paths of Glory. Suffice to say that the film is a potent reminder of the World War I’s absolute ghastliness; we can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to be an 18-year-old lad in the trenches, ordered to venture into No Man’s Land where certain (and totally pointless) death awaited. Talk about a low point for humanity…
One scene, in particular, sticks in our minds. Toward the very beginning, a French general encounters an enlisted man who’s clearly a psychological casualty. Upon being informed of this fact by an underling, the general rages that shell shock is nothing but a myth—in fact, the prevailing view among the military elite at that time. An untold number of soldiers were thus shot for cowardice, rather than given the medical attention they so desperately required.
As the war dragged on, however, even the most recalcitrant of generals came to acknowledge that there were psychological consequences to surviving bombardment after bombardment. And so the shell shocked were subjected to a particularly unpleasant form of treatment: Torpillage:
One of the most common treatment modalities, particularly popular in the French Army, was a form of faradization (application of electric shock, using very high voltage and low amperage) called torpillage. It was found to be particularly useful when shocks were applied to the affected part of the body. Very high levels of success were reported; contracture rapidly disappeared, and/or vision, speech, hearing, use of a limb, etc. were rapidly restored. The use of “electric therapy” to “restore proper function to weak nervous systems” and “weak nerves” went back for a good number of years.
The British, by contrast, were more apt to use “pep talks and appeals to patriotism and loyalty.” Probably just as effective as torpillage, but a great deal less sadistic.
Chilling vids of shell shockees here and here. Thank your lucky stars you weren’t a European male of military age circa 1915.
The handsome logo at right belongs to Zeya Shwe Myay FC, one of eight teams that will soon compete in Burma’s National League Cup, the nation’s first-ever professional soccer league. Matches kick off this coming Saturday, with the early money on Mandalay’s Yadanarpon FC as the prohibitive favorite; the team is owned by a drinking-water mogul whose lavished a relative fortune on five African players.
Microkhan will be a proud Zeya Shwe Myay supporter because the team reps Sagaing Division, where much of Now the Hell Will Start is set. But we’ll also confess to being a bit creeped out by this entire athletic enterprise, especially in light of The Irrawaddy‘s claim that it’s part of the ruling junta’s bread-and-circuses strategy to win next year’s elections. (We also wonder about the provenance of the owners’ fortunes, given that Burma’s economy appears to be one big cronyist racket.)
More on the forthcoming elections here; even thought the outcome will likely be rigged, the opposition National League for Democracy is still debating whether or not to boycott the process.
Microkhan has to jet downtown to beg The Man for affordable health insurance (prognosis: grim), so no Bad Movie Friday this week. But we’ve got the next-best thing to reward you for a work week well-done—Manimal, dude, Manimal. How Microkhan loved this cheese back in his grade-school days, and how we wept when NBC unceremoniously killed it before Season One even ended. The opening narration alone is a pulp classic:
Dr. Jonathan Chase… wealthy, young, handsome. A man with the brightest of futures. A man with the darkest of pasts. From Africa’s deepest recesses, to the rarefied peaks of Tibet, heir to his father’s legacy and the world’s darkest mysteries. Jonathan Chase, master of the secrets that divide man from animal, animal from man… Manimal!
Given what’s been going on in Hollywood these days, shouldn’t be long before they turn this one into a big-budget movie. If they can do frickin’ Land of the Lost on the big screen, why not a far superior show like Manimal?
An appreciable slice of Now the Hell Will Start takes place in the Ledo Stockade, an United States Army prison in North-East India. The place was known for the casual brutality of its guards, several of whom had worked as chain-gang supervisors back in Uncle Sugar. The stockade’s abysmal conditions play a key role in the tragedy at Now the Hell Will Start‘s heart.
What’s left unsaid in the book is the Ledo Stockade’s role in the history of “comfort women”—Korean ladies used as indentured sex servants by the Imperial Japanese Army. Much of what we know about the day-to-day lives of these women comes from interrogations done at the stockade; the involuntary prostitutes had been captured during the Battle of Myitkyina. The Army’s Psychological Warfare Team reported its findings here; the interrogators seemed oddly unsympathetic to the women, despite all the hardships they’d been forced to endure:
The interrogations show the average Korean “comfort girl” to be about twenty-five years old, uneducated, childish, and selfish. She is not pretty either by Japanese of Caucasian standards. She is inclined to be egotistical and likes to talk about herself. Her attitude in front of strangers is quiet and demure, but she “knows the wiles of a woman.” She claims to dislike her “profession” and would rather not talk either about it or her family. Because of the kind treatment she received as a prisoner from American soldiers at Myitkyina and Ledo, she feels that they are more emotional than Japanese soldiers. She is afraid of Chinese and Indian troops.
The comfort-women issue continues to echo in contemporary relations between Japan and South Korea. Check out this fascinating piece from last year, which examines the Korean survivors’ ongoing efforts to wrangle a formal apology out of Japan—as well as a growing vogue for revisionist history among Japanese scholars.
In the process of prepping a special series on first contacts (which will launch next week), Microkhan recently became acquainted with the work of John Webber, an English painter best known for accompanying Captain James Cook to Hawaii. Fortunately for us, Webber did not share Cook’s bummer of fate, and went on to create some trulymemorableimages of 18th-century Alaska and its indigenous residents. Given our longtime interest in the history of tattoing and piercing, Webber’s illustrated study of the practices in the Aleutian Islands is gold.
Plenty more of Webber’s work is available here; of particular note is his rendering of Cook’s arrival in Hawaii, where the captain was initially greeted warmly before matters went terribly awry.
And stay tuned for Microkhan’s “First Contact” series. You know you want it.
A few years back, Microkhan wrote a lengthy Wired opus about a thorny conflict in Oklahoma: The battle over whether descendants of freedmen should be allowed to join the Native American tribes that their ancestors had belonged to. Now the Obama administration may be entering the fray:
In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last week, the six lawmakers say, “The illegal actions of the leadership of the Five Tribes, some of which are the wealthiest tribes in Indian Country, have resulted in the freedman’s inability to access federal benefits and programs, totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, in the areas of housing, education, health and public works.”
The letter, first reported by The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, requests a “full-scale investigation into what we believe are the Five Tribes’ systematic expulsion of its freedman citizens in violation of their treaty, voting and civil rights.”
Today’s edition of NtHWS Extras brings us the amazing tale of Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, arguably one of the most selfless and impressive American expatriates of the 20th century. There is nary a peep about Seagrave in Now the Hell Will Start, primarily because he’s not the sort of bloke you can just casually mention without giving some backstory; if we’d brought up his saintly endeavors, we would have been compelled to spend pages on the topic. So the good doctor fell by the wayside—until now.
The son of Baptist missionaries, Seagrave spent 44 years tending to the medical needs of Burma’s hill tribes. Time caught up with the doctor in 1961, just four years before his death:
Seagrave’s main hospital building is a substantial stone structure which he helped build with his bare hands to show native laborers that Americans do not consider manual work demeaning. The other buildings are of flimsier native construction. Thanks mainly to a U.S. support group, American Medical Center for Burma, Inc., which raises funds, and to drug manufacturers who donate supplies, Dr. Seagrave is able to practice and supervise good medical care for a population of border tribesmen totaling some 400,000. He fills 250 beds and 50 mats with about 2,500 admissions a year for surgery and an equal number for medical treatment, plus 10,000 out patient visits. He also runs one of the best Western-style nursing schools of any of the underdeveloped countries.
The Burma surgeon does all this on less than a shoestring, but then he always has.
He got started with a wastebasketful of broken surgical instruments that he salvaged from Johns Hopkins Hospital. The hospital’s yearly budget is $75,000— a third of what Seagrave needs. He takes only $90 a month as salary and pays for his own food out of it.
Dr. Seagrave, who no longer visits the U.S., vows to die in Burma. He tires easily; he has heart trouble—despite which he is a chain smoker.
During World War II, Seagrave was forced to flee the Japanese invasion of Burma. He joined Lieut. Gen. Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell in his famous march out of Burma, along with 19 of his nurses. Five years after the end of the war, he was prosecuted for treason by the newly independent Burmese government; the main charge was that he aided Karen rebels, who continue to fight to this day. Seagrave got off thanks to international pressure, and spent the next 15 years back at his hospital in Namkhan. Per his wishes, he died there in 1965.
Seagrave is such a towering figure due to his utter indifference to his own happiness. Despite his missonary roots, he was no Baptist proselytizer; rather, his passion was tackling the challenge of making something out of a nothing, again and again and again. And in the poverty-stricken wilds of Burma, where the monsoons exact an awful annual toll, the cycle of reinvention is perhaps the only constant.
More on Seagrave’s wartime work here. Seagrave’s own book, Burma Surgeon, has long been out of print, but is a staple of dusty university libraries. Microkhan may just have to dig up a copy at his current Columbia Library headquarters.
The 1988 B-movie “classic” Bloodsport is notable for three things: Forest Whitaker’s nuanced supporting performance, Bolo Yeung‘s ‘roided-out pectorals, and the novel highlighting of non-Asian martial arts. Microkhan, for one, was first introduced to capoeira through the film, and has been a fan ever since (which meant that his time in Salvadaor de Bahia was a little slice of heaven).
But Bloodsport fell short by not including an Irish martial artist among the kumite competitors. It turns out the Emerald Isle has its own rich tradition of skilled hand-to-hand combat, a tradition that may well have vanished into complete obscurity without the efforts of John W. Hurley. The noted author has dedicated years to popularizing the art of Shillelagh fighting, which centers around a knobbed stick once integral to ant-Irish cartoons. Hurley has labored to salvage the Shillelagh’s reputation.
Get involved in the controlled mayhem by taking an online lesson. Please note that Microkhan cannot be held responsible for any injuries incurred; our insurance won’t cover it.
British science writer Simon Singh is no fan of chiropractors. In fact, he thinks the vast majority of what they do is pure quackery, and he spends a fair chunk of his book Trick or Treatment? making that abundantly clear. Spinal adjustments that can alleviate a range of ailments? Pshaw, says Singh (as does Microkhan).
The British Chiropractic Association has taken great exception to Singh’s attacks, and is now suing him for libel. In a delicious twist straight out of that Simpsons episode guest starring Stephen Jay Gould, the trial may very well establish whether chiropractors are considered bona fide in the eyes of British law. If Singh wins out, this could rank as an epic legal blunder on par with William Jennings Bryant’s involvement in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
The trial kicks off today; get daily updates via blogger Jack of Kent, who’s attending the proceedings. Or join Singh’s Facebook group here.
When Microkhan posted yesterday about a California mule festival, he had no idea he was getting mixed up in a national spat. As several kind readers brought to our attention, the 40-year-old Mule Days celebration is a Johnny-come-lately compared to Mule Day (singular) in Columbia, Tenn. The hoedown in the Volunteer State is said to date all the way back to the 1840s, when it started as an annual livestock show. It’s since grown into a nearly week-long party sponsored by the likes of Purity Dairies and James K. Polk’s Ancestral Home.
Mule Day’s centerpiece is the crowning of the Mule Day Queen. This year’s coronation of Rachel Ethridge (above), alas, was marred by a backstage theft. If you have any leads on the culprit, said to be a heavily tattooed woman with straight black hair, please alert these good folks.
En route to the Indo-Burmese jungle, the main character in Now the Hell Will Start spent several weeks at a British rest camp called Deolali, about 125 miles from Bombay. Prior to World War II, the camp had been used as a holding area for British soldiers who’d completed their service in Asia, and were finally bound for Liverpool, Glasgow, or wherever else home might be. Unfortunately, many of these soldiers had been driven mad by the conditions of their service, which typically involved endemic malaria, brutal discipline, and oppressive heat. As such, the word “Deolali” was twisted into the slang term “doolally”—”crazy.”
As it turns out, Deolali has another, less well-known claim to infamy. According to a report from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the camp was a testing ground for Allied mustard-gas experiments during World War II:
The numerous testing facilities operated by the Allies in South Asia were particularly concerned with analysing the effects of CW in tropical conditions. Often live human volunteer subjects were exposed to high doses of mustard agents, with anywhere from adequate protection to no protection at all. Photographs show that Indian soldiers also took part in these “volunteer” trials. Of the numerous testing ranges operated by the Allies in South Asia during the war, live agents were tested at the following sites: Deolali, Dehra Dun, Coimbatore, Kumbla, Porkhal, Chakra, Cambellpur (present day India), and Maurypur (present day Pakistan).
Microkhan’s bolding. Of course, Indian “volunteers” were not the only poor souls doused with mustard gas during World War II trials. A fair number of American sailors apparently got the cruel treatment, too.
Microkhan never tires of reading about the semi-ingenious concealment methods employed by drug smugglers. In today’s installment, an American college student allegedly attempts to shimmy her way out of Guyana while carrying gobs of cocaine. Her defense upon being caught, as explained by her lawyer to a Guyanese magistrate, is somewhat less-than-convincing:
“It was quite unfortunate, however, Madam, that when she was going back to the US, her relatives in New Jersey had contacted her and asked her to take back some grind seasoning for them to the US and it was in the bottles containing the grind seasoning that the illegal substance was found concealed.”
This excuse would hold much more water if the alleged smuggler hadn’t been in possession of over 20 pounds of coke. No one needs that much grind seasoning. And it also seems unlikely that such a fantastic stash would be randomly found on the shelves of a Georgetown supermarket. But, hey, stranger things have happened.
For an animal primarily known for its stubbornness, the humble mule inspires a surprising amount of human love and devotion. Microkhan recently became acquainted with mule fandom via Western Mule Magazine, a publication that led him to discover Mule Days in Bishop, Calif. Held annually over Memorial Day Weekend, Mule Days is a true whopper of a hootenanny, which allows mule aficionados to congregate and feel secure in their oft-mocked affinity for (mostly) infertile donkey-horse hybrids:
There is no way to actually describe Mule Days. It is part mule show, part test of skills, and part Wild West show. It is an event the likes of which are held no where else in the world. Over the five days of the event, there are 14 shows featuring over 700 mules with their trainers, riders and packers. In excess of 30,000 fans converge on the Tri- County Fairgrounds and the Mike Boothe Arena to watch the events and visit the exhibitors.The fourteen mule shows consist of: Western, youth, English, cattle working, gaited, coon jumping, racing, musical tires, gymkhana, packing, shoeing, chariot racing, team roping and driving.
Mule people are determined to prove that anything a good horse can do, a good mule can do better. From trail riding to show classes, mules can do it all with the grace unique to these animals. Steer roping and penning, an event normally reserved for quarter horses, is another highlight of Mule Days. Cowboys will have the opportunity to prove their roping and riding skills astride some of the best working mules in the United States.
Microkhan’s travel budget is currently zero, so we’ll sadly be unable to report from the festivities this month. But if we can scrape up $165, perhaps we’ll invest in the official Mule Days buckle. If not, then we’ll just stick with following the celebration’s Tweets.
We rarely get misty-eyed over the celebrity deaths, but yesterday’s passing of Dom DeLuise really got to us. That’s because he helped form our earliest impression of Ancient Roman decadence, with his turn as a gluttonous, Nero-like emperor in History of the World Part I. (Above; language slightly NSFW.) To this day, we can’t read about the Caesars’ exploits without envisioning Mr. DeLuise in all his porcine glory, requesting a “small lyre” and more wine as he moans over the loneliness of dictatorship.
Godspeed to you, Dom, and thanks for stirring our passion for ancient history. May there be more than enough fried mozzarella in Heaven to keep you sated for all eternity.
In the course of researching the Now the Hell Will Start chapter that deals with wartime prostitution, we stumbled upon a great little artifact called Morale-Building Activities in Foreign Armies. It’s an illustrated 1943 pamphlet that delves into the various methods used by both Axis and Allies to pep up their troops’ spirits. And it makes fighting history’s most lethal war seem like attending Camp Pinewood.
The illustration at right, for example is captioned: “German soldiers who are artistically inclined are allowed to bring cameras and art kits into the theater of operations.” And the Italians really seemed to have a ball when the guns fell silent:
A specific Fascist unit organization furnishes music and entertainment for soldiers. Singing is probably the most popular diversion for Italians in camp or on the march. Both individual and group singing is encouraged and stimulated by the army. In an official handbook on “Life in the Garrison” (Norme della vita di caserne), it is stated that “Songs and patriotic hymns should form an important element in the soldier’s life.” Another official publication, “Rules of Instruction” (Regolamento d’instruzione), includes a statement that the “Italian soldier, in addition to fighting, eats and sings.”
The stick-in-the-mud award goes to the British, who were the lone non-American force to actively discourage liaisons with prostitutes. A British soldier’s free nights were instead meant to be filled with “plenty of healthy interests and amusements.” Sounds painfully dull, but you really can’t question the resulting won-loss record.
Indonesia regularly languishes near the bottom of Transparency International‘s corruption index; in the 2008 rankings, the world’s fourth-most populous nation came in tied for 126th, alongside Honduras, Uganda, and Mozambique. With everyone’s hand out when foreign investors come knocking, it’s no wonder that major development deals fall through all the time.
In an effort to develop integrity among young people, the government of East Kalimantan Province plans to build hundreds of cashier-free “honesty cafes,” Governor Awang Faroek Ishak said on Monday.
Awang said putting ethics concepts taught by teachers and parents into everyday practical use would help to foster a positive mental attitude among children and young people. The proposed cafes, in which customers would use the honor system in paying for drinks and treats, would encourage honest behavior that would eventually curb misconduct and corruption.
“For instance, if they eat three sandwiches, they will be trained to pay for what they consume, though no one is watching. But if they act dishonesty, the moral sanction would come from peers who are honest,” Awang said.
Developing honesty, he said, was critical for developing the nation, particularly in light of humiliating standings in world rankings for corruption.
“If we don’t prevent the corrupted attitude, the future of our nation will be stuck in a rut and we will disgrace ourselves to other countries in the world,” Awang said.
Good luck to the governor. Judging by his experience in the American Hades known as junior high school, Microkhan is deeply skeptical. Then again, we’ve often been surprised by the high compliance rates on mass-transit systems that go by the honor system—though, granted, lots of folks probably buy tickets solely because they’re scared of getting pinched.
We’ve long been looking for an excuse to shout-out Fresh Produce, an eclectic podcast that airs semi-regularly from “an undisclosed location in South London.” Thankfully, their latest show gave us a killer hook: The strange career of Jamaican rocksteady legend Phyllis Dillon.
As recounted by Fresh Produce co-host Daddy Like, who spun Dillon’s fantastic “Don’t Stay Away,” the singer emigrated to New York City in the late 1960s; despite her widespread fame in Jamaica, Dillon never made more than five quid off any one song, largely due to the island nation’s lack of royalty statutes. She became a bank teller in New York, handling deposits from clients who had no idea they were interacting with a music superstar. When she could, Dillon would then fly down to Jamaica and record tracks for Duke Reid‘s Treasure Isle label.
Dillon enjoyed a revival in the late 1990s, thanks to a rocksteady fad that swept through Europe and Japan. She tried to use her late-career earnings to retire to Jamaica, but frequent extortion attempts forced her to retreat back to New York.
More classic Dillon tracks here and here. Absolutely gorgeous.
In light of February’s horrific chimpanzee attack in Stamford, Connecticut legislators have proposed a sweeping ban on pets deemed capable of harming humans. And they’ve spared no effort in identifying animals who they’d like to render bestia non grata in the Nutmeg State. This entry in the bill’s verboten list caught Microkhan’s eye:
(10) The elephantidae, including, but not limited to, the hippopotamidae, including the hippopotamus.
Now, no question that hippos are dangerous creatures; why, just the other day a pair of Swazi fisherman narrowly avoided death-by-hippo while plying their trade. But as far as Microkhan can tell, no Connecticut resident owns a hippo, even of the pygmy variety. We’d be interested to know who recommended that hippos be added to the bill’s text; someone who was familiar with the tale of Calvin Coolidge’s pet hippo, perhaps.
In other hippo news, the debate continues to rage over whether hippos are more closely related to whales or pigs. We’re currently leaning toward the former.
During 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:
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