Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 133

Now the Paperback Will Start

So at long last, we’ve come to the appointed hour: The Now the Hell Will Start paperback hits stores today, and can currently be had via Amazon for as little as a tenner. Not a bad deal in our humble (albeit biased) opinion, considering the nearly five years’ worth of mental toil contained within those pages.

We’ve been building up to this since late April, with our daily NtHWS Extras series of factoids, anecdotes, and other material gleaned off the cutting-room floor. For the outro, we decided

Microkhan and the Lawsuit King

It’s not often that Microkhan has a personal stake in the day’s big news. But the curious case of Jonathan Lee Riches, a.k.a. Irving Picard, is a notable exception. Riches, a federal inmate doing a stint for wire fraud, has apparently passed the time by engaging in a most curious hobby: Filing as many frivolous lawsuits as he possibly can. He’s now up to 4,000 by his own count, and openly boasts that he “flush[es:] out more lawsuits than a sewer.” (Yes, that analogy makes no sense when you really

Keeping Tabs on Dear Leader’s Nukes

In devouring the weekend’s reports regarding North Korea’s latest atomic machinations, we were struck by the technological limits of the global monitoring system. Seismic readings indicate that something went down that Mother Nature didn’t intend, but such tremors can be caused by conventional explosions. (Yeah, that’s a lot of TNT, but it can be done.) We’ll need to get a whiff of radioactive gas before we know the true extent of Dear Leader’s naughtiness.

So how do we check for those traces? Th

ID’ing in a Skeptical World

Try as it might, the Sri Lankan government can’t quite convince everyone that its soldiers did, indeed, gun down Velupillai Prabhakaran. So a DNA test may be necessary to quell the few remaining naysayers. But how might such a test work, especially considering that Tiger 001’s wife and daughters are nowhere to be found? Several years ago, amidst a false rumor of Saddam Hussein’s demise, Microkhan delved into the art of wartime corpse identification. The skinny? More distant male relatives can su

In Pace Requiescat

We hope the vast majority of our American readers are enjoying the Memorial Day holiday outdoors, and thus won’t be reading these words ’til much later. Microkhan, alas, won’t be barbecuing with y’all—this is just another work day ’round here, as the screenplay deadline looms. We’re gonna devote the bulk of today’s energies to that project, but we realize that we’ve also got a pressing responsibility to round out our NtHWS Extras series. Tomorrow, after all, is when the Now the Hell Will Start p

Hop the Next Shark to the Bahamas

The holiday weekend’s just hours away, and we’re mighty spent from a long week of writing and tending to Microkhan Jr. So we’re gonna outsource this week’s Bad Movie Friday to the late Richard Jeni. His target? The egregiously awful Jaws: The Revenge (aka Jaws IV).

As Jeni rightfully points out in his routine, there are all sorts of logic problems with this movie. (Would you really become a marine biologist if your family had been tormented by sharks on multiple occasions?) But nothing in the fi

“Scattering Like a Pool of Animals”

One of the greatest research challenges we faced while writing Now the Hell Will Start was the paucity of primary source material describing day-to-day life for African-American GIs. Enlisted men were discouraged from keeping diaries, literacy rates were low, and post-war archivists too often ignored black contributions to the Great Cause—an unholy trifecta for historians working today. So you can only imagine our joy upon discovering Phillip McGuire’s Taps for a Jim Crow Army, a compendium of l

Judge Kuffner’s Fifteen Minutes

With our compadre Ta-Nehisi thinking deep thoughts and WEFUNK providing our daily soundtrack, hip-hop’s been on Microkhan’s brain all week—yes, even more so than usual. And the question we’ve been asking ourselves is what, exactly, separates the wheat from the chaff in the land of lyricism? Is it pure mastery of metaphor? Yeats-like poetic timing? Reckless bravado? Or perhaps some witches brew that combines all three, along with myriad other ingredients that our musically ungifted mind will fore

A Mathematician’s Revenge

Delaware’s future as the new Vega$ East may well hinge on the microstate’s supreme court. A “sports lottery” law was recently passed, but the specifics of how it’ll work are still unclear. Yesterday, the Home of Tax-Free Shopping’s most learned judges heard arguments from two parties: Those in favor of single-game betting, and those who prefer a parlay system. The rub here is that Delaware’s constitution may ban games of skill. So does it take any mental chops to bet a single game? One lawyer’s

First Contact: New Guinea Highlands

For the second installment of our nascent First Contact series, we’re gonna hit the layup and blog about this classic culture-clash documentary. A prized Microkhan correspondent and former New Guinea resident summarizes the film with far more acumen than we could ever manage:

Basic story is that the initial European settlements in Papua (south side of the East part of the island by the British) and New Guinea (north side and surrounding islands by the Germans) hugged the coasts in part because t