Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 97

Too Big to Fail?

In the midst of our annual Thanksgiving pigout, we've often justified our gluttony on the grounds that the ensuing expansion of our girth really shouldn't be frowned upon by society. After all, isn't the disapproval of fatness of a modern phenomenon, egged along by the Fitness Industrial Complex? In Medieval times, we tell ourselves, our massive ingestion of food would be hailed as a mark of greatness—why else would a king go along with being called Charles the Fat?

Alas, it seems we've been m...

Stoned and Dethroned

We can honestly say we've never once been tempted to try phencyclidine. Nothing about the drug seems enjoyable in the slightest, starting with the fact that it tends to make grown men strip off all their clothes and rant like lunatics. (Exhibit A: Steve.) That said, it's always nice to have cinematic confirmation that our "Just Say No" approach to angel dust is, indeed, correct. And so we were recently pleased to come across Death Drug, starring a pre-Miami Vice . We...

Bulletproof: The Boxers

It is to the turn-of-the-century media's great discredit that they referred to China's quasi-Luddite rebels as "Boxers." Had the minions of William Randolph Hearts been more adept at understanding Chinese, they would have realized that the rebels' secret society translated more literally as "Fists of Righteous Harmony," a far more poetic moniker for an organization dedicated to dragging their nation back a few centuries.

Yet these failed anti-modernist, anti-Western rebels will forever be...

Failing to Prepare is Preparing to Fail

We generally suspect that few fake kidnappings go off without a hitch. And that's especially true when the perpetrators of the crime don't understand the basics of cell-phone technology:

At about 6am Friday morning Bangor Police received information that Mr. Daniel Chute was being held captive in an automobile in the Bangor Mall Cinema's parking lot on Stillwater Avenue.

Police say these captors were demanding several hundred dollars to be wired to them and if they didn't get the money, they...

Alchemy on Shaolin

In terms of sheer quixoticism, the quest for kitchen diamonds ranks mighty high. Scores of swindlers, loons, and fabulists have long claimed to know the secret of manufacturing a girl's best friend, using little more than lumps of charcoal and common ovens. (Peanut butter figures heavily in our favorite tongue-in-cheek recipe.) As with most alchemical dreams, there's a substantial grain of truth here—industrial-grade diamonds can be created with controlled explosions, and synthetic diamonds

Twilight of the Panthers

It's been a rough year for Florida's official animal, as 15 percent of the state's remaining wild panthers have perished (largely due to being hit by cars). Now comes particularly grisly news out of Yeehaw Junction:

An anonymous caller reported seeing a dead Florida panther by the side of the Florida Turnpike near Yeehaw Junction. That's more than 150 miles north of where most panthers live.

When Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission staffers checked out the tip Thursday...

First Contact: The Ainu

Every eight to ten months, we run across a story more-or-less identical to this one lamenting the declining visibility of Japan's Ainu minority. It's certainly a sad tale, given that forced assimilation was the nation's official policy throughout much of the twentieth-century. Yet the Ainu have received equally callous treatment from the West, particularly at the notorious 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. There, a bevy of Ainus were "imported" to hang out at an ethnographic exhibit, much like ...

Security and the Soil

In Pakistan's chaotic North-West Frontier Province, there's a movement afoot to temporarily ban the sale of fertilizers containing ammonium nitrate, which are frequently used in bombmaking. (The article mistakenly fingers urea fertilizers as the target of the ban.) This got us thinking about the reasons for ammonium nitrate's continued popularity among the world's farmers, despite the chemical's lethal history. We actually tackled this conundrum for Slate some years back, and found that it...

The Surest Way to Our Heart(s)

Want one of your tracks to someday be posted on Microkhan? As MF Doom so amply demonstrates above, there's one surefire way to earn that honor: mention Snake Plissken in the very first verse.

The Hilarity of Specificity

Upon learning about the opening of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Me., we felt compelled to spend a pleasant few minutes going over the latest in Sasquatch research. What we find most entertaining about this field is not its sheer uselessness, but rather the seriousness of its tone. As demonstrated by the chart above, which purports to show the growth curve for North American Bigfoots, cryptozoologists can use visual aids as fluidly as their mainstream counterparts. And t...