Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 110

Olfactory Attack

We're currently prepping for a work-related trip to East Africa, which means we now get to spend lots of time being freaked out by ominous Centers for Disease Control warnings. (According to the CDC's literature, setting foot in half the countries on the planet appears to be a recipe for gory death.) It also means we'll be dedicating a lot of mental bandwidth to public health in the developing world, particularly that old bogeyman malaria. We've taken a keen interest in the disease ever since wo

"At the End of the Day, It's Just a Snake"

Ordinarily we'd save Lockjaw: Rise of the Kulev Serpent for our weekly Bad Movie Friday feature. But, honestly, we don't think we can sleep too many more days without knowing exactly what star DMX mumbles in the middle of this trailer. We think his closing line is, "The only thing you have to look forward to is the stomach acid," but that just makes zero sense. Can somebody with sharper ears than ours please advise?

Also, DMX—what happened to your thespian chops, good sir? You were actually damn

The Power of Outright Bribery

Left-of-center politicians are often demonized for simply "throwing money at a problem" instead of concocting a more innovative solution. But there are, in fact, instances in which direct cash incentives are by far the most efficient tact. Such appears to be the case in India, which continues to have a serious problem with female infanticide, especially among the rural poor. As Delhi's government is discovering, the best way to address this problem is not through education, but rather a thoughtf

Five Hundred

According to WordPress's handy dashboard counter, the words you're now reading constitute my 500th blog post. So what better time to temporarily drop the royal we and think aloud regarding what this whole blogging deal has taught us—and, perhaps more importantly, why we keep at it despite the ludicrously imbalanced labor-to-reward ratio.

When I launched Microkhan in early February, I did so for a few reasons—some of them craven, some of them a tad more honorable. I'd be lying if I said there was

A Dose of Burmese Glamour

Not that we're insensitive louts or anything, but we generally fail to get riled up by charges of religious blasphemy. As such, we really can't say we understood the recent, rather obscure to-do over the photo above, in which a Burmese film star named Min Maw Kun was accused of disrespecting Buddhism. No, what made our eyebrows rise was the revelation that Burma has its own movie-celebrity culture—Yollywood, as we'd like to dub it. And it comes complete with annual Oscars-style shindig, as well

Twenty Years

It's been ages since we've discussed Sri Lanka, one of our pet topics dating back to this blog's earliest days. And so it pains us to revisit the island nation under such disturbing circumstances—namely, today's news that Tamil journalist J.S. Tissainayagam has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for violating the sweeping Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Given the nature of our profession, we're naturally inclined to side with our fellow ink-stained wretches. But even the most hardened media cynic

Done, the Sequel

After an insanely hectic five weeks of virtually non-stop mental toil, we can proudly state that we hit our deadline. The second draft of the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay is safely in our boss's hands, which means it's time for us to enjoy a rare moment of peace—a moment that's sure to include copious quantities of this. In keeping with Microkhan tradition, we're posting the video for one of the most triumphant tunes known to man. Lazy of us? Sure, especially considering that we posted the

Let the Right One In

For all of mankind's scientific advances in recent centuries, many elemental mysteries still persist. Among the most puzzling is the reason that right-handers far outnumber their southpaw peers. There's a bevy of theories as to why this is the case, but no single one seems ironclad. So in the absence of a definitive explanation for why this is a right-hander's world, we prefer to cast our lot with the theory we deem to be the most entertaining—the one that traces the handedness schism back to ma

The Homestretch

We're getting down to the wire on a major, major deadline, and thus don't have even a neuron to spare for poor Microkhan this afternoon. As previously promised, we'll be back to full strength on Monday. Thanks for bearing with us as we toil elsewhere.

As a small token of our immense gratitude, please enjoy the Italo-pop nugget above—quite possibly the most '80s thing we've ever encountered. Yes, even more than that Saraya tune we dug up a while back. My, what a sonically gaudy decade we came of

The Grain Curve

Inspired in part by the "Meat is the new bread!" daring of the much maligned KFC Double Down, we recently found ourselves keen on learning more about the history of America's love affair with flour. There is, of course, good reason that one of our most patriotic songs goes out of its way to shout out those "amber waves of grain"—namely, the fact that bread-y products have long been a centerpiece of our diet.

But as demonstrated above, our current grain consumption pales in comparison to that of o