Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 137
May 12, 2009
Hold the Turtle by the Hand
Microkhan’s in the midst of a vintage programming kick, and so we’ve inevitably turned out thoughts to Logo in recent days. We have incredibly fond memories of clustering around a battered Tandy in the early 1980s, to watch our school’s lone computer-proficient teacher demonstrate how simple commands could push a turtle-shaped cursor around. We’ve been hooked on the dynamics of human-machine interface ever since.
Our fandom’s led us to waste more than a few hours on this Logo emulator (which incl
May 11, 2009
Take a Load Off, Insan
In today’s installment of NtHWS Extras, we’re gonna revisit one of Microkhan’s very favorite topics: headhunting.
Perhaps the most famous anthropological study of the practice is Renato Rosaldo’s Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974. The Ilongot, who inhabit the Filipino island of Luzon, are peculiar in that they don’t preserve their captured heads as keepsakes. Rather, they discard the heads, literally tossing the grisly objects into remote corners of the forest where they’ll never be discovered. As R
When the Disease Beats the Cure
Last night, Microkhan finally got around to completing the Stanley Kubrick circuit by watching Paths of Glory. Suffice to say that the film is a potent reminder of the World War I’s absolute ghastliness; we can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to be an 18-year-old lad in the trenches, ordered to venture into No Man’s Land where certain (and totally pointless) death awaited. Talk about a low point for humanity…
One scene, in particular, sticks in our minds. Toward the very beginning, a
The Pride of Sagaing Division
The handsome logo at right belongs to Zeya Shwe Myay FC, one of eight teams that will soon compete in Burma’s National League Cup, the nation’s first-ever professional soccer league. Matches kick off this coming Saturday, with the early money on Mandalay’s Yadanarpon FC as the prohibitive favorite; the team is owned by a drinking-water mogul whose lavished a relative fortune on five African players.
Microkhan will be a proud Zeya Shwe Myay supporter because the team reps Sagaing Division, where m
May 8, 2009
Form of…a Hawk?
Microkhan has to jet downtown to beg The Man for affordable health insurance (prognosis: grim), so no Bad Movie Friday this week. But we’ve got the next-best thing to reward you for a work week well-done—Manimal, dude, Manimal. How Microkhan loved this cheese back in his grade-school days, and how we wept when NBC unceremoniously killed it before Season One even ended. The opening narration alone is a pulp classic:
Dr. Jonathan Chase… wealthy, young, handsome. A man with the brightest of futures
Comfort Girls at the Ledo Stockade
An appreciable slice of Now the Hell Will Start takes place in the Ledo Stockade, an United States Army prison in North-East India. The place was known for the casual brutality of its guards, several of whom had worked as chain-gang supervisors back in Uncle Sugar. The stockade’s abysmal conditions play a key role in the tragedy at Now the Hell Will Start’s heart.
What’s left unsaid in the book is the Ledo Stockade’s role in the history of “comfort women”—Korean ladies used as indentured sex serv
Paint the Far Corners
In the process of prepping a special series on first contacts (which will launch next week), Microkhan recently became acquainted with the work of John Webber, an English painter best known for accompanying Captain James Cook to Hawaii. Fortunately for us, Webber did not share Cook’s bummer of fate, and went on to create some truly memorable images of 18th-century Alaska and its indigenous residents. Given our longtime interest in the history of tattoing and piercing, Webber’s illustrated study
Freedmen and the Five Tribes
A few years back, Microkhan wrote a lengthy Wired opus about a thorny conflict in Oklahoma: The battle over whether descendants of freedmen should be allowed to join the Native American tribes that their ancestors had belonged to. Now the Obama administration is may be entering the fray:
In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last week, the six lawmakers say, “The illegal actions of the leadership of the Five Tribes, some of which are the wealthiest tribes in Indian Country, have r
May 7, 2009
The Burma Surgeon
Today’s edition of NtHWS Extras brings us the amazing tale of Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, arguably one of the most selfless and impressive American expatriates of the 20th century. There is nary a peep about Seagrave in Now the Hell Will Start, primarily because he’s not the sort of bloke you can just casually mention without giving some backstory; if we’d brought up his saintly endeavors, we would have been compelled to spend pages on the topic. So the good doctor fell by the wayside—until now.
The
