Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 136

Temple of Boom

We’re so far behind on the screenplay it ain’t even funny, so we need to jet early today and focus on revising Act Three’s supremely clunky dialogue. We’re thus gonna leave you with a somewhat oddball NtHWS Extra: The promotional trailer for Madlib’s absolutely essential Beat Konducta in India. Yeah, it may seem like a stretch, seeing as how the Bollywood samples here come from films made a good three decades after Now the Hell Will Start’s main narrative ends, but we insist there’s a connection

The Battle of Balbriggan

During our time in Ireland, we never ceased to be mystified by the venom spewed toward Travellers, perhaps the Emerald Isle’s largest ethnic minority. For starters, we had a tough time differentiating Travellers from their countrymen, although our Irish comrades never seemed to fail at the task. Alas, many of those comrades were barkeeps, and they’d often get the vapors when a group of Travellers showed up for pints. The saga apparently continues, judging by what went down during a recent Irish

Send in the Microbes?

Though it’s still siphoning money from Uncle Sam’s coffers, the general consensus is that Yucca Mountain will never emerge from its bureaucratic coma. So what’s next? Microkhan is glad you asked:

For the moment, the only real option is to leave the waste where it was created, encased in metal cylinders and stowed in concrete bunkers. Barring the machinations of some truly ingenious evildoers, that approach should get us safely through the next century or so. Unfortunately, we’ll still have anothe

Calcutta R&R

We’re swamped with Wired reporting duties for the remainder of the day, so today’s NtHWS Extras installment must once again be a visual quickie. The photo above depicts several African-American GIs enjoying rickshaw rides in Calcutta, the only Indian city with a nearby rest camp willing to accept black soldiers. White American officers, by contrast, were given a choice of a dozen vacation spots, including the famous ski slopes of Kashmir. Because Calcutta at that time was suffering through a ter

The Mother of All TD Dances

For reasons best left unsaid, Microkhan found himself watching Bundesliga highlights yesterday evening. Not a bad time at all, but the Germans’ post-goal celebrations really disappoint. The whole running-toward-the-crowd-with-spread-arms thing is almost wholly lacking in imagination, and does little to express the pure joy of athletic genius.

This got us thinking about the celebratory dance that we’ve often wanted to perform after finishing a really good blog post: The legendary Merton Hanks chi

First Contact: The Dena’ina

Perhaps our favorite passage in all of American literature can be found on the last page of The Great Gatsby. No, not that celebrated last line about boats fighting the current. Rather it’s the snippet located a few paragraphs before the end, in which Nick Carraway waxes rhapsodic about Dutch explorers:

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the

How to be a Millionaire

Step one: Join the Hells Angels. Step two: Rat everyone out to the Mounties. Step three: Profit, to the tune of $2.5 million.

More on Canada’s “Operation SharQc” here. With the Hells Angels leadership in disarray, it may be their sons who start to step up.

The Glory of Jungle Juice

We have to jet downtown for an evening of semi-responsible alcohol consumption, so today’s edition of NtHWS Extras will be exceedingly brief. It consists, in fact, of little more than the cartoon at right, which Microkhan discovered in the archives of the United States Army Military History Institute. It comes from a scrapbook donated by a veteran of OSS Detachment 101, an intelligence unit dedicated to training the Kachin Rangers in Burma. The unit’s members were known as real work hard, play h

What’s Killing Our Bats?

A veteran caver has a theory about the scourge of White Nose Syndrome. Meanwhile, farmers are starting to fret. Nature’s bug zappers are a lot cheaper than pesticides.

The Natural Rate of Divorce

America’s sky-high divorce rate is often cited as a prime example of our moral decay. But how many other nations avoid such matrimonial chaos only through the maintenance of draconian laws? Microkhan would like to direct your attention toward Uganda, which has recently experienced a surge in divorces. The culprit seems to be the repeal of a law that strikes us as only slightly less unfair than the ending of Paths of Glory:

The criminal adultery law was scrapped on April 5, 2007 in a land mark rul