Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 108

Is Football Our Species' Savior?

In the course of conducting some morning research on chimpanzee cannibalism, we found ourselves absorbed in a 2006 paper that compared the aggressive tendencies of chimps and humans. (A PDF can be downloaded by clicking here.) As it turns out, humans and chimps are equally adept that cold-blooded murder, but our primate brethren are far bigger fans of non-lethal violence:

First, we assembled data on lethal aggression from long-term studies of nine communities of chimpanzees living in five...

Beyond Burma Shave

A valued Friend of Microkhan informs us that GMC is running a new crop of ads that refer to the Burma Road, where the company's trucks did fine work plowing through the monsoon muck. This campaign obviously harkens back to one from the thick of World War II, when GMC touted its vehicles' performance in the China-Burma-India Theater of operations.

And GMC was not alone in using the so-called Forgotten Theater to help hawk its wartime wares. Check out this excellent collection of ads keying...

Inadvertently on the Angels' Side

Our post about Teddy Roosevelt's health-care reform attracted a fair number of responses, in particular the ending snippet about the Progressive Party's opposition to privately contracted prison labor. As one commenter pointed out, this opposition wasn't borne out of genuine concern over the practice's moral shortcomings, but rather Big Labor griping over the downward pressure on wages. After all, why would a company hire unionized workers if it could enlist the services of inmates who...

Kids Do Love Lasers

Modern pentathlon is by far our favorite Summer Olympics sport, topping even our beloved . (How he got beat out by four Swedes, we'll never understand.)

But recent years have been rough on modern pentathlon—it's just not the draw that ...

"There's Always Barber College"

Patrick Swayze starred in perhaps the most celebrated mom movie of all time—or, at the very least, the one that defined a certain kind of mom-ism in the latter Reagan Era. But we'll always remember him as Dalton, the philosophical, mulleted boucer with a heart of gold and fists of stone. He now follows fellow Road House alum Jeff Healy into whatever comes next. Rest in peace.

Touched by 17D

We just returned from receiving the yellow fever vaccine, with a side of polio booster. Suffice to say that the injections have knocked our mental faculties for a loop; the video above, the psychedelic trailer for Geetaa Mera Naam, provides a pretty accurate snapshot of our current state. A small price to pay, though, for eliminating any chance of suffering the fate of 19th-century Philadelphians during our forthcoming trip abroad.

Our Infant Mortality Conundrum

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 mortality rate is only slightly better than Lithuania's, and it's slightly worse than Slovakia's. And as the chart above shows, no improvement has been made in...

"This Rhyme Flow Take Practice Like Tae Bo"

The ultra-celebrated Ta-Nehisi Coates has lent us plenty of support over the years, so we'd like to return the favor by calling attention to his latest conquest: the vaunted pages of The New Yorker, where his killer MF Doom profile just debuted. Though to call it a mere profile is a disservice—it's also a meditation on the essence of hip-hop and, more fundamentally, the challenges of maintaining one's love for an art form as the years stack up. Oh, and one of the piece's interviews was...

Burgoo Back in Vogue

About a dozen years ago, there was a minor to-do in Kentucky over the health hazards of burgoo—specifically the possibility that the consumption of squirrel brains could lead to some variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The state's government thus engaged in a pointed campaign to discourage the consumption of roadkilled squirrels, the brains of which are a key component of traditional burgoo recipes.

Yet was such a campaign anti-environmental? The tide certainly seems to be turning in favor o...

(Mid)Westworld

For the second time in less than a month, we're off to the Land of 10,000 Lakes for a brief, work-related visit. We'll do our best to post from the road, though we may get too caught up in ironing our shirts and watching tonight's Titans-Steelers tilt.

Oh, and if anyone can recommend a good, cheap place to eat in downtown St. Paul, please advise. No lutefisk, please.