Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 113

The Lakers of Poultry Judging

We're in the midst of working on a Wired piece about agricultural science, so you can expect Microkhan to dish up a plethora of farm-related factoids in the coming weeks. We'll start today by highlighting a world us big city types know embarrassingly little about: the collegiate poultry judging circuit.

Our journey began as we scanned this paper from the University of Nebraska's poultry management program. That spurred us to comb through recent news items on ThePoultrySite.com, where we learned o

A Death Less Ordinary

It's probably a bit of stretch to file 1999's Deep Blue Sea under our ever-popular Bad Movie Friday heading. While the premise of the film could scarcely be more ridiculous—hyper-intelligent mako sharks?—the sunken-laboratory thriller is not without its guilty pleasures. Chief among them is this classic scene, which features Samuel L. Jackson at his edgy finest. We're not too proud to admit that his character's grisly demise influenced a scene in the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay; we just s

Mortality as Morality

We've yet to fully sort out our feelings about zoos. On the one hand, we obviously love us some exotic animals, especially those who occasionally turn on Man. (Yes, we're macabre like that.) But the concept of captivity makes us more than a wee bit uncomfortable; we'll never forget our last trip to the Bronx Zoo, when we glimpsed deep sadness in the eyes of a silverback gorilla—a gorilla whose young offspring, by contrast, had not yet become resigned to their fate.

But since there's no scientific

Where the Smoke Jumpers Are

In the midst of trying to learn everything there is to know about the Air Tractor 802 "Fire Boss" model, we stumbled across one of the coolest data aggregators we've seen in eons: Pitney Bowes' Fire Locator, which provides (almost) real-time updates on the nation's raging wildfires. When you take it for a spin, we highly recommend that you enable the Flickr option, so that you can check out recent pics of aerial dousing.

Ceausescu Through the Looking Glass

Richmonda, Virginia's DJ Carlito specializes in digging up vintage, totally random vacation films and setting them to music. We're absolute suckers for all things Romanian, so the above clip is a fave. But also check out Carlito's found footage from Tunisia in 1967—not to mention this Indonesian propaganda flick from the heyday of (we think) Sukarno.

Oil Non-Shock

During out all-too-brief sojourn in St. Cloud, Minnesota, we caught wind of James Leroy Iverson's release from North Dakota's Missouri River Correctional Facility, after serving 40 years for a pair of 1969 murders. Iverson was, in fact, North Dakota's longest-serving inmate, and thus a man unaccustomed to 21st-century living. What has shocked him the most about our strange world so far?:

"He made the comment that when he went into prison gas was 15 cents a gallon."

Oh, how times change! But wait

St. Cloud Bound

By the time these words go live, we'll be en route to beautiful St. Cloud, Minnesota for a whirlwind work trip. Odds are we won't have a chance to blog while on the road, so no fresh posts for the next couple dozen hours or so. Take a break, enjoy some vintage Nas, and we'll hopefully catch you again on Thursday—depending on whether we're able to make our tight connection at O'Hare on Wednesday evening. Wish us luck.

They're Not Just Plot Devices Anymore

Last night, we got in a brief discussion with a pal regarding the Hollywood history of bearer bonds. These arcane financial instruments played a key role in at least two cinematic classics from our younger years: Beverly Hills Cop, in which Eddie Murphy's pal foolishly steals some "German bearer bonds" from a drug dealer, and Die Hard, where they were hidden deep within the Nakatomi Building. But save for a few instances of fakery, we've seldom heard of bearer bonds outside of filmdom.

It seems,

Beastmaster Errata

Look, we're big enough Mongolian monarchs to admit when we've goofed. And that's exactly what appears to be the case with last week's Bad Movie Friday post about the 1982 Marc Singer vehicle The Beastmaster. We riffed about Singer's apparent refusal to save the life of the ferret that had just helped pluck him from some nasty quicksand. But as several commenters pointed out, we posted an abridged version of the scene; as you can see above, starting at around the 2:01 mark, the title character do

All from the Comfort of Chihuahua

Many moons ago at the Bronx Museum, we caught a great bit of satiric video art entitled Why Cybraceros?. We'll let the artist himself, Alex Rivera, explain the riotous concept:

In his second film, Why Cybraceros? (USA 1997), Rivera sarcastically imagined a future in which migrant farm workers (or Braceros) could work in America, but never actually come to America, by controlling robotic workers over the internet from their country of origin. The Cybracero concept started as a surrealist satire o