Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 85
February 16, 2010
Lord of the Snow
Big doings up in the Yukon yesterday, as Austrian dog-sledding superstar Hans Gatt captured his fourth Yukon Quest title. If you've ever been curious about the strategies employed by professional mushers during their competitive odysseys, we highly recommend the invaluable "Check Point" blog, which is sort of the ESPN.com of dog sledding. We especially enjoyed the blog's account of the Quest's final phase, when subterfuge and grit came into play:
Gatt made a nice move before reaching Pelly...
Choke on This
There's an old chestnut (of dubious veracity) about how more rock climbers perish in auto accidents to-and-from the cliffs than from accidental falls. We thought of that contrarian info-nugget this morning upon stumbling across some surprising morbidity news from Britain:
Last week, the House of Commons's Environmental Audit Committee heard evidence that about 35,000 people – or 51,500, if you use the methodology devised by the European Topic Centre on Air and Climate Change – died...
February 15, 2010
The Hero of Tippecanoe
On this President's Day, we can think of no better way to celebrate our nation's most exalted job than by recalling the wise, though incredibly logorrheic words of the starcrossed William Henry Harrison. As the American history nerds in the audience will recall, Harrison doomed himself to an early death by refusing to wear a coat or hat during his inaugural address in 1941. This turned out to be an excellent way of catching fatal pneumonia, given the chilly January rain combined with the...
February 12, 2010
Harvey Takes a Stretch
For the record, we think Harvey Keitel's performance in Bad Lieutenant is one of the most awesome acting jobs in cinematic history. It's such a grandiose villainous turn, in fact, that we have a tough time seeing him as anything other than a crack-smoking, sexually deviant New York City cop. And so we get a feeling we'd have a tough time sitting through all of Monkey Trouble, the 1994 family film he did with none other than a very young Thora Birch (currently residing in the "Where Are They N...
Fuel for a Growing Nation
The lamentable advent of Bud Select 55 got us thinking about the history of nutritional science—or, rather, the ways in which dodgy scientific claims have been used to peddle all manner of food products. We're of a mind that such science-y pitches do an excellent job of reflecting cultural neuroses. So just as today we're all about shedding pounds, back in the waning months of the Roaring 20s, the concern was that America's food supplies wouldn't be adequate to fuel its growth. The admen...
February 11, 2010
The Agony of Victory
Despite our longtime enthusiasm for ski jumping, we just can't seem to drum up much interest in this edition of the Winter Olympics. Perhaps that's because we currently find ourselves smitten with an entirely different set of cold-weather games—those which comprise the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska. Most are simple tests of sheer strength and agility, and rely on equipment no fancier than a greased pole or loop of string.
Our favorite, though, requires...
Cashed Out
A few days back, we touched on the challenges of undermining one's enemy by counterfeiting his currency. Today we'd like to shift the focus to another tactic of fiscal warfare: issuing a new currency upon seceding from a national union. We all know the Confederacy did it back in the day, but it has become an exceedingly rare step in contemporary times. Take, for example, the Tamil Tigers, who succeeded in briefly creating a de facto government on the Jaffna peninsula, complete with its own...
February 10, 2010
Rhymes for the Deluge
A minor blizzard out here in Atlah today, and we're using the weather as an excuse to steal some time for our Secret Major Project™. Back soon with all the information you know and love; in the meantime, please enjoy the decidedly NSFW cut above. Seriously, do not hit play if you're in a Puritanical environment and lacking headphones; your boss will not appreciate Lord Finesse's potty mouth.
Blitzed on Feudalism
Living in Europe during the Middle Ages was certainly no picnic, given the abundance of horrid diseases, the precariousness of the food supply, and the constant threat of having one's arms lopped off by a passing knight. Yet how much agony and anxiety did the denizens of Medieval fiefdoms really experience? Not bloody much, given their heroic consumption of alcohol. In fact, it sounds as if the average vassal or lord had more than a few purely sober minutes each day:
In medieval England the...
February 9, 2010
Chasers Versus Runners
Our affection for the Indian sport of kabaddi is well-known around these parts. But our taste in the athletics of the subcontinent doesn't always run toward the brutal, as proven by the soft spot we've recently developed for kho-kho, which can perhaps be best described as a formalized version of freeze tag. We won't pretend to understand all the rules, but there's nothing too tricky about the core concept: attackers lunge after defenders, and success is achieved by laying hands on an evasive ...
