Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 92

Hogmanay

We were all set to do a last "Best of Oh Nine" installment on music, but events have intervened—namely a surprise blizzard here in Atlah, coupled with pressing Microkhan Jr. oversight duties. You can, of course, rifle through the sounds that echoed through our cranium in 2009 by checking out our "Music" tag; Lord knows we ain't shy about posting whatever's spinning through our ears, from "Shine Blockas" to "Sally Got a One-Track Mind" to the very finest in Polish funk.

So we're gonna outro...

Best of Oh Nine: Booze

Being anchored to headquarters and relatively penniless meant that the Microkhan clan engaged in much low-brow imbibing throughout 2009. (Think Ballantine in the 22-ounce bottle, and some occasional Jim Beam.) But we're of the mind that life isn't worth living with somewhat alcoholic splurging, a mindset that led us to encounter a number of fine beers, wines, and liquors over the past twelve months. Here's what we wish we could have again and again, bank account and liver wiling:

Southern...

What Young Men Still Do

Headhunting of the literal sort figures quite prominently in Now the Hell Will Start, our 386-page labor o' love. We dedicated an entire chapter to the practice, and thus field frequent questions from readers regarding whether or not the tribal inhabitants of North-East India and northwest Burma still take skulls. Our stock answer is that headhunting petered out after World War II, especially in areas that became heavily Christianized due to Western missionary activity. We did find one...

The Best of Oh Nine: Books*

As with yesterday's list, the asterisk is in the post title for a very good reason—namely, to tip you off that the titles mentioned below didn't necessarily come out in 2009. They are, rather, things we read and dug over the past 12 months. Apologies for the relative brevity of the list, but our most common reaction to books this year was "meh." Perhaps that's because, due to the nature of our polymathic work, we often read books because they contain esoteric information, not because they're ...

The Mongoose as Showman

We'll be posting later today about the best books we read in 2009, but we thought we'd start the day by shouting out a book sure to be atop our to-read list for the coming months: Snake vs. Mongoose: How a Rivalry Changed Drag Racing Forever.

Drag racing owes much of its current success to that rivalry, which pitted Tom "Mongoose" McEwen against Don "Snake" Prudhomme throughout much of the late sixties and early seventies. When the two men started going at it on the strip, drag racing was...

Best of Oh Nine: Movies*

Before the film geeks among you point out that the photo above is from a movie released in 2005, please note the asterisk. See, our deal is that we didn't really get out to the theater much this year—blame Microkhan Jr. and the economic decline, both of which conspired to keep us at home much more than we would have liked. So, alas, the bulk of our movie-watching this year was done in the living room, which means we're ill-equipped to comment on 2009's celluloid bounty.

But we did make our...

Gravity Denied

Growing up in Los Angeles, we were annually subjected to a series of PSAs cautioning against celebratory gunfire on New Year's Eve. In fact, we distinctly remember a police officer visiting our elementary school one year before the holiday break, in order to caution us against going outside in the initial minutes after they calendar's big turn.

The anti-gunfire campaign continues in L.A., though not without yielding some positive results—it's been ten years since the city's last fatality...

The Redemption of Snively

We're winding it down for Christmas, but not before we leave you with a minor token of our Yuletide gratitude: a clip from Yogi's First Christmas, undoubtedly the best animated ursine-themed holiday film in existence. We've spent years trying to convince the world of this flick's unheralded magnificence, a crusade which led us to write the following for Slate's "Guide to Overlooked Christmas Movies" two years ago:

The movie is far smarter than the standard kiddie dreck. The story, for...

Twinkies for Peace

Staying on the food-taboo theme, we recommend this recent paper from the eternally irresistible Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine. The whole thing is worth a read, especially the authors' various theories regarding why taboos exist. Our favorite nugget comes in the section dedicated to explaining why taboos may have formed to protect human health:

Eating to regulate emotions has been listed as one of the five classes of "emotion-induced changes of eating" by Macht and IgE-mediated...

Love Those Arthropods at Popeyes

A comment on an otherwise forgettable post just got us thinking: isn't there something completely random about the Western culinary take on arthropods? We have apparently decided to feast on only one of the phylum's four remaining subphyllum—Crustacea. But we gag at the thought of eating the terrestrial cousins of shrimp, lobsters, and crayfish. Why is that? Why not a nice, crispy scorpion every now and again, in lieu of beef or chicken?

Don't say it's because of toxicity—a scorpion's poison ...