Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 61

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According to the nifty WordPress counter, this is my one thousandth post on Microkhan. Unlike the last time I hit such a significant milestone, there shall be no navel-gazing—in part because I'm too busy working on an afternoon post about Prohibition-era crime in northern Florida. But let me just say thanks to all who've stuck around to support this ongoing endeavor. There have been plenty of moments when I've been tempted to shutter the project. I'm glad that I've managed to resist those...

Far More Than a Footnote

Focusing on various paying gigs today, so just a quick music clip to tide y'all over. The above is Segun Bucknor's brief appearance in the excellent Ginger Baker in Africa; he's the man in the lime-green vest behind the dancers. With Comb & Razor provides some much-needed background on the largely forgotten Afrobeat pioneer here:

As a student at the venerable King's College, Bucknor sang in the choir, and at the age of 15 he got the chance to play and recorded with highlife bandleader Roy...

Teach a Man to Fish

The last time that Microkhan checked in with Jimmy "Rasta" Lusibaea, he had just found the Lord after a lifetime of sin. The former head of the Malaita Eagles Force (MEF), the Solomon Islands' most feared militia, Lusibaea had spent years defending his peoples' turf against ethnic rivals. The MEF was once so powerful that it managed to kidnap the nation's prime minister. No mere armchair general, Lusibaea was celebrated for his battlefield feats of derring-do, which once included the very...

Live Spot in Brooklyn

Though I find myself laboring on Labor Day, I sincerely hope that you have avoided a similarly wretched fate. And if you live in New York City, I hope you'll carve out some time tomorrow evening to swing by Brooklyn's Union Hall to check out a rare live appearance by your humble narrator.

I'll be participating in the latest installment of Adult Education, which bills itself as "Brooklyn's favorite useless lecture series." This month's theme is the ever-cheery "War," which means I'll be...

Matti Nukes Adrift

Of the many death-defying sports that I've grown to admire over the years, few astound quite like elite ski jumping. Perhaps it's not until you witness the sport in person that you really get a sense of just how bananas it is: TV can't do justice to the true height of those hills, nor the vast distances that the competitors cover in the air. Given that I didn't strap on a ski 'til late into my teens, and that I have occasional nightmares about getting swept over the Cliffs of Moher, I can...

Back in the Bunker

Sorry, but today's all about tackling a major project, rather than scooping out a small portion of my brain to share with you good people. Please content yourself with the high-brow electronic music above, as well as the following snippet of anti-jazz hysteria from the April 11, 1921 edition of the Chicago Tribune:

Home was handicapped. No saxophones or trombones; the best he could find to smite was a bloomin' lyre. Nero was restricted to a Stradivarius.

Both made their mistake, it seems, for...

The New Quicksand

One of my Slate editors recently made waves with this sharp piece about the cultural demise of quicksand. The gunky stuff, so infamous for ensnaring characters in movies (including The Beastmaster's beloved ferrets), no longer scares the youth of today. Perhaps this is because kids now realize that quicksand's lethal potential was always overstated, and that their odds of perishing in a pit of viscous mud are positively nil.

So what should replace quicksand in the corner of the American...

Landing on Planet Mercury

Unlike everyone's favorite intergalactic MC, I am not bio-enhanced. And that means I must occasionally steal a day to focus on a single project, rather than multitasking as if I'd been blessed with multiple brains. Today is such a day, which means no meaningful Microkhaning 'til after the next sunrise. Apologies, and hope y'all understand.

I will leave you, though, with a bit of beer history. There was apparently a time when Meister Brau was marketed as a classy beverage, a campaign...

Should You Find Yourself Plummeting

Whenever a plane I'm on is close enough to its destination that houses and cars appear, I can't help thinking to myself: "If I fell from here, could I survive?" There is something about having a visual sense of the ground that makes a parachute-less airplane jump seem survivable. If those motor vehicles can zip along the highways below with such silent smoothness, surely I could manage to flutter to Earth like a feather.

It's all a ridiculous illusion, of course, as the vast majority of...

Fleet Street's Dubious Science

Apologies for the late start to the day, but Microkhan Jr. decided to rob the clan of some much-needed sleep in the wee hours. Unable to get back to the Sandman's realm once the kid had been pacified, I passed the time by catching up on The World at War. Lots of good stuff there, including a well-reasoned explanation as to why the bicycle enabled Japan's conquest of Malaya. But my favorite tidbit is cued up above—a classic piece of racial "science" that appeared in the British press prior to ...