Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 88
January 27, 2010
Up on Trickle Creek
Having spent some time in Alberta's northern climes, we've taken an unusually keen interest in the arrest of Wiebo Ludwig, a religious patriarch with a Luddite streak a mile wide. Having served time for vandalizing oil-industry equipment in the past, Ludwig recently presented himself as man capable of coaxing a fellow pipeline bomber into giving up his detonators. Now he stands accused of actually being that bomber, a charge that really doesn't surprise us in the least given what we learned a...
January 26, 2010
Hand to the Throat
Apologies, just a crazy day here in Atlah. Closing multiple stories and dealing with Microkhan Jr., all at once. May have to reach for a sip of hooch at lunch, just to keep the nerves on an even keel. Take the dreamy superstar collaboration above, and we'll circle back to you either later today or first thing in the a.m. Good stuff cooking, just don't have the mental bandwidth to make it gel right now.
A Heyday Down East
Whenever we drive through a mid-sized American town that has obviously seen better days, we wonder what industry built the once stately homes that have fallen into gentle disrepair. In most cases, it seems, such towns have fallen victim to the decline in manufacturing—Waterbury's reign as "Brass City," for example, certainly seems like a distant memory. Yet there are also cases in which a town's core industry was built on a dubious fad, such as the turn-of-the-century vogue for patent...
January 25, 2010
Self-Publishing for Legends
We've recently been toying with the idea of self-publishing a book, but can't quite seem to get over the feeling that such a maneuver will result in a disastrous labor-to-pay ratio. That said, we've been heartened to learn that putting out one's own book is no longer the sole domain of conspiracy theorists and frustrated poets. The great Yaphet Kotto has joined the trend with Kill Bond, an angry (and apparently poorly punctuated) account of the time he spent filming Live and Let Die in...
In Defense of Hitchhiking
It's not often that we read a piece as boldly contrarian as this letter to the editor from the pages of The Bellingham Herald. The correspondent comes out hard in favor of a practice that's likely to get you arrested if you don't take care: hitchhiking:
As a person who has traveled thousands of miles by the grace and generosity of strangers, I feel that I can say that hitchhiking is safe. I can't find myself speaking poorly of any of the traveling companions I've met over the years, whether I...
January 22, 2010
The Horse Gallops Onward
When it comes to sports fandom, we're incurable pessimists—perhaps no surprise given our decades-long love affair with the most miserable franchise in the history of athletics. And so in the run-up to this Sunday's monster Colts game, we will not dare to offer any sunny predictions about the inevitability of a Super Bowl. We've been disappointed far too many times to put our heart on the line in such a manner.
But we would like to note two minor omens that seem to portend well for our...
"There's a Female Up There Circling Mother Earth"
Not much time for Bad Movie Friday this week, as we're scrambling on the Secret Major Project™. So this vintage anti-Soviet propaganda film about the travails of Laika will have to suffice. It gets really amazing around the 42-second mark, when one of Laika's American peers dons granny glasses in order to peep the space-race news. Oh, the non-ironic sanctimony of it all…
Telling Johnny Redcoat to Scram
These are not particularly joyous days for legal fans of a liberal bent, seeing as how SCOTUS has just brought us ever-closer to selling naming rights to federal buildings. (The "1-800-FLOWERS White House Rose Garden" has a nice ring to it.) If you fall into that ideological category, let us brighten your day a tad by recalling a triumph of yore: the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal's landmark decision in Engblom v. Carey, which resulted in a more expansive understanding of the Third Amendment.
The...
Buried Whales, Cont'd
Our recent post about the hazards of whale burial attracted a celebrity commenter: Steve O'Shea of the Auckland University of Technology. Best known for his squid-hunting endeavors, O'Shea is also overseeing the research into the public-health consequences of interring beached whales. He takes us to school thusly:
I can assure you that E. coli is the very least of our concerns; there's some real bad stuff in there.
The reason for burial is not because of maori insistence; burial is commonplace...
January 21, 2010
"How in the Future Will Man Take It?"
Ham the Chimp, one of the great unsung heroes of the American space program. Okay, perhaps "unsung" is a bit of a stretch—he did, after all, receive a proper burial beneath the lawn of the Space Hall of Fame. We wonder if Robert Vince has ever wandered over that way to pay his...
