Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 90

Bulletproof: Indians in the Civil War

The way that Civil War history is written, you'd think that the conflict was confined to the easternmost quarter of the nation. But though few significant battles took place on the western frontier, the region wasn't exactly unscathed. In the vast area known then simply as "Indian Country," for example, tribes split along factional lines—many chieftains entered into alliances with the Confederacy, lured in by promises of territorial protection should the South emerge victorious. But some...

File Under "Illusions, Shattered"

Whenever the stress of big-city living starts to wear us down—which seems to be happening an awful lot these days—we briefly fantasize about chucking it all in favor of life as a shepherd. We can trace this pipe dream back to our grade-school viewing of Fletch, in which Chevy Chase's titular character facetiously replies "I'm a shepherd" to the main villain's query regarding his occupation. Ever since, the pull of green mountains and woolly ruminant mammals has been awfully strong at times.

A...

R.I.P. Teddy Bear

This morning's news that Teddy Pendergrass has passed on comes just months after we first started to discover his silky genius. For years, we considered Teddy Bear the epitome of old-person music, and rarely listened to the records of his that we'd somehow accumulated over the years. (When you're a vinyl geek, you have a way of accruing random albums—often because you volunteer to take throwaways off folks' hands.) But then back in October we heard Big Boi's "Shine Blockas", which uses a...

A Sonnet for Haiti

William Wordworth's "To Toussaint L'ouverture" works beautifully today as a meditation on loss and rebirth:

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon's earless den; -
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that...

The Terrible Predictability of It All

One of the most ghoulish-yet-wise sayings we've ever heard is "Earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do." (Or, a bit more accurately, "poorly constructed buildings do.") So as soon as we heard news of Haiti's latest natural catastrophe yesterday, we knew the death toll would be high. There is little chance that the nation's relatively weak government has made the enforcement of building codes a top priority, and poverty has doubtless compelled most builders to resort to the cheapest...

"You're More False Than Dentures"

We're gonna use the khan's prerogative to spend the rest of today on our ongoing Secret Major Project™. In our brief absence, please take a few seconds to check out Big Daddy Kane at his finest. While we may heartily disagree with his eschewment of escargot and the word "rendezvous," we can scarcely deny that he is one of the finest rappers to ever walk Spaceship Earth. Enjoy, and please keep in mind that his obvious call-out of Michael Jackson in the second verse was just par for the course ...

Pants Are the Enemy of Freedom

For reasons too drab to mention, we recently stumbled across this sordid 1982 tale about a self-described "mountain man" who turned murderous. We were struck not so much by the brutality of Henry Burton Merrill's crimes, but rather by the media's insistence on referring to him as a "hermit." And that got us thinking, naturally, about the American tradition of eremitism, and how it has come to take on very different dimensions than back in the days of Walden Pond.

When we usually think of...

When the Disease Beats the Cure, Part II

Medical history's dustbin is full of well-meaning treatments that were basically guaranteed to increase a patient's misery. Several months back, for example, we wrote about the use of Torpillage to treat victims of shell shock. Now, via the journals of the great Irish explorer John Palliser, comes news of a 19th-century Native American rabies remedy that strikes us as exceedingly tough to take:

I saw great numbers of the case wolf (mischechogonis or togonie) prowling about. This is the wolf...

The Land of Ersatz Arthropods

Atop one of our record shelves sits a fossilized trilobite, given to us by a dear friend of the Grand Empress. We've long cherished the gift, but as we went about some cleaning chores while catching yesterday's Ravens-Patriots tilt, a troubling thought entered our consciousness while giving the arthropod a shine: how do we know it's genuine? It is such a perfect-looking specimen, we now wonder whether the ridges of its exoskeleton were created by human hands.

Alas, we certainly lack the...

Dolph on a Mission

We here at Microkhan headquarters have been been shy about expressing our love for modern pentathlon, by far the most underrated sport in the Summer Olympics. And so we were recently overjoyed to discover that none other than Dolph Lundgren, one of the finest actors of the past half century, shares our affinity for the awesome combo of running, swimming, fencing, shooting, and horseback riding. He's such a supporter, in fact, that he made a little-seen movie about the sport 16 years ago...