Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 122

Last Call in Red Hook

To borrow a sentiment from Mötley Crüe, it's time to turn the page on Now the Hell Will Start, our dead-tree labor o' love. This Sunday, July 5th, we'll be reading from the book for the very last time, amid the cozy waterfront confines of Sunny's Bar in beautiful Red Hook. If you're in New York and up for an afternoon of cold beer and jungle yarns, please swing by and help us celebrate this bittersweet occasion. The reading kicks off at 3 p.m., and will be followed by some celebratory pints. Hop

Temple of Boom (Cont'd)

We've already expressed our boundless admiration for Madlib's Beat Konducta in India album, arguably the most perfect slab of sonic creativity we've heard over the past five years. Thanks to this new Grooveshark widget, we can now bring you our favorite track off that opus—the song we've long imagined as playing over the credit sequence in the Now the Hell Will Start movie. It's only 78-seconds long, but it's about as glorious as tunes come nowadays. Please enjoy as you pack up for the holiday—

Stepping Into a More Brutal Ring

We were saddened to learn of the death of Alexis "The Explosive Thin Man" Arguello, one of our all-time favorite boxers. And we were surprised to discover that just a year before his passing, Arguello had been elected the mayor of Managua. (Okay, we admit it—we don't keep up on Nicaraguan municipal politics like we should.)

Reading about Arguello's transition into politics got us thinking about other athletes who've gotten the public-service itch after retiring from the court, field, or ring. ESP

The Mob Psychology of Desperate Men

It took us well over a week, but we finally got around to finishing Harp of Burma last night, while sitting on the 2 train back from Brooklyn. Yes, a week-plus is an awful long time to tackle a so-called children's book, one which clocks in at a measly 132 pages. But such is life these days, with so many projects weighing us down and Microkhan Jr. causing plenty of mischief.

We're glad we stuck with the book, though, because it's a minor gem—an elegant anti-war fable, imbued with stinging critici

Pigeon Protectionism

If a Massachusetts pigeon breeder gets his way, out-of-state squabs could soon be aves non grata on the state's film and TV sets. Bill Desmarais has coaxed the Massachusetts House of Representatives into considering H816 (PDF), more colloquially known as "An act relative to pigeons in motion pictures." The bill's text reads in full:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives in General Court assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:

SECTION 1. Not withstanding any Gene

"Don't Kill the Goose…"

In our never-ending quest to bring you the classic tracks behind our favorite hip-hop cuts, today we bring you the U-Roy and Hopeton Lewis collaboration "Tom Drunk." It only takes a few seconds' worth of listening to realize that the song's best riff was long-ago copped by Reflection Eternal for "Fortified Live," a tune notable for some of the '90s greatest rhymes: To wit:

I'm sippin wishing well water imported from Pluto
That's why my eyes is glassy, so ain't got to ask me
The interplanetary Ill

First Contact: The English and the Inuit

Continuing our ongoing First Contact series, today we're gonna look back at the 1576 encounter between the English and the Inuit of Baffin Island. The details of the meet-up were recorded by one Christopher Hall, a member of a Martin Frobisher-led expedition in search of the fabled Northwest Passage to China.

Upon first landing on Baffin Island and climbing a small hill in order to view the bay below, Frobisher and his men initially thought the surrounding waters were teeming with a novel form o

When's the Victory Parade?

With the Obama administration in the midst of trying to dinosaur the phrase "War on Drugs," we thought it would be worth looking at some of that 40-year-old conflict's greatest defeats. And we found a true gem buried within this recent Department of Justice bulletin (PDF), a compilation of felony-case statistics from 2004.

There are some great nuggets throughout the document, such as the revelation that auto-theft cases are the easiest for prosecutors to win, and the fact that 97 percent of conv

Rising from the Turf

Bit of a rough day here 'round Microkhan HQs, alas—a potential project just fell through, so we're suffering through one of our periodic bouts of creative moroseness. Hopefully we'll rebound in an hour or two, but for the moment the well is nearly dry. As such, we're gonna go the lazy khan's route and kick you over to one of our favorite time shredders: The Virtual Apple II version of Karateka. We're ashamed to admit how much of 1984 we spent trying to rescue Princess Mariko (who, we should note

Maoists vs. Communists

Violence continues in rural West Bengal, where the Indian military is campaigning against a scrappy band of rebels referred to as "Maoists." How do Maoists differ from your garden-variety followers of Marxist tenets? Microkhan broke it down a few years back, when the Nepalese civil war was in full swing. Seems like it's mostly about the proletariat's day-to-day jobs—if their people spend more time whacking the soil with sticks than manufacturing steel, insurgents are likely to come down on the M