Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 73

Beyond Bulgarian Metal

In discussing Bulgaria's long and healthy tradition of heavy metal last week, we briefly lampooned the first act that popped up when we Googled "Bulgarian hip-hop"—a buffoonish rapper named Ustata. As fate would have it, a Bulgarian reader chimed in to gently upbraid us for highlighting her nation's most embarrassingly awful MC:

I'm amused that Ustata, the Bulgarian Vanilla Ice, is mentioned here when Upsurt is much more of a solid hip-hop choice from the country.

In the interests of righting ...

Pax Upon Him…Perhaps

If the whole Richard Blumenthal saga has taught us anything, it's that the brazen mendacity of public figures is relatively easy to detect, provided that someone is willing to put a little elbow grease into the search. Of course, that search requires resources, specifically time and money. Microkhan is short on both, alas, so we can't quite drop the investigatory bomb like the big boys of dead-tree journalism. But we'd still like to take a stab at debunking a claim put forth by a major...

The Rabies "Racket"

Healthy skepticism is obviously the lifeblood of a functioning society, yet there are moments when distrust of The Man can have dire consequences. That is too often the case in the public-health sphere, which we reckon makes sense—the notion of injecting ourselves with foreign agents is terrifying, especially since it's so hard to observe how those agents act inside the body. And so recent history has been peppered with controversies in which medical advances have been reviled as dangerous...

Room 118

If all goes according to plan, this post will go live right as we exit a federal courthouse. That where we plan on spending the better part of the morning, in search of a case file that is likely jaundiced with age. Wish us luck in dealing with the quizzical looks of the clerical staff; back here soon, provided the 2 train's running alright.

Oh, and Syl Johnson—someone out on the street just drove by, blasting this particular tune. Made everything seem okay, despite the incessant background n...

The Weapon That Almost Wasn't?

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Edward G. Uhl, renowned as one of the co-fathers of the bazooka. It is safe to say that World War II would have been a much tougher slog for the Allies without the tubular weapon, which Dwight D. Eisenhower hailed as one of our side's four keys to victory. (The others were the Jeep, the A-bomb, and the C-47.) Yet according to one august rocket scientist, the American military nearly took a pass on the bazooka:

The United States Army was...

A Question of Lead

Back in November, we opined that the likes of the United Nations would be well-advised to focus less on paying for physical improvements to impoverished schools, and more on reducing lead poisoning among very young children. As it turns out, the endlessly troubled city of Detroit might want to consider heeding that advice, too:

A landmark study by the city health department and Detroit Public Schools of lead data and test scores shows that the higher the lead level, the worse a student's...

Sci-Fi in the DDR

The Stasi was hardly the only important East German institution to leave behind a wealth of archival material. Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft, better known to Western film buffs as DEFA Studios, also preserved its documentary heritage upon Communism's collapse. The state-run movie producer has since bequeathed much of its vast archives to the University of Massachusetts, so that future generations can revel in the weirdo sci-fi visions of such films as Eolomea (above). If you like what you ...

Lessons from the Thin White Duke

Even if you never owned the cassette version of Use Your Illusion II, this recent interview with Slash can't help but entertain. We've loved the man ever since seeing him avoid self-immolation by ever-so-calmly removing a dropped cigarette from his knee-high boot. (Such are the perils of falling asleep on talk-show couch, apparently.) Oh, and the guitar solo on "Paradise City" really makes us want to bench press something. Yet Slash also has a keen and curious mind, which led him to approach ...

Leotards for the Proletariat

One of the first "heavy" books we ever read was Hedrick Smith's The Russians, which came out at the height of the whole "Evil Empire" period. Before cracking open Smith's honest investigation of daily life in the U.S.S.R., we imagined that Moscow resembled a vast outdoor version of the Death Star, absolutely devoid of color or joy. The Russians drove home a point that now seems obvious, but was tough for a 12-year-old to grasp amidst the mid-1980s hysteria: a nation's politics, no matter how ...

Bulletproof: The Lumpas

As long promised, we're finally bringing back The Bulletproof Project, our series on mass movements that instructed their followers that magic could counteract modern weaponry. Today's entry is one we've been researching for ages: Northern Rhodesia's Lumpa Church, a messianic Christian movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s headed by a woman named Alice Lenshina.

Much has been written about the Lumpas since they suffered greatly at the hands of the Northern Rhodesian military during a...