Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

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“Anyone Should Have Seen Catastrophe Approaching”

May 4th, 2009

bengalfamine1943The Bengal Famine of 1943 receives barely two paragprahs’ worth of ink in Now the Hell Will Start, a lamentable oversight that we now hope to correct as part of NtHWS Extras Month.

Our interest in the famine has less to do with its devastating scale—as many as 4 million Indians may have perished from hunger—than its obvious preventability. Because so much of Eastern India’s arable land was given over to tea production, the British raj made Burma the region’s bread basket—or, more accurately, its rice basket. When the Japanese conquered Burma in 1942, however, the British made no discernible effort to find an alternate source of food for Bengal. Within a year, entire families were literally wasting away in the streets of Calcutta. The New Republic neatly summarized the horror:

The national, provincial and municipal governments of India, Bengal and Calcutta vied with each other in complacency, procrastination and inefficiency. Bureaucrats got snarled in red tape; food merchants profiteered shamelessly (even now the price of rice, the staple diet of the province, is up 500 percent). Although anyone should have seen catastropher approaching, the government of India waited a whole year after the Japanese took Burma, the main source of rice for Bengal, before it worried about food. Then it set up a bureau which did little except to issue pamphlets which, in the style of Eric Johnston, glorified “free enterprise.” The government says about a million died; [The New Statesman] thinks the total will be closer to three millions (sic), as cholera, malaria and smallpox follow in the wake of starvation. Whole areas are almost depopulated; sometimes the survivors are too weak to bury the dead, and leave them to the competition of dogs and vultures.

What Microkhan would give to find one of those pamphlets designed to assuage the masses that their empty bellies were simply a product of the market struggling toward maximum efficiency.

Some chilling contemporary photos of the famine here. And a Bengali short-story about the tragedy, translated by Kalpana Bardhan, can be read here.

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The Fallibility of Folk Medicine

May 4th, 2009

Since folk-medicine techniques ostensibly develop over many centuries, one would think its practitioners would slowly come to realize that some practices are actually harmful rather than helpful. But, alas, it turns out our species isn’t always aces at connecting cause to effect. And so we keep using treatments that are several degrees worse than doing nothing at all.

One troubling case in point is traditional birthing in Timor-Leste, where infant mortality is unusually high by regional standards. The difference appears to be due to folk-medicine techniques that inadvertently cause harm to newborns:

“It happens quite a lot that when a mother gives birth, they stay by a fire for three months,” said Macu Guterres, the coordinator of the National Breastfeeding Association for the Alola Foundation, an NGO that supports women and children in Timor-Leste.

“They make a small bed beside the fire and sleep there while the fire burns 24 hours a day,” she said, explaining that the heat from the fire is believed to help dispel “dirty” blood from the body after birth.

“This can affect the baby’s health as well as the mum. The baby can develop asthma or may find it hard to breathe because of the smoke. It happens a lot in Oecussi,” she said, referring to the Timorese enclave deep inside Indonesian territory…

Traditional birth attendants (‘dukuns’), using traditional medicines and sometimes harmful practices, are common, especially in rural areas. The Alola Foundation estimates that only 10 percent of women in Timor-Leste give birth with the assistance of a skilled birth attendant.

Harmful practices by ‘dukuns’ include encouraging the mother to push before she is ready, and placing rice or other substances in the birth canal to “lure the baby out”.

Another common belief is that colostrum, the nutrient-rich milk mothers produce in the late stages of pregnancy and immediately after birth, is bad for the baby.

“They believe using water and honey instead of colostrum will wash the baby’s stomach and intestines and remove dirty blood,” Alola Foundation’s Guterres said.

Stamping out these folkways is no mean feat, as NGOs are often suspected of having impure motives. (In fairness, of course, there are historical reasons for East Indians to be suspicious of Western interlopers.)

Microkhan is not only curious as to how NGOs might best coax these harmful practices out of existence, but also why human beings are so often incapable of recognizing when certain cherished medical techniques need to fall by the wayside. (See: trepanation.) A little more global love for the scientific method certainly wouldn’t hurt.

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Redoubt in (Almost) Realtime

May 4th, 2009

Alaska’s Mount Redoubt, a 10,197-foot-high volcano located a little over 100 miles from Anchorage, is burbling anew. Witness the ashy stir via the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s three Mount Redoubt webcams; Microkhan’s favorite snaps regular pics from the volcano’s northern flank, though the angle from a nearby seismic station is mighty intriguing, too.

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I, Milkbot

May 4th, 2009


Growing up in Los Angeles, I always idealized cow milking. It seemed like such a delightful, salt-of-the-earth activity, with just the right amount of grossness thrown in for good measure. Plus, being the curious sort of bairn, I was always fascinated by the thought of tracing my beloved Kraft Singles back to the source.

Turns out, of course, that milking is a royal pain, which is why some dairy farmers are now opting for the Lely Astronaut A3 Robotic Milking System. Unlike many other milking robots, the Lely product allows for “free cow traffic”—that is, cows wander into the device whenever the milking mood strikes, rather than being forced to produce according to human schedules. And at the end of the process, their udders get brushed clean, perhaps resulting in some modicum of quasi-erotic bovine pleasure.

A full Astronaut A3 installation can run upwards of $140,000, but Lely (obviously) claims that the investment is a long-term winner. This British farmer, for example, saved himself five hours of toil per day.

But it’s unlikely the Astronaut A3 can save the untold number of small American dairy farms that are going through extremely rough times, due to an ongoing milk glut combined with weakening exports. Increased efficiency, even when provided by nifty Jetsons-style contraptions, is not always a panacea.

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“The World Meets Nobody Halfway”

May 1st, 2009


Let Microkhan go on record as saying that we’ve enjoyed at least one frequently derided Sylvester Stallone flick (the campy-yet-terrifying Cobra). But when it comes to Over the Top, we have no choice but to agree with the masses. Like so many of Sly’s 1980s vehicles, it’s all-too-easy to envision the movie-exec brainstorming that went into this schlock. Someone obviously caught a few minutes of arm wrestling on ESPN, and then ordered his minions to build a movie around the sport. Throw in a tale of fatherly redemption and a mountain of steroids, and you’ve got a flick that inspired The Washington Post to moan:

Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk. They call him “Hawk.” Years ago, he abandoned his wife and kid. Boy, does Hawk regret it. But he gets a chance to make it up to both of them when the wife, who is dying of an unidentified heart ailment, asks him to pick up the kid at his military school graduation and drive him cross-country in his big tractor-trailer.

Hawk and the kid, they don’t get along so good. The kid’s a snotnose with a girlish giggle. Hawk has to introduce him to the manly pleasures of interstate trucking and arm-wrestling. And teach him the latest version of the Stallone creed: “The world meets nobody halfway. If you want it, you got to take it.”

Well, Mom’s heart gives out, the kid blames Hawk and goes to live with his grandpa (Robert Loggia), an evil, grasping zillionaire steadily attended by scowling bodyguards. Hawk goes back to living his life, which consists of the manly pleasures of interstate trucking and arm-wrestling. He’s betting the ranch, you see, on winning the arm-wrestling championship of the world in Las Vegas. There are, of course, other arm-wrestlers in the way, many of them the rarefied product of centuries of inbreeding. But the world meets nobody halfway…

Personally, we prefer Tony Montana’s more optimistic credo. Although when it comes to raising Microkhan Jr., we’ll probably just stick with teaching him the Golden Rule.

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“Greater Liberia”

May 1st, 2009

bilboThe earliest draft of Now the Hell Will Start contained a long passage about the efforts of Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-Miss.) to deport America’s black population to West Africa. The Bilbo tangent got lost in the shuffle, and probably for the best. But the senator’s vitriol is something to behold, and it’s worth reviving for NtHWS Extras Month. From a 1939 Time magazine article (all offensive language left intact from the original):

Mississippi’s Theodore (“The Man”) Bilbo arose in the Senate one day last week to display a bulky petition. It bore, said he, the names of 2,500,000 U. S. Negroes who would prefer to live in Africa. For three-and-a-half hours and 26 pages in the Congressional Record, he expanded on a way to make this possible: let the Government establish a Greater Liberia for “repatriated” blacks.

Mr. Bilbo thus returned to a favorite theme and revived an idea older than the U. S. itself. By subsidizing a Negro exodus to Africa, he maintained, the U. S. would rid its whites of a depressed and depressing race, save itself from racial “amalgamation.”

“By this separation,” droned little Mr. Bilbo, “the blood stream of the white race shall remain uncontaminated and all the . . . blessings of the white man’s civilization shall forever remain the priceless possession of the Anglo-Saxon. . . . There is an overmastering impulse, a divine afflatus among the mass of the Negroes of the U. S. for a country of their own.”

In support of his bill to create Greater Liberia, Senator Bilbo quoted Thomas Jefferson, founder-hero of the Democratic Party. He declared that 20,000 mulattoes annually “cross the color line” (pass for whites). If miscegenation goes on unchecked, he predicted the U. S. will become a land of decadent mongrels, “a yellow race yet to come.”

Microkhan can only smile at the thought of Bilbo’s specter receiving word of Sally Hemmings. You can almost hear his head knocking against the coffin as he spins.

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Nixon in Ceylon

May 1st, 2009

nixoninceylonIn 1953, America dispatched Vice-President Richard Nixon to the island nation of Ceylon (still nearly two decades away from being rechristened Sri Lanka). The Eisenhower Administration was mighty worried about reports that Ceylon was shipping strategic materials to newly Communist China, a sign that the former colony might be contemplating an even more dramatic leftward shift. So Nixon alighted in Colombo, intent on letting the Ceylonese know that the United States was the Cold War side to choose.

Today brings an exhaustive rundown of this obscure episode in Cold War foreign affairs. The tale is most notable, perhaps, not for what it tells us about 1950s geopolitics, but rather Nixon’s strange control-freak tendencies. The vice-president took the time to write a series of memos detailing his wants and needs. Among the gems:

Whenever you are with me look for opportunities for me to break away from the protocol people and greet ordinary people who may be standing along the side. For example, children, cripples, old people, etc.

And:

Secret Service men and anyone else who is with us at receptions should assume the responsibility of being sure that no photographers are snapping shots when I have a drink in my hand.

Three years later, Ceylon moved to the left.

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The Novelty of Schizophrenia

May 1st, 2009

An intriguing debate (PDF) over whether schizophrenia is a uniquely modern disease. Given the ailment’s genetic origins, Microkhan has long assumed that it’s been with our species since time immemorial. But based on their examination from 15th-century Islamic medical textbooks, a pair of South Carolina doctors disagree:

Serefeddin Sabuncuoglu (1385-1470) was a general physician who practiced during the 15th century in central Anatolia, which is now Turkey. Written in Turkish with Sabuncuoglu’s own calligraphy, Cerrahiyyetu’l-Haniyye (Imperial Surgery) is the first known illustrated textbook of surgery and contains colored, handmade miniatures of surgical techniques and instruments (6, 7). The book contains Sabuncuoglu’s
descriptions of numerous medical conditions and their treatments. Several neurological conditions, including migraine headaches, epilepsy, and tremor are described. The psychiatric conditions described are melancholy (mal-i hulya) and forgetfulness (unutsaguluk). We have carefully reviewed each illustration of Sabuncuoglu’s masterpiece and report that a description of a condition that resembles schizophrenia is not present.

In the rebuttal, it is claimed that schizophrenics may have been shunted into “hospital-villages” where they were essentially forgotten.

More on the search for schizophrenica’s genetic origins here. Microkhan is struck by the apparent link between the increasing complexity of modern life and the rise in schizophrenia diagnoses. Might environmental stress somehow “switch on” a genetic mechanism that creates paranoia and delusion?

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“…Like Them Dudes in Red Shirts Off Star Trek”

April 30th, 2009


Breaking early today to head downtown and catch a screening of Adam. (Thanks, James.) In my absence, enjoy the above slice o’ lyrical genius from MF Doom (or, as he now prefers to be called, DOOM). Any rapper who knows his Star Trek minutiae is worthy of only the highest praise.

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Jaundiced for the Cause

April 30th, 2009

atabrineIn today’s edition of NtHWS Extras, we’re taking a look at a nearly forgotten medical tale from World War II: The widespread use of Atabrine to combat malaria, with varying results.

This story starts all the way back in the 19th century, with a bunch of Dutch smugglers who brought Cinchona seeds from South America to Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies). Cinchona is the source of quinine, the most effective anti-malarial agent then known. It had long been manufactured in Peru, but the Indonesian plantations quickly cornered the market; they could produce the drug for about half as much as the Peruvians. So by the dawn of World War II, Indonesia was the world’s sole supplier of quinine, and thus a highly strategic asset.

The Japanese were totally hip to this fact, and thus made the invasion of Java of a top priority. After the Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies, the Allies suddenly found themselves deprived of a vital pharmaceutical resource—they key to fighting in jungles the world over. Our soldiers were thus forced to resort to Atabrine, a synthetic antimalarial synthesized from coal tars.

Atabrine was mildly effective, but there were some serious side effects. The mildest of these was a deep yellowing of the skin; soldiers on daily Atabrine regimens appeared as if they’d come down with jaundice. More disturbingly, the drug was also known to cause cases of violent psychosis.

In the jungles of northwest Burma, where much of Now the Hell Will Start takes place, Americans were ordered to swallow five grains of Atabrine per day; sergeants sometimes manually forced the pills down privates’ throats. But despite the strict drug regimens, malarial was endemic along the Ledo Road; for every 1,000 men in the field, the Army recorded 955 cases of malaria.

Moral of the story? Diversify your pharmaceutical supply lines!

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The Kobe Bryant of Netball

April 30th, 2009

romeldaaikenMicrokhan’s Australian readers (we have at least two!) may already be familiar with Romelda Aiken’s spectacular exploits on the netball court. She is, after all, the best player on the Queensland Nationals, a lithe and aggressive scoring machine who recently racked up 42 goals in an upset win over the Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic.

The above paragraph may seem like gibberish to Americans, however, unaccustomed as we are to the sport of netball. It’s basically a more static version of basketball, in which dribbling is not involved and the basket lacks a backboard. As lifelong fans of the NBA, we find the sport (played almost exclusively by female athletes) to be somewhat lacking in flair. Yet it’s bigtime in Commonwealth nations such as New Zealand and Jamaica, presumably because it’s been a longtime staple of English-style girls schools. (The sport was thought to be more ladylike than basketball.)

More on the dominant Aiken here. Meanwhile, netball seems to be in swift decline in Indonesia. But the ANZ Championships, in which Aiken stars, claim record attendence. Their tagline? “The Hottest Game in Town.” These blokes might disagree.

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Microkhan’s Bicentennial

April 30th, 2009

microkhansoloJust realized that the quickie below on flu terminology was Microkhan’s 200th post. As such, now’s the perfect time to thank y’all who’ve helped build this blog since its early February debut. Really grateful for your daily clicks, given how much time and effort we’ve expended on this rather esoteric project.

We’ve got plenty more cookin’ for the coming months, so please stick around and, if possible, help spread the good word. If your pals balk, tell ’em that a blog that inspires this sort of curious adulation is at least worth a gander.

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Know Your Flu Terms

April 30th, 2009

What’s the difference between an epidemic, a pandemic, and a mere outbreak? Microkhan gives the skinny here. Apparently the dreaded Osaka flu doesn’t qualify as any of the above, at least in the non-Simpsons universe.

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The Cannabis Debate, Circa 1894

April 29th, 2009

bhangFor today’s edition of NtHWS Extras, we’ll be covering a topic that’s been much in the news as of late: Cannabis laws.

Ganja use plays a significant role in Now the Hell Will Start, as it did in the lives of thousands of American GIs during World War II. The book’s main character became a devotee of the substance during his time in northwest Burma, where there were few ways of salving the pain of jungle life. Soldiers were promised a case of lager every month, but the Army often failed to make good on its obligation. So the men would turn to tribal peddlers of ganja, who sold twists of the drug for as little as 70 cents.

Ganja cultivation flourished in the Patkai Mountains thanks to British indifference. Though the hill tribes could be fined for selling the drug in the Brahmaputra Plains, enforcement was lax. This was primarily due to the conclusions of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, a late 19th-century panel that investigated the consequences of cannabis consumption on the subcontinent. The commission’s study is celebrated among decriminalization advocates for concluding that “moderate use practically produces no ill effects, [and] in all but the most exceptional cases, the injury from habitual moderate use is not appreciable.” The British thus learned to object not to the drug’s use, but rather to the efforts of users to evade excise taxes.

The commission also opined on the futility of criminalization in India’s outlying regions, specifically the North-East where much of Now the Hell Will Start takes place. A simple cost-benefit analysis revealed that the raj had better things to do with its time:

It would be useless to prohibit the use of ganja in a province like Assam, surrounded as it is by independent hill people, who would cultivate it in their hills and smuggle it down with little risk of detection. Any prohibition will only lead to the increase of illicit consumption and to the secret use of the drug, which would be decidedly bad; of course, stop cultivation in Bengal, and the prohibition of the use of excise ganja could be enforced; but there would be serious discourse, though in this province it might not amount to a political danger, and the prohibition would be followed by recourse to opium, and in some cases to alcohol. The evidence of planters tends generally to show that the use of ganja by the garden coolies, who (except in the western districts of the Assam Valley and those of the Surma Valley, all of which border on Bengal) are the principal consumers, produces no serious effects. There is nothing in any of the Assam evidence to controvert these views.

It’s worth noting, though, that American GIs caught using cannabis during the construction of the Ledo Road were liable to be court-martialed and, in rare instances, committed to mental hospitals.

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Thoughts on Lithium

April 29th, 2009

salardeatacamalithium
So there’s a fresh stir over Bolivia’s massive lithium reserves, which a French industrialist hopes to tap virtually all by his lonesome.

This isn’t news to Microkhan, since we helped coin the term “the Saudi Arabia of lithium” last fall. But the object of our interest back then was Chile, currently the world’s leading lithium producer. And despite our acknowledgement that, yes, the Bolivian reserves in the Salar de Uyuni are larger than in Chile’s Salar de Atacama, there are two technical factors to keep in mind.

Firstly, the Bolivian lithium is much more tainted with magnesium, an impurity that must be excised before the commodity can be prepared for market. And perhaps more importantly, the Salar de Uyuni is less drenched in solar radiation than the Salar de Atacama. Since the lithium-rich “brine” is prepared for processing by leaving it in outdoor pools, this makes a big difference; a pool of Chilean brine will be ready for processing in a much shorter time frame than a pool of Bolivian brine. (We go into much more detail in our Forbes piece, so please check it out.)

Bottom line: Chile will remain the world’s leading lithium producer for the foreseeable future. If there’s anyone to watch right now, it’s the Chinese—they’ve got some big projects going in Tibet, which have already depressed lithium carbonate prices by about 10 percent. But how are they doing it, considering they face some of the same technical hurdles as the Bolivians? The utter lack of labor standards may be one factor.

(Photo of Chilean lithium pool by Microkhan, September 2008)

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Shacked!

April 29th, 2009

Given that Radio Shack provides one of the least pleasant retail experiences imaginable, this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Though I wonder if the employee asked for the customer’s zip code while delivering the beatdown.

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“The Palm Beach of Manchuria”

April 29th, 2009


The best novel we’ve read so far this year is Ian Buruma’s The China Lover, a criminally underrated fusion of first-rate historical reportage and thoughtful meditation on the nature of art. The book’s backbone is the true-life tale of a Japanese actress-turned-politician, whose career is recounted through the eyes of three lonely, movie-obsessed observers. The first of these narrators has a most unusual job—working on 1930s propaganda films meant to pacify the denizens of Manchukuo, or Japanese-controlled Manchuria. This is the puppet state that figured so prominently in The Last Emperor, as the scene of Pu Yi‘s pathetic comeback gig. (Pu Yi makes an appearance in The China Lover, as an aficionado of both opium and Charlie Chaplin flicks.)

The book’s Manchukuo section inspired me to dig up the English-language propaganda film above, which portrays life in Manchukuo as a little slice of workingman’s heaven. The movie was obviously designed to allay American fears over rumors of Japanese atrocities, such as the testing of germ-warfare methods on human subjects. Here, Manchukuo is depicted as remarkably similar to the United States, a place where baseball and bathing beauties reign.

Knowing what we know now, propaganda films of this nature seem both quaint and ghoulish. But put yourself in the shoes of a 1930s American moviegoer, who might have caught this newsreel before the showing of the latest Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical. This would likely have been your first real glimpse of Manchuria, after having read just a few snippets in the newspaper, or in history textbooks. As such, you’d have little reason to doubt Japan’s benevolence in bringing Manchuria into the modern world. Celluloid had far more power to convince in the pre-TV era.

Microkhan remains curious about the front company cited at the beginning of the film: “Beaux Art (sic) Production.” As those familiar with Tokyo Rose know, the Japanese cultivated a sophisticated network of native English speakers. But who is the narrator in this flick? And was he a true believer, or just another propagandist in on the con?

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“A Crushing Insult”

April 28th, 2009

navalsegregation1In today’s edition of Now the Hell Will Start Extras Month, we’re going to delve into one of the book‘s main themes: Military segregation during World War II. Time and again in the course of my research, I was struck by the virulence of Jim Crow attitudes within our nation’s armed forces. Despite the desperate need for manpower, especially as the conflict wore on, the generals and War Department planners continued to resist calls for even mild forms of integration; like their Axis opponents, they had been deeply influenced by the specter of scientific racism, and were thus hard-pressed to believe that African-Americans could function as combat soldiers.

One of the most intriguing documents I came across is atop this post. It’s a 1942 memo addressed to the Secretary of the Navy, regarding the debate over whether or not the Navy should use black enlistees for duties other than cooking. The author portrays himself as a pragmatist, arguing that the more widespread use of black sailors would hamper the war effort. To give himself a bit of plausible deniability, he quotes from an anonymous “southern congressman” in order to make his argument:

In this hour of national crisis, it is much more important that we have the full-hearted cooperation of the thirty million white southern Americans than that we satisfy the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People. I realize you have never lived in the South. I have lived there all my life. You know that our people have vounteered for military service more readily than the people of any other section of the Nation. If they be forced to serve with Negroes, they will cease to volunteer; and when drafted, they will not serve with that enthusiasm and high morale that has always characterized the soldiers and sailors of the southern states.

I do not mean to urge the complete seclusion of Negroes from military or naval service, but I do most earnestly plead with you to see that there is a complete segregation of the races. To assign a Negro doctor to treat some southern white boy would be a crushing insult and in my opinion, an outrage against the patriotism of our southern people.

Click on the image to read the whole memo, which has been scanned and posted by Stanford Law School’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue” project.

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Top-Notch Pigeon Tech

April 28th, 2009

pigeonringWith legit cash available on the pigeon-racing circuit, there’s huge demand for gadgets that can ensure fair play. And that’s where Germany’s Unikon comes in, offering the very best in tracking rings, loft antennas, and clocks capable of simultaneously timing 250 birds.

A video review of Unikon’s latest clock, the Champ, is available here, via the greatest Spanish pigeon breeder in recent memory. You do not mess with Mister Universe.

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The Stability of Suicide

April 28th, 2009

suicideshistorical
It’s a bright, gorgeous morning here at Harlem headquarters, which obviously means it’s the perfect time to revisit one of Microkhan’s favorite topics: suicide.

The graph above shows the suicide rate in the United States between 1950 and 2005. As you can see, the rate has been remarkably stable over the years, despite growing awareness of mental-health issues and suicide prevention tactics. There have been intermittent increases, such as in 1975, but they could hardly qualify as spikes. (One researcher has hypothesized that the mid-70’s spike was caused by a Me Decade divorce wave.)

Microkhan wonders if this means there’s a “natural rate” of suicide in a society, a baseline of self-destructive activity that can never be stamped out by policy. As long as love affairs fail and creditors insist on repayment, suicide will remain a fixture of the human condition. Perhaps we can have a national goal of getting back to 1950’s relatively low rate of 7.6 suicides per 100,000 Americans. But then again, Microkhan is skeptical of that figure—the first year of tracking data is always difficult, especially back in an era when many suicides were probably mislabeled by embarrassed communities. (Microkhan does wonder whether the high rate of male suicides in 1950 was due to post-traumatic stress among World War II vets.)

This historical data also raises the question of whether suicide attempts have remained stable over the years. Our hunch is that the number of annual attempts has markedly increased since 1950, which would explain why suicide rates have remained steady despite huge advances in emergency medicine. (Average distance from ERs may play a big role in Montana’s sky-high suicide rate.)

Okay, that’s enough morbidity for a warm spring day. Get happy, dear readers.

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“…With No One Else in Sight”

April 27th, 2009


The great downside of music’s move toward digitization is the end of liner notes, the record industry’s equivalent of YouTube’s “Related Videos” feature. Microkhan fondly recalls discovering Donny Hathaway via the notes from The Chronic; half the hooks on that album were copped from the great-and-troubled legend of Chicago soul.

Nowadays, alas, you have to be motivated to use The Google when struck by a sample. So it went for years with Smif-n-Wessun’s “We Came Up (Crystal Stair),” which opens and closes with some truly memorable crooning. But by who? With the help of Elbows, we finally hunted down the obscure soul nugget at this great song’s core: It’s Bobby Reed’s “Time is Right for Love” (above). Well worth a listen this afternoon, as you gently slide toward that reward called night.

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Countdown to Paper

April 27th, 2009

nthwspaperbackAs of yesterday, we’ve got one month to go ’til Microkhan’s labor o’ love, Now the Hell Will Start, hits shelves in paperback form. To celebrate this joyous occasion, we’ll be doing a sorta DVD-extras thing from now ’til May 26th. Every day, Microkhan will scoop up some NtHWS-related material off the cutting-room floor, and post here for parties interested in such disparate topics as headhunting, British colonialism, the Depression-era South, scientific racism, Assamese politics, opium addiction, and much, much more.

For those unfamiliar with NtHWS, here’s the skinny from the jacket:

A true story of murder, love, and headhunters, Now the Hell Will Start tells the remarkable tale of Herman Perry, a budding playboy from the streets of Washington, D.C., who wound up going native in the Indo-Burmese jungle—not because he yearned for adventure, but rather to escape the greatest manhunt conducted by the United States Army during World War II.

An African American G.I. assigned to a segregated labor battalion, Perry was shipped to South Asia in 1943, enduring unspeakable hardships while sailing around the globe. He was one of thousands of black soldiers dispatched to build the Ledo Road, a highway meant to appease China’s conniving dictator, Chiang Kai-shek. Stretching from the thickly forested mountains of northeast India across the tiger-infested vales of Burma, the road was a lethal nightmare, beset by monsoons, malaria, and insects that chewed men’s flesh to pulp.

Perry could not endure the jungle’s brutality, nor the racist treatment meted out by his white officers. He found solace in opium and marijuana, which further warped his fraying psyche. Finally, on March 5, 1944, he broke down—an emotional collapse that ended with him shooting an unarmed white lieutenant.

So began Perry’s flight through the Indo-Burmese wilderness, one of the planet’s most hostile realms. While the military police combed the brothels of Calcutta, Perry trekked through the jungle, eventually stumbling upon a village festooned with polished human skulls. It was here, amid a tribe of elaborately tattooed headhunters, that Herman Perry would find bliss—and would marry the chief ’s fourteen-year-old daughter.

Starting off with nothing more than a ten-word snippet culled from an obscure bibliography, Brendan I. Koerner spent nearly five years chasing Perry’s ghost—a pursuit that eventually led him to the remotest corners of India and Burma, where drug runners and ethnic militias now hold sway. Along the way, Koerner uncovered the forgotten story of the Ledo Road’s black G.I.s, for whom Jim Crow was as virulent an enemy as the Japanese. Many of these troops revered the elusive Perry as a folk hero—whom they named the Jungle King.

Sweeping from North Carolina’s Depression-era cotton fields all the way to the Himalayas, Now the Hell Will Start is an epic saga of hubris, cruelty, and redemption.

As an intro to NtHWS Extras Month, check out this 1945 Universal Newsreel, a rare look at the Ledo Road during its extraordinarily brief heyday. Or you can check out this much longer documentary about the entire Burma Road, which the Ledo Road joins up with at Mong-Yu. The doc’s narrator? Some bloke by the name of Ronald Reagan.

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Colombo Couture

April 27th, 2009

A new, government-approved t-shirt hits Sri Lanka’s capital. Tamils seem highly unamused; read the article’s, um, “impassioned” comments at your own risk.

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Daytona for Squabs

April 27th, 2009


The winner of the 2009 Mercedes Classic will not, in fact, walk away with a shiny new car. But there are genuine riches at stake in this competition, to be held in the pigeon-racing mecca that is central Oklahoma. By Microkhan’s count, in fact, a sweep of all events could bring a pigeon owner $109,500—more than enough to buy a nicely loaded CLS-class coupe, or score upon score of the very finest racing birds.

Like most top-tier races worldwide, the Mercedes Classic is a “one loft” sort of competition. This means that the entrants are kept together for several months before the actual races commence. As a total newbie to this sport, Microkhan remains unclear on why the one-loft approach is so popular. Is it because pigeons require acclimation in order to perform up to their abilities? Or is it to circumvent the possible use of performance-enhancing drugs?

See the video above for an update from the Mercedes Classic loft, where more than 500 pigeons are currently cooling their heels. Or check out the live webcams here. And Microkhan previously delved into pigeon history, by recounting the brave WWII-era work of Burma Queen.

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Alone in Samoa

April 27th, 2009

Microkhan has often wondered what happens to criminals who, upon completing their prison sentences, are deported to their countries of origin—countries they may well have left when they were just a few days old. A New Zealand broadcaster caught up with one such deportee in Samoa, who says that the experience is (to say the least) mighty rough:

It was Faamausil’s former California gangster life which bought him a prison sentence and then deportation in shackles back to his birth country Samoa – a country he couldn’t even remember.

He was dumped at the airport completely alone with no money.

“After the third day after sitting there with no food no clothes I thought, oh it’s time to kill yourself and when I went to the bathroom to hang myself a taxi driver came inside the bathroom,” says Faamausil.

The taxi driver took pity on him and saved his life.

The deportees also apparently face regular beatings from their new compatriots, who (in Faamausil’s opinion) loathe Americans who threaten the relative tranquility of traditional village society.

And the situation for the exiled Americans is about to get worse: Come September, Samoa will be switching to British-style traffic regulations, after a century of right-hand driving. Prognosis? Nightmare.

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“Your Highness Learns Fast”

April 24th, 2009


There are few films less deserving of a big-budget remake than Red Sonja. It plays more like a sword-and-sorcery spoof than a genuine adventure, due in large part to the most awful dialogue this side of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation—as well as the craven addition of a Short Round-style sidekick. If memory serves, Red Sonja was actually supposed to be another Conan film. But having realized what a hash they’d made, its producers wisely chose to saddle Brigitte Nielsen with the infamy.

Can the dude behind Highlander:Endgame actually make next year’s Red Sonja revamp halfway decent? Color Microkhan the deepest shade of skeptical, especially since Rose McGowan doesn’t strike us as particularly bad-ass. Though she did survive her whole Marilyn Manson phase, so perhaps we’re underestimating.

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Medieval Monkeys

April 24th, 2009

aberdeenapes
Microkhan has a longstanding fascination with non-human primates, and so was intrigued to stumble upon the homepage of Kenneth Gouwens, a history professor at UConn. One of Gouwen’s specialties seems tailor-made for us: “Distinctions drawn between humans and simians in the Renaissance and in our own era.”

Alas, Microkhan wasn’t able to locate any of Gouwens’ work on this particular subject. But in the process of poking around The Tubes, we did stumble upon an equally delectable prize: The Aberdeen Bestiary, a digitized version of a 13th-century English manuscript. The collection contains this priceless description of apes (illustrated above), as penned by a Medieval zoologist:

The female monkey gives birth to twins, loving one and hating the other. When hunted, she carries the loved one in her arms while the other clings to her back. Eventually she tires, drops the favoured baby and the other one is saved. The ape does not have a tail.

The whole bestiary is well worth your time, particularly the sections on the delicate interplay ‘twixt lions and tigers. Please note that Microkhan does not endorse the “glass trick” for stealing tiger cubs.

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The Migingo Spat

April 24th, 2009

migingoisland
To the untrained eye, Migingo Island appears to be no great shakes. It covers just a half-acre’s worth of Lake Victoria, and it’s covered with the tin shacks of fishermen. Yet Kenya and Uganda both covet the ramshackle rock, leading to a border row that threatens to lead to outright war. Ugandan marines overtook the island in late February, an act that has led to nationalist rioting in the slums of Nairobi. Now Rwanda’s president is trying to intervene and prevent further turmoil.

Ugandan and Kenyan surveyors are ostensibly doing their best to sort out the mess—in London, where the best colonial maps still reside. Yes, the arbitrary borders drawn by Oxbridge adventurers over a century ago still matter, down to a fraction of an inch. Since we’re huge cartography nerds, Microkhan would love to take a peek at the decisive maps, presumably locked up in some musty archives. Though we acknowledge that whatever those maps might show, the “loser” in this dispute will likely contest the depiction as inaccurate.

More on the Migingo controversy here, including a strange Ugandan claim that the island was submerged until 2004. What Microkhan has yet to determine, alas, is why Uganda is so intent on owning this half-acre boulder. Anyone?

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“Too Bad He’s a Killer”

April 24th, 2009

verryidhamhenyansyahMicrokhan recently opined that it’s best to avoid serial killers who fancy themselves musicians. To our great consternation, alas, the teenage girls of West Java seem to be disregarding this sage advice. They have apparently gone somewhat ga-ga over Verry Idam Henyasyah, a.k.a. “Ryan,” a condemned murderer who’s become an object of myriad schoolgirl crushes.

In an all-white high school uniform, Eca, who refused to give her real name, said, “Initially, I just wanted to see what a person like Ryan would look like.” Asked about her first impression of Ryan, she replied, “He’s actually handsome. Too bad he’s a killer.”

“Not only is he handsome,” Eca, 16, added, “he’s also very nice. He doesn’t mind taking pictures with us. And he sings for us, too.” Eca proudly said that last week, she took a picture of herself beside Ryan in his cell, got his autograph and listened to him sing.

Three girls took pictures of Ryan using their cellphones. One of them whispered to her friend, “Ryan’s fine, don’t you think? He looks like [former President] Sukarno in what he’s wearing right now.” At the time, Ryan was sporting a long white shirt, black pants and a black peci, a fez-like Indonesian traditional hat.

One girl asked for Ryan’s autograph, as if he were an up-and-coming celebrity. A police officer jokingly told her, “Here, I’ll give you a piece of paper, and I’ll let you in to get his autograph. I dare you.” The girl smiled hesitantly, fear written over her face, and shyly gave the police a “No, thanks” look.

Others stood observing the prisoner quietly, seemingly enjoying the experience of being in close proximity to such an infamous man. “I’m just curious,” said one curly-haired girl.

At one point, a girl threw a balled-up piece of paper to Ryan, which he wrote on then returned to her. She said they were exchanging phone numbers. Initially, the girl said she had asked for the number merely as a keepsake. When Ryan was asked why he gave his number to her, he beamed and said, “Why don’t you just ask them?”

The girl then admitted that she planned to send text messages to Ryan, “to give him support and to ask him what he’s doing [while in the cell].”

“It gets dreary in my cell,” Ryan said. “Getting text messages from these girls keeps me entertained.”

Ryan’s 12-song album, tentatively titled Persembahan Terakhirku, is currently in the works. Perhaps one of its cuts will someday be regarded as the Indonesian version of Charles Manson’s “Cease to Exist”.

The real question here, of course, is why vile killers are so sexually alluring to some. One possibility: Certain personality types are hopelessly attracted to malignant narcissists, of which serial killers are the most extreme examples.

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“I Still Need Him for Shooting!”

April 23rd, 2009


As previously noted this week, Microkhan recently re-watched the great Fitzcarraldo as part of his ongoing screenplay research. Of particular interest was the second half of the film, in which Klaus Kinski’s aspiring rubber baron encounters a tribe of Amazonian headhunters. Since Now the Hell Will Start contains a similar culture clash, we wanted to learn how the great Werner Herzog handled the mashup of languages, social mores, and religions.

The best scene involves Kinski and his crew anxiously dining while surrounded by dozens of armed tribesmen. The natives are riled up for unclear reasons, and one of them appears ready to spear Kinski through the neck. The intensity is palpable—and, according to Herzog, quite authentic. Turns out that Kinski was a complete monster on the set—Christian Bale times a thousand. So offensive were his antics, it seems, that the tribal actors actually offered to carry out a murder-for-hire. Herzog declined, though judging by his response, he wasn’t completely horrified by the proposition.

Microkhan is always baffled (as well as amsued) by tales of on-set misbehavior by actors. Obviously there is something about being in front of the camera that can inflate one’s ego beyond measure—the flipside of the whole “the camera steals you soul” myth perpetrated by more than a few pre-modern cultures of yore. Then again, as anyone who’s read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls can attest, directors enjoy their fair-share of me-first shenanigans, too. Microkhan will never quite be able to shake the image of Robert Towne on the set of Personal Best, blowing lines in the hot tub with female Olympic shot putters.

More Kinski madness here. Do not attempt to snatch the man’s microphone while’s he imitating Jesus, please.

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