I must confess to an undue fascination with bird theft, a crime too-seldom explored in the annals of popular literature. Though there is no shortage of stories about purloined finches, reporters never seem to explain how much the crooks stand to earn—or, more important, the mechanics of fencing illegally obtained birds. I was thus pleased to come across this account of recent swan-egg thefts in Florida, which flicks at the dollar amounts involved:
Forty swan eggs were stolen from nests on the shores of two lakes near downtown Lakeland, city officials said Friday. That’s double the 15 or 20 originally feared stolen since March.
The motive for the theft is believed to be money. Parks and recreation officials say an egg is worth $150 and a cygnet $300, so the thief or thieves could make up to $12,000, tops.
Digging a little deeper, I find that full-grown swans can retail for upwards of $3,500, a figure which would seem to substantiate the Florida officials’ estimates. It should be noted, however, that Cameroonian suppliers stand to roil the market with their cut-rate prices—though, granted, you need to factor in the probability of getting scammed when dealing with Yaoundé-based poultry farms.
A Belarusian opposition activist has been sentenced to 15 days in jail for using a sign to mock a plainclothes security officer.
In the April incident, Ivan Amelchanka was photographed standing next to a man who was using a hand-held camera to film an opposition-organized march in Minsk. The activist’s placard contained the word “Musorok”—a Russian slang word that can be translated as “fuzz” or “pig.” It also had an arrow pointing in the direction of the officer.
Amelchanka was technically found guilty of “hooliganism,” which I find both sad and uproarious. Perhaps the Belarusian judiciary should read Among the Thugs to develop a more solid understanding of what “hooligan” actually means.
The last time we checked in with Carol Kidu, Papua New Guinea’s lone female legislator, she was proposing a bil that would set aside a percentage of parliamentary seats for women. Since then, she has become the head of the nation’s forlorn opposition, a role which has brought her into frequent conflict with PNG’s thoroughly corrupt elite. Three days ago, as the above video attests, Kidu’s activism brought her to the streets of a Port Moresby slum, where security services were bulldozing homes to make way for a shiny new development. Kidu asked only that the residents be permitted to gather their possessions before being evicted. But the men who do the government’s bidding wouldn’t hear of it.
Watch the whole video if you can. The situation spirals out of control at the 1:45 mark, which is right around when the bullets start flying. This is life in a country where the rule of law is mostly an illusion.
On the road for much of today, so start your week off right with a little vintage King Kobra, the rare hair-metal band willing to sacrifice its hair for a worthy cause—in this case, the destruction of Commies. Louis Gossett Jr. kills it in this video, too.
I’ve been breaking out all my old kiddie books to read to Microkhan Jr., an experience that has taught me a lot about the formative images that shaped my worldview—sometimes to horrifying effect. One that jumped out at me the other day was from Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World. It purports to depict the demoralizing life of a Tokyo commuter, complete with those infamous subway pushers who cram salarymen onto the rush-hour trains. The Scarry drawing uses pigs instead of people, which makes for a disconcerting finished product—almost as if the passengers are being hauled to the slaughterhouse rather than office buildings.
As a result of that supposedly whimsical image, I developed a longstanding fascination with the travails (both real and imagined) of Japanese mass-transit users. Apparently I’m not the only one.
I dog-eared a whole bunch of pages in Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah, including one featuring a passage about a longtime favorite topic: the psychology of captivity. I am a firm believer in the proposition that extended confinement can warp the mind in terrifying ways, which means I’m also a great admirer of men who manage to endure such torment. (Case in point.) Bowden briefly touches on a trick that such survivors employ, in his description of what Colonel Charles Scott discovered when cast into a cell where his fellow military officer, Colonel Thomas Schaefer, had recently been held:
Left alone, [Scott] found evidence that Schaefer had been in the room. It was lined with steel lockers and in one he found a slip of paper and a short pencil On the paper in handwriting he recognized as Schaefer’s—they had been passing notes for months—was a list of songs. Scott guessed that his air force colleague had been trying to memorize them. On another slip of paper was a rudimentary calendar, again in Schaefer’s handwriting. One of the lessons they had been taught in survival school was to keep track of time. From the scraps, Scott determined that Schaefer had been held in this freezing room for thirteen days, and that he had been moved three days earlier.
The ebb and flow of the days is something we rarely pay attention to, which is why time seems to march so quickly. But when you’re stripped of all freedom, keeping a running tally of the Earth’s rotation is one of the few ways you can exert some small measure of power. Amazing how little things like that can prevent the mind from unspooling.
There is, of course, no reason to expect anything but prevarication from the government of Azerbaijan, an authoritarian kleptocracy with no compunctions about employing dirty tricks. Still, the regime’s insistence on spouting obvious falsehoods is a dark wonder to behold. With its turn as Eurovision host fast approaching, Azerbaijan is going to great lengths to present a Potemkin village to the world, insisting that all is swell despite vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. Perhaps my favorite counterfactual claim of recent days, though, is this one:
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s son-in-law, pop singer Emin Agalarov, has been confirmed as an act for Baku’s staging of Eurovision, the European Broadcasting Union’s annual pop blow-out, but a senior contest executive maintains that special interests did not play a role in the decision.
In a May 2 statement, the Eurovision.tv website announced that guest acts for the May 22-26 event “combine Azerbaijan’s music and culture and are a synthesis of national traditions and modern trends.” Along with the 32-year-old Agalarov, the Azerbaijan National Dance Ensemble, mugham singer Alim Gasimov and the band Natiq will also take part.
Agalarov’s inclusion, originally announced last month by the Moscow-based singer himself, had sparked criticism about favoritism. First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva heads the organizational committee for the event, which kicks off the day after the May 21 worldwide release of Agalarov’s latest album, “After the Thunder.”
But in emailed comments on May 3, Sietse Bakker, event supervisor for the Eurovision Song Contest 2012, maintained that “[t]he people who have proposed Emin as [an] interval act have only one interest: To make the best Eurovision Song Contest possible in Azerbaijan.”
If the Azerbaijani government was really intent on making the best contest possible, they might consider letting the nation’s opposition stage a public rally, as would be their right in virtually any other European nation.
Will future historians look back upon Angela “LaGija” Dlamini as the great tea-leaf reader of Swazi politics? In recent days, her husband, the absolute monarch King Mswati III, has come under an unusual amount of fire for his profligacy—it is still tough to imagine, for example, why he merited a new $46 million jet, or a birthday party that would put Karen Kozlowski’s infamous shindig to shame. Dlamini perhaps sensed that her spouse was verging on his Marie Antoinette moment when she decided to split:
Angela “LaGija” Dlamini had been unhappy for a long time and had thought of leaving for many years, a royal guard told SSN. She left the palace to visit her parents in Hhohho, northern Swaziland. From there, she disappeared and was believed to be staying with relatives in the Mkhuzweni region of the country, said Lukhele.
LaGija is the third of the king’s wives to leave the royal household. According to a 2004 report in the Daily Sun, the first to flee was Delisa Magwaza, 30, known as Inkhosikati LaMagwaza, who made her way to London via Cape Town. She was followed by Putsoana Hwala, 30, known as Inkhosikati LaHwala, who left behind her three children.
Mswati’s 12th wife Mswati Nothando Dube, 22, known as Inkhosikati LaDube, was placed under house arrest at the home of the king’s mother in 2010 after an alleged affair with Swaziland’s justice minister Ndumiso Mamba. Mamba was fired.
Predicting the fall of a dictator is a mug’s game; strongmen have a way of clinging to power long after their popular support has entirely evaporated. But when even the most privileged members of the inner circle start fleeing, it’s not too much of a stretch to predict that a full implosion looms—though perhaps not until Swaziland’s richest neighbor decides to speed along the process by tightening its purse strings.
If nothing else, King Mswati III’s crooked reign reaffirms an old Microkhan axiom: Never put much faith in a regime that puts living political figures on its currency.
As you read these words today, I’ll be putting the finishing touches on my book manuscript—an 84,000-word tale of a young couple that pulled off an amazing heist many moons ago, then went roaming about the world. Tough to believe I’ve reached this point in the process; I started working on this project nearly three years ago, and there have been many moments when I’ve been tempted to chuck it all. Still a long way to go, but I can at least glimpse the shape of the finished product now.
One reason I’ve kept chugging along is a compulsion eloquently encapsulated by Chinese photographer Song Chao, so well-known for his portraits of coal miners. A former miner himself, Song was recently asked why he had turned his lens on subjects who most people rarely give a second thought to. His answer says a lot about the challenges and the allure of bringing characters to life in any artistic medium:
In people’s minds miners are ‘black’ people, leading a dull, mysterious and hard life. But this has nothing to do with reality, we often go out have drinks, grab something to eat, speak about our security, about women, and so forth. After six years of work in the mines, I spent more time with my colleagues than my family. In my mind, all their faces changed into unique characters. When I close my eyes I can perfectly imagine them in detail, I can even describe their personality, their opinion, the way they work. For me, these portraits embrace all the above-mentioned ideas.
We all know on some innate level that every human being is unique. But we often need to hear their stories to be reminded of that fact.
Just about thirty hours to go ’til my book deadline. Furiously trimming adverbs and trying to inject much-needed moments of humor and profundity. Sit tight.
As you may have noticed, I have a soft spot for walruses, who I like to think of as Nature’s couch potatoes. I was thus amused to learn that the self-styled scientists of the sixteenth century believed that these sedentary sacks of blubber were, in fact, agents of the Devil. Check out this 1539 description of walruses (then called Rosmari) from Olaus Magnus, who was sort of the Charles Darwin of his day (minus the genius or work ethic):
The Norway Coast, toward the more Northern parts, hath huge great Fish as big as Elephants, which are called Morsi, or Rosmari, may be they are so from their sharp biting; for if they see any man on the Sea-shore, and can catch him, they come suddenly upon hum, and rend him with their Teeth, that they will kill him in a trice. Therefore, these Fish called Rosmari, or Morsi, have heads fashioned like to an Oxes, and a hairy Skin, and hair growing as thick as straw or corn-reeds, that lye loose very laregely. They will raise themselves with their Teeth as by Ladders to the very tops of Rocks, that they may feed on the Dewie Grasse, or fresh Water, and role themselves in it, and then go to the Sea again.
I can only think that Magnus got his information from grog-addled sailors who were having a laugh. And yet his description of walruses became the conventional wisdom for roughly two centuries. Which makes me think we rather like tales that overhype the redness of Nature’s tooth and claw—they make us feel more secure in or tranquil surroundings, yet also more adventurous when we sally forth. I can only imagine that someone raised on Magnus’s walruses-as-fiendish-monsters fantasia was mightily confused upon first glimpsing the flabby mammals.
I’m out in California, doing some (very, very, very) last-minute reporting for the book. In my absence, check out these abandoned structures; the ones from Gary, Indiana, are particularly haunting.
I have exactly one week to go before my book deadline, so expect the next few posts to spin off my last-minute writing struggles.
Over the past several months, I’ve occasionally shouted out great examples of single descriptive details that elevated non-fiction tales into the realm of high art. There was Barbara Demick’s retelling of a North Korean’s manicure-related revelation; Bill Buford on a skinhead disco; and, pehaps most memorably, Mark Bowden’s riff on Pablo Escobar’s depraved leisure preferences. Another recently popped to mind, an analogy from C.J. Chivers that long-ago struck me as a classic. It comes from his 2002 New York Times Magazine piece about walrus hunting:
The revived walrus shoot ranks among the most bizarre hunts ever. Walrus remain protected in the United States, and it is illegal for American hunters to bring home any part of their kills. Instead, they store the skulls, ivory and enormous penis bones in Canada and talk of lobbying Congress to amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act to allow shipment of their curios south. The restrictions hardly deter. Each hunter pays $6,000 to $6,500 to kill a bull, which generally takes a day. It is an achievement that is not surprising, considering that walrus hunting, under Inuit supervision, is the approximate equivalent of a long boat ride to shoot a very large beanbag chair.
That single clause opens up so much psychological depth in the piece. There are a lot of ways that Chivers’ could have denigrated the supposed challenges inherent in hunting stationary animals. But comparing the targets to a cushy staple of Carter-era dorm rooms nails it in a very ingenious way. I can actually see those bean-bag chairs out on the ice floes, waiting to be perforated by rifle bullets. And then hear the unearned whoops of the hunters as they celebrate their faux triumph.
After a day spent haggling with the callous mandarins of America’s health-care system, I’m back to working on the final chapter of the book. I actually came up with a killer last line while walking Microkhan Jr. to school this morning; everything else, alas, is a mess, which is why I’m just leaving you with instructions to check out Jon Rhodes’ photographs of Australia’s rougher precincts. I’m particularly fond of this stout fellow’s joie de vivre.
For a glimpse of the pyramids before their bulldozing a few years back, you must check out this awesome Anderson Scott photo essay. Be advised that while the vast majority of the compound was razed, a few of the smaller pyramids were salvaged. Click onwards to discover the fate of one such structure—a reinvention that could not be more thoroughly American. [Read more →]
Watching Metta World Peace absolutely lose the plot in yesterday’s Lakers-Thunder contest made me think about the possible legal ramifications of on-court/on-field violence. Much has obviously been written about the possibility of treating such incidents as criminal matters, as has happened on occasion in the Canadian legal system. (The American system, by contrast, seems terribly reluctant to go down that path.) But perhaps the more interesting question is whether sports violence can lead to big-money civil actions. That’s precisely what happened after Houston Rockets guard Rudy Tomjanovich was infamously clocked in the face by Lakers power forward Kermit Washington; Tomjanovich sued the Lakers’ ownership group, arguing that the team had urged its players to act violently, and walked away with a multimillion-dollar settlement.
What is less known, however, is that Kermit Washington also contemplated filing a suit related to the incident—not against Tomjanovich or his employers, but against the NBA itself. Over twenty years after he threw the punch, Washington had his lawyer send a threatening letter to NBA commissioner David Stern. The text of that bizarre letter is included in John Feinstein’s The Punch:
Kermit feels that the NBA manipulated the situation when it occurred in 1977 for public relations purposes and worked against Kermit with NBA team owners to make Kermit the scapegoat and make the NBA look better to Kermit’s detriment. As a result, Kermit’s ability to flourish as an NBA all-star was undermined and any future opportunities with the league and in the basketball world in general were ruined…
Because of the false light that the NBA has cast Kermit in, every time an incident involving violence in sports comes up, Kermit’s involvement in the Tomjanovich incident and his subsequent suspension are repeatedly established by the NBA as a benchmark. It is our understanding that the NBA released footage of the incident and continues today to cast Kermit in a false light…
Kermit believes that he is entitled to compensation in the amount of five million dollars for the difficulty that he has faced for the last twenty-three years as a result of the actions of the NBA. Kermit has tried to maintain a good relationship with the NBA, but the poor treatment that he has received has pushed him to this point. Five million dollars is a small amount for the NBA to pay for the injustice that Kermit has dealt with for the last twenty-three years.
Once the NBA made clear its intention to vigorously defend itself should a lawsuit be filed, Washington failed to pursue his case. Which is actually too bad—it would have been interesting to see whether a jury could empathize with his plight.
I recently spent the better part of a day trying to verify a single, rather insignificant fact for my next book—namely, whether an interviewee’s claim to have received a certain model of Omega watch in early 1978 jibed with Omega’s production schedule. (It did.) Having expended way too much mental bandwidth to accomplish that one reportorial task, I can’t help but wonder how much better life would be if contemporary non-fiction operated according to the rules of Cold War-era pulp magazines. Because as this interview with the writer behind an article entitled “Budapest’s Sex Revolt” makes clear, accuracy was the least of that industry’s concerns:
You wrote hundreds of action, adventure and war stories for men’s adventure magazines. Did you also write a lot of “sex exposé” stories and were they your ideas or suggested by editors?
DORR: I wrote dozens of sex exposé stories and I did it all without having sex with anybody. With one exception involving one article, no editor ever suggested a topic to me. I simply looked at what the magazines were publishing and tried to copy it.
The Budapest story has references to true history and a lot of details about the city. How much was based on personal knowledge versus imagination?
DORR: I’ve never been to Budapest. I don’t remember how I wrote the story. I believe “pure imagination” was a big factor. Remember that any place with a faraway name was deemed exotic back in 1970 and not very many other Americans had ever been to Budapest, either.
Keep that in mind the next time some media pundit tries to convince you that the seventies were some sort of Golden Age of reportorial truth. Woodward and Bernstein were the exception, not the rule.
I highly recommend this set of Papua New Guinea images, by the Australian photographer Ben Bohane. The one posted above (larger version here) is a personal favorite for the way it juxtaposes the firearm with the quote from Psalms. I read that quote as so sinister in this context, but alternate translations give quite the opposite effect. Wish I could know whether the raskol who made that sign deliberately chose a translation that would fit with his crew’s nihilistic world view. Or if whatever Bible he stumbled across just happened to feature a version of the quote that was cosmically appropriate to his desperate circumstances.
More chilling photographs of raskolshere and here.
If all had gone according to plan, I would’ve handed in the complete first draft of my next book today. But, much to my discredit, I’m stil a whole chapter away from completion, plus a few more days’ worth of revisions. I can take some small comfort, at least, in knowing that I’m probably not the first writer to miss a major deadline. I mean, hey, we’re all still anxiously awaiting that runaway bride’s memoir, right?
Microkhan Jr. has reached the age at which he’s starting to ask about food taboos—like, why we eat pigs but not horses (a recent dinnertime inquiry). In straining to explain the nuances of societal dietary preferences, I thought of this incredible photo essay on the rat catchers of Mozambique, who provide that nation’s blue-collar workers with an affordable source of meat—albeit one that many Americans might find icky. Yet Mozambique’s appetite for this protein source is such that the rodent harvest is causing serious environmental damage:
Albinio Matias, a Mozambican farmer, lost his daughter, Cassula, and his home to wildfires, which also damaged his crops for four consecutive years. “The fires were set by youngsters hunting for rats, and because our houses were close to the weeds they caught fire and I lost everything,” said Matias, who lives in the Macossa district of Manica Province in central Mozambique. Hunters would start fires to flush out rodents from the forests and the bush to eat, and the blaze would often get out of hand.
Around 70 percent of Mozambique’s 20 million people live in rural areas where every year thousands are displaced or lose their possessions, homes and crops to these fires. Manica Province’s Forest and Wildlife Services said 43 wildfires were caused by rat hunters in 2007; in 2008 that figure rose to 60 and led to 15 deaths and the displacement of 200 families.
This is definitely an instance in which controlled production is far preferable to the “free-range” approach. But while our species has proven quite adept at wiping out rat populations, we’ve had a much harder time breeding them for meat—at least not profitably. Some reasons why can be found here; suffice to say that rats aren’t quite as compliant as, say, chickens when it comes to determining gender and organizing efficient breeding schedules.
Also, as detailed here, rats are actually quite sensitive to environmental toxins such as pesticides. That detail surprised me: You’d think any animal capable of thriving off congealed grease in the sewers of Washington D.C. would let a little aldicarb slide right off their backs.
The photographer behind the rat-catching series, Vlad Sokhin, is a gem, by the way; check out more of his work here.
In countries where the rule of law is less-than-robust, traffic cops can often best be classified as entrepreneurs rather than law-enforcement officials. Their main concern is not keeping the streets safe, but rather extracting bribes from unfortunate drivers—a pursuit that has made some Zambian policeman rather wealthy by that nation’s standards:
Home Affairs Minister Kennedy Sakeni has wondered how a traffic officer can amass wealth worth K1 billion and yet his salary was only below K3 million. Mr. Sakeni says his office is aware that some of the officers make as much as K30 million per week which is never deposited into the government treasury but instead pocketed by themselves.
If my math is correct here, then, a Zambian traffic cop’s actual income is approximately 333 times greater than his official income. So how can the government coax those police into giving up such filthy lucre, save for prosecuting each and every one to the fullest extent of the law?
The convenient answer is that the cops’ salaries must be raised in order to reduce the temptation to extract bribes. But by how much? There is simply no way that the government can afford to replace all of the incomes that a cop would lose out on by going legit. How much of an increase will set a corrupt official on the straight-and-narrow?
There is quite a bit of debate on this point. This landmark IMF paper from 1997 (PDF) suggests that a public-sector official’s wages must be two to three times greater than that of his private-sector counterpart—a laughable proposition here in the U.S., of course, where civil-service salaries always lag. This case study from Tanzania (PDF), by contrast, concludes that even a massive salary bump doesn’t always do the trick:
For a [revenue office] employee who is used to get bribes of TSh 20–30,000 daily, a tenfold increase of his salary from the present level will not make him desist from demanding and accepting bribes. The situation worsened even more due to the erosion by inflation of the initial pay rates for TRA staff, since nominal wages between 1996 and 2000 remained unchanged.
The ultimate solution probably has less to do with wages than with developing a sense of common purpose. But that’s a slow fix that requires leadership by example. The lowliest official has no incentive to change his ways when the highest is taking suspiciously frequent ski vacations in Gstaad.
As I re-apply nose to grindstone for the book’s sake, check out this footage from yesterday’s mass protest in Port Moresby. Despite its denials, the current Papuan regime is clearly intent on delaying this summer’s scheduled election, perhaps in the hope that Sir Michael Somare‘s influence or health will diminish. The Papuan people are rightfully getting tired of such electoral hijinks.
Anyone who takes the time to comment on Microkhan is pretty much on my cool list for all eternity. But I reserve extra-special love for those who help solve the mysteries this project occasionally explores. And so let me offer a cosmically enormous high five to the reader who recently responded to this January 2011 post about the Rolls-Royce fleet once owned by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I mentioned that 84 of the cars were purchased by a Dallas auto dealer, who was backed by a doomed savings and loan. It wasn’t immediately clear to me whether the dealer ever managed to offload any of the cars, but apparently he found at least one taker for the notoriously gaudy vehicles:
I know where one of the cars ended up: in my mother’s driveway. Yes, she purchased Rajneesh’s 1982 Silver Spur in possibly the ugliest baby blue one could imagine. It had what we know as the gold package, hood ornament and all – dipped in gold. I remember reading through the owner’s manual as a 15 year old and seeing the oringinal warrnanty card that read Rajneesh Investments. My mother was, as the time, president of the now defunct KIAB, Channel 23 in Dallas. This would have been her third Rolls Royce. She was as gay as a french horn and the cars fit her well (I was an adoptee).
I am still looking for confirmation on what happened to the “green-and-gold-lace number with tear-gas guns secreted beneath the fender.” Here’s to hoping this post teases out another tipster.
Continuing on with our semi-regular practice of shouting out old Sports Illustrated stories that have stuck in our mind, I’d like to call your attention to this “Where Are They Now?” piece about the fabled Steve Dalkowski—a man who recently popped to mind when news of Ryan Leaf’s latest travails broke wide. The thumbnail sketch on Dalkowski is that he’s the greatest left-handed pitcher who never was—a wild fireballer who awed the great Ted Williams, yet was undone by alcoholism before he could truly make his mark in the game. As of last report, he resides in an extended-care facility, the victim of dementia caused by his longtime chemical dependence. A straight-up tragic tale any way you cut it.
What I remember most about the SI is one detail in particular—a classic example of a single observation that lays bare the essence of a character. The one about Dalkowski is the kicker to the paragraph:
At midseason in 1964, Baltimore released Dalkowski. He hung on for two seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ and the Los Angeles Angels’ organizations. In Bakersfield in 1965 he married a schoolteacher named Linda Moore, but they divorced two years later. Soon he was in the California fields, picking cotton and sugar beets, beans and carrots. Dalkowski’s drink of choice was cheap wine, which he would buy when the bus stopped on the way to the crop field. Often he would place a bottle in the next row as motivation.
Makes me think that the rewards we all set up for ourselves really speak volumes about our core desires—desires that we may not wish to reveal to others, at least not overtly. When it comes right down to it, human psychology is astonishingly hamster-like.
As I steal another day to focus on the book—my deadline is less than two weeks away—I was hoping to ask y’all for a bit of help with a research matter.
Let’s say I walked into an American embassy or consulate in the spring of 1978, claiming to have lost my passport while traveling. What identification, exactly, would I have been asked to provide in order to obtain a replacement passport? You have no idea how hard it’s been to get a concrete answer to this question. And while I’m sure I could glean what I need from the State Department’s archives, I’d rather not invest the time/money in a Bolt Bus trip down to Washington D.C. Fingers crossed that someone in the Microkhan audience can provide a little insight, or at least point me in the direction of a resource I can tap from the comfort of my global headquarters. Thank you in advance for the helping hand.
For those of us who lack law degrees, reading judicial opinions can often be a major slog. Those who occupy the bench favor a prose style that is, to be charitable, a bit on the dry side; yarn-spinning is not their forte. Yet every once in a while, I stumble upon a ruling that crackles like the fine narrative non-fiction. This 1992 circuit-court opinion in the matter of U.S. v Lowry is an excellent case in point.
Instead of summarizing the background, how ’bout we let Judge John Louis Coffey set the scene:
In the early 1960s Donald Lowry published a book about his travels through Mexico entitled Mexico: Bachelor’s Paradise. The response to the book convinced Lowry that there were many men out there who lacked self-confidence and had trouble with relationships, and that he could help these men by establishing a mail-order lonely hearts club. He followed through on this idea and founded such a club in 1965. After running this club for a few years, Lowry incorporated his business under the name of Col International, “Col” being an acronym for “Church of Love” (hereinafter “COL”).
It is the premise of the COL that lends spice to the script. Using mailing lists acquired from men’s magazines and various lonely hearts clubs, Lowry mailed informational packets to thousands of men describing the COL and its purpose. These letters claimed that the COL was founded in Mexico in 1965 by a teenage girl, Maria Simona Mireles, who now went by the name “Mother Maria”. According to the letters Mother Maria had been called to establish a new Garden of Eden, a valley paradise to be known as “Chonda-Za”. In Chonda-Za, COL members would join with Mother Maria and an entourage of beautiful young women known as the “Angels of Love”, living the rest of their lives in utter peace and fulfillment. Neither Rome nor the Garden of Eden was built in a day, however, and at present Chonda-Za was still a shimmering dream, though progress was being made. In the meantime, the mailings revealed, Mother Maria and the Angels were living on an old farm near the western Illinois town of Hillsdale, frolicking in a bucolic encampment known as the “Retreat”. At the Retreat the Angels were purifying themselves for entry into Chonda-Za and perfecting a free and open pastoral lifestyle, uninhibited by the moral code and strictures that modern society places on male-female relationships. This would be the lifestyle enjoyed by all in Chonda-Za.
From this idea sprang perhaps the most lucrative lonely-hearts scam in American history, one that eventually raked in an estimated $31.5 million. Lowry and his chief accomplice, Pamela St. Charles, did this not only by collecting membership fees from men who wished to retire to Chonda-Za, but also by coaxing their marks into contributing to special funds for the upkeep of the fictional paradise. Coffey explained the mechanics: [Read more →]
Crashing on a major Wired deadline today. In my absence, please enjoy the North Korean propaganda video above, featuring the least enthusiastic narrator in the history of film. Back tomorrow with something truly splendid from the history of swindling.
I got in a spirited discussion yesterday regarding New York’s abundance of one-dollar dumpling shops. In my dozen-plus years of calling this metropolis home, the special these joints offer has never changed, even though their various costs (especially rent) have certainly increased a fair bit. And though I realize that many of them probably skirt labor rules, I can’t imagine they have shaved enough off wages to compensate for other expenses.
In looking to explain why that one-dollar price has remained static, then, I began researching the various technologies that have kept pork prices so absurdly low. To my surprise, the real cost of pork has tumbled over the past four decades; a pound of pork that would’ve wholesaled for $3.95 in today’s dollars in 1970 now goes for $1.52. I have to think one of the main reasons for the plunge is greater efficiency on farms, a product of gadgets like the Nedap Velos heat detector. As the machine’s sales literature so eloquently phrases its benefits:
The more accurately it can be determined whether a sow is on heat, the more efficient the operational management…Nedap Velos alerts you on time to when a sow requires insemination. Without you having to monitor this yourself. Based on this information, you can organise the different tasks.
While I have no intention of giving up my affinity for pork-and-chive dumplings, I will confess that there’s something a bit creepy about the cold mechanization of porcine reproduction. Napoleon would not approve.
For those of y’all who follow my microblog, you might have noticed a recent fascination with pop-culture relics of the early Atomic Age. That interest is a spin-off of a book-related strand about America’s early nuclear reactors, one of which plays a small-yet-pivotal role in the plot. As I iron out some kinks in that particular scene today, please check out Dagwood Splits the Atom, which I found to be a surprisingly cogent refresher course on nuclear physics. I’m embarrassed to admit how poorly I scored on the wrap-up test at the end.
