Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 107

In an Introspective Mood

"The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore."–Vincent Van Gogh

More on the Venom Trade

In one of our recent posts regarding the troubled Pakistani snake-venom industry, we opined that government price controls were making the black market too appealing for Sindh Province's snake charmers. As it turns out, a similar scenario is playing out far to the south, where India's snake-catching Irula tribe is suspected of selling venom off the books.

For the uninitiated, the Irulas are tribals whose traditional job has been killing and skinning snakes. When this practice was outlawed in 1...

Fourteen in a Million

Given our recent, brain-bending encounter with the yellow fever vaccine, we've had a sharper eye for tales of preventive treatments gone awry. As a result, we just had to share this troubling tale of a Missouri Marine and MILVAX:

It wasn't a bullet or roadside bomb that felled Lance Cpl. Josef Lopez three years ago, after just nine days in Iraq.

It was an injection into his arm before his Marine Corps unit left the United States.

It left Lopez in a coma, paralyzed and unable for a time to...

The Physics of the Impossible

Unlike some past movies we've highlighted as part of Bad Movie Friday—notably the irredeemably dreadful Hard to Ticket to Hawaii—Gleaming the Cube is actually halfway watchable, provided you're willing to switch off your brain for 90 minutes. But even when we're feeling truly charitable, there are two things that can't help but irk us to our core:

1) We were sentient in the '80s. We skated in the '80s. Heck, we even idolized Christian Hosoi for a spell. But until this flick came out, we had n...

The Venom Trade, Cont'd

In yesterday's post on Pakistan's troubled system of snake-venom collection, we opined that technology seemed to have changed the field little. But if we'd read the latest issue of the journal Toxicon, we wouldn't have been so quick to make such blanket claims. Because as it turns out, a Florida cottonmouth researchers are blazing trails:

Scientists used a portable nerve stimulator to extract venom from anesthetized cottonmouths, producing more consistent extraction results and greater...

First Contact: The Germans

For obvious reasons—primarily the abundance of English-language sources—the bulk of our First Contact series has focused on European accounts of "New World" civilizations. Today's entry breaks that trend, however, by harkening back to a more intramural culture clash: that between the Romans and the Germans, during the waning years of the Roman Republic.

The eyewitness here is none other than Julius Caesar, who's accomplishments as a writer are usually overshadowed by his military and...

Tinged With Regret

We're solo parenting Microkhan Jr. this week, which means we have to put off lots of tasks 'til after his bedtime—specifically catching up on the day's e-mail deluge. That's precisely what we were doing last night, cold Ballantine in hand, when William Bell's classic "I Forgot to Be Your Lover" came wafting across Radio Nova. It had been so long since we heard it—we lost our Stax Records box set during our last move, and with it a lot of our favorite Bell nuggets. "I Forgot to Be Your Lover" ...

The Venom Trade

As if the Pakistani government wasn't already catching enough flak for its inefficacy, now some learned herpetologists are criticizing its lackluster approach to rounding up poisonous snakes:

A report jointly prepared by Snake Research Academy (SRA) and University of Sindh, Jamshoro (SUJ) has slammed the snake catching methodology of the National Institute of Health Sciences (NIHS), Islamabad.

The authors of the report, Prof. Dr Ghulam Sarwar Gachal of SUJ and Snake Research Academy (SRA...

Polyglot to the Extreme

It's basically impossible not to be bowled over by the abundance of languages in Papua New Guinea. Though the nation's population clocks in at a shade less than six million souls, those residents speak a mind-boggling 830 languages. That's enough to make PNG the most polyglot country on Earth, beating out runner-up Indonesia by 108 languages. (Nigeria takes third place, with a measly 521 living tongues; the United States has 364.)

We naturally assumed that this abundance of languages was due ...

When Frisians Soar

We've always had a shaky handle on the definition of "feedback loop," but we think this might qualify as a case in point. Yesterday, we noticed a fair bit of traffic coming Microkhan's way thanks to a fantastic Ask MetaFilter thread slugged "Who are the best athletes nobody has heard of?" We were honored that a couple of our kabaddi paeans got shouted-out. Yet what truly brought a broad smile to our lips was the mention of a sportsman heretofore unknown 'round these parts: the great Bart...