As you may have noticed, I have a soft spot for walruses, who I like to think of as Nature’s couch potatoes. I was thus amused to learn that the self-styled scientists of the sixteenth century believed that these sedentary sacks of blubber were, in fact, agents of the Devil. Check out this 1539 description […]
If you desire a brief respite from today’s deluge of bin Laden-related news and punditry, take a sec to check out the work of Bern Will Brown. He’s sort of the Paul Gaugin of the frozen north, having settled into the tiny Arctic hamlet of Colville Lake many decades ago. Though he originally journeyed up […]
Tags:Arctic·art·Bern Will Brown·Canada·Colville Lake·film·Native Americans·painting
Every member of our species naturally fears death, given that we can never satisfactorily answer the question of what comes next. And so we’ve invented a zillion different ways of coping with that anxiety, many of which involve rituals that confirm a belief in the spirit’s indestructibility. Few of these rituals, however, are quite as […]
From the northernmost portion of Canada comes a salient lesson on mankind’s bottomless thirst for booze—a thirst that we’ll go to ridiculous lengths to slake: The announcement of an alcohol task force comes on the heels of a string of bootlegging busts across the territory. At a news conference Wednesday, RCMP Sgt. Jimmy Akavak said […]
Speaking of Frozen Hades as we do in the post below, Microkhan couldn’t help but notice the recent grim news from the planet’s roof. Seems that if things keep going as they are, Santa’s workshop will be bereft of ice before 2040. When climate-change skeptics hear news of this magnitude, their stock response is to […]
