In order to round out a gestating Wired essay, I spent a good chunk of this past week drumming up examples of celluloid robots. One invaluable resource that I relied upon was this excellent Wikipedia entry, which mentions a number of B-movie ‘bots that vanished from my memory banks. Perhaps the most laughably cheesy of […]
Entries Tagged as 'cigarettes'
“We Got Robots, We Got Cavemen, We Got Kung Fu…”
October 8th, 2010 · Comments Off on “We Got Robots, We Got Cavemen, We Got Kung Fu…”
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·cigarettes·Eliminators·Mandroid·movies·robots
Lessons from the Thin White Duke
May 14th, 2010 · Comments Off on Lessons from the Thin White Duke
Even if you never owned the cassette version of Use Your Illusion II, this recent interview with Slash can’t help but entertain. We’ve loved the man ever since seeing him avoid self-immolation by ever-so-calmly removing a dropped cigarette from his knee-high boot. (Such are the perils of falling asleep on talk-show couch, apparently.) Oh, and […]
Tags:cigarettes·music·Slash·snakes
Kenya, Continued
December 16th, 2009 · Comments Off on Kenya, Continued
Still plugging away on the Kenya piece for Wired, so few if any deep thoughts this afternoon. Fortunately, The Tubes provide us with a quick and easy way to keep the Microkhan mojo going—namely, the priceless ad above for C-3PO cereal. This breakfast treat not only further lined George Lucas’s burgeoning pockets with cash; it […]
Tags:1980s·advertising·breakfast cereal·C-3PO·cigarettes·Star Wars·TV
Can Nicorette Be Righteous?
September 23rd, 2009 · Comments Off on Can Nicorette Be Righteous?
As we’ve given ever-deeper thought to our nation’s distressingly high infant morality rate, we’ve started to wonder how best to address the problem. Everything we’ve read in recent days seems to indicate that the rate could be dramatically lowered if more expectant mothers took better care of their bodies—specifically by quitting smoking, which pretty clearly […]
Tags:cigarettes·infant mortality·medicine·Nicorette·philosophy·public health
Our Infant Mortality Conundrum
September 14th, 2009 · 7 Comments
No matter where you stand on the whole health-care debate, it’s tough to argue with the fact that our revamped system needs to address our appallingly high rate of infant mortality. Though the American economy is the largest in the OECD, our babies perish more frequently than the organization’s average. In fact, our national infant […]
Tags:cigarettes·infant mortality·Lithuania·OECD·public health·Slovakia
It Was a Different Era…
June 12th, 2009 · 3 Comments
The response to yesterday’s post on smoking ballerinas got us thinking about other examples of folks who make their livings with their bodies, yet continue to puff away. And that train of thought inevitably led us to Phillies great Dick Allen, whose between-innings habit would never fly today. Then again, it’s unclear to us whether […]
Why Are These Ballerinas Smoking?
June 11th, 2009 · 8 Comments
Because they have unsually high discount rates (PDF)—which is econo-speak for, “Don’t give a sufficient damn about their future wage prospects.” Of course, if they knew what was good for them, these ballerinas would be studying actuarial science instead of practicing their arabesque positions. (Image via George Simhoni)
Tags:ballet·cigarettes·dance·economics
A Nation Built on Smoke
June 5th, 2009 · 2 Comments
When we first established Microkhan HQs a few years back, we were immediately struck by the nabe’s vibrant cigarette bootlegging scene. For a while there, we couldn’t walk 10 feet without having someone pull up alongside us and whisper, “Newport, Newports.” (The pace of solicitations has since decreased a bit, in part due to mounting […]