Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 116

The Murder Project: "Doing the Big Job"

Part of our goal with The Murder Project series is to assess how hitman prices have changed over time. Our assumption going in is that these prices shift according to the certainty (or lack thereof) of capture, and so more lawless epochs will be marked by lower murder-for-hire fees. A logical guess, perhaps, but does the evidence bear it out?

Today we start in the most obvious place for historical data of this nature: Luc Sante's classic Low Life, the preeminent non-fiction account of New York's

Oken Goes to Oshkosh

Apologies, but gonna be a slightly late start today. We're in the process of helping our great pal from Arunachal Pradesh catch a plan from LaGuardia to Minneapolis, en route to the big Oshkosh air show.

So chew on the above Mood Swingaz track for the next hour or so, and we'll be back at the keys as soon as Oken's safely aboard the M60 bus. Got a Murder Project entry slated for the late morning, so a revisit will be well worth your trouble. Promise.

Mr. T, Copyright Defender

Huge apologies for the string of bummer posts over the past few days—murder-for-hire, arms smuggling, and gulags do not a happy Microkhan reader make, we now realize. So let us make it up to you by sharing an episode of Mr. T's eponymous (and hugely underrated) Reagan-era cartoon. It involves stuntmen, ninjas, and movie piracy, as well as Laurence Tureaud trademark wit and wisdom. No one puts a self-righteous egghead in his place better than the man behind Clubber Lang.

Special Bonus: The young

Too Fat for the Fuzz?

We've seen our fair share of portly policemen over the years, so were were a bit surprised to learn of Chris Parent's strange saga. The Nebraskan cop was fired two years ago for being way too fat—so fat, in fact, that he couldn't kneel down and shoot during the department's firearms test. A protracted legal battle has Parent back on the force, but it looks like his chief is none too happy with the situation.

All of which raises the question: Can you really be too obese to police? We tend to think

Daily Bread

Last night's long subway ride afforded us an opportunity to start reading Ian Frazier's Siberia travelogue in the latest New Yorker. So far, it's every bit as astounding as we'd hoped—the long digression about Siberian butter, in particular, made our inner magazine geek nearly burst with glee. What can we say, we're absolute suckers for Frazier's brand of narrative non-fiction—and, of course, jealous of his gig. What Microkhan wouldn't give to be dispatched to the frostiest reaches of the globe,

The Arms Trade, Illustrated

In the course of learning about contemporary cattle raiding in Sudan, we found ourselves sifting through a recent edition of the annual Small Arms Survey. It's an informative publication, no doubt, but also mind-numbingly dense; our eyes glazed over midway through Chapter Three, during the extended exploration of "security enhancement projects."

Thankfully, the survey's authors must have realized the dryness of the material. And so they decided to break up the monotony with this eight-page comic

The Murder Project

While scouring some FBI press releases last week, we came across this semi-comical gem from the Chicago field office. It announces the arrest of a Indiana tandem who stand accused of trying to arrange a contract killing. Note the details of their proposed payment for this risky task:

FRIEDBURG and ALEXANDER were both charged in a criminal complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Chicago with one count each of Conspiracy to use Interstate Commerce Facilities in the Commission of Murder

Katowice Got It Goin' On

Poland's funk era has often been described as "little known," and not without good reason. We here at Microkhan are intent on correcting that egregious oversight by bringing you the cut above, complete with candy-colored Slavic montage. We're big fans of the rhythm guitar work on this one, not to mention Irena's breathy "ahs."

Sports Transition Fail

In response to our recent post about Japanese tackle football, a commenter asked a salient question:

I've always wondered if some of the high-ranking sumo wrestlers could make it in the NFL as blitzing specialists. There's been a long history of association between football and wrestling in the US, with a lot of highschool wrestling teams serving as off-season training programs for the football team. I wonder if the Japanese national Football team is stocked with washed out sumo wrestlers?

Microkh

Divorce in Ye Olden Tymes

Following up on last week's divorce theme, we thought we'd take a look back at pre-modern marital splits. While divorce may not have been common in the West until the advent of women's lib, it was apparently a staple of several Asian and Middle Eastern societies for centuries:

The outpouring of scholarly and popular works dealing with the rise of divorce in the West all but disregards the historical examples of past societies in which divorce rates have been consistently high. Two major examples