Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

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Back in the Bunker

September 2nd, 2010


Sorry, but today’s all about tackling a major project, rather than scooping out a small portion of my brain to share with you good people. Please content yourself with the high-brow electronic music above, as well as the following snippet of anti-jazz hysteria from the April 11, 1921 edition of the Chicago Tribune:

Home was handicapped. No saxophones or trombones; the best he could find to smite was a bloomin’ lyre. Nero was restricted to a Stradivarius.

Both made their mistake, it seems, for jazz, we learn, is the brand of racket which best suits the destructive motif. It is Bolshevized Wagner, Carrie Jacobs Bond in a Soviet tune.

In short, jazz is wicked. Dr. Frank E. Morton, acoustic engineer for the American Steel and Wire Company and a leader in the music trades convention which is to be held in the Drake hotel next month, says it’s the black sheep of the melody family.

“Jazz,” he said last night, “expressed hysteria and incites to idleness, revelry, dissipation, destruction, discord, and chaos. It accords with the devestating, volcanic spirit that has burst forth over the world in the last six years…

“Make music virile. Put red blood into it. Associate it with two-fisted men who do things. Keep away from the jazz abominations. Restore the orderly harmonized organization of industrial and social life with good music. Bring back ‘Home Sweet Home.’“

Dr. Morton, consider yourself fortunate that you shed your mortal coil before the advent of sinister-clown hip-hop. I very much doubt you would have had the fortitude to endure the sonic experience.

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The New Quicksand

September 1st, 2010


One of my Slate editors recently made waves with this sharp piece about the cultural demise of quicksand. The gunky stuff, so infamous for ensnaring characters in movies (including The Beastmaster’s beloved ferrets), no longer scares the youth of today. Perhaps this is because kids now realize that quicksand’s lethal potential was always overstated, and that their odds of perishing in a pit of viscous mud are positively nil.

So what should replace quicksand in the corner of the American imagination reserved for nightmares? I’d like to humbly suggest grain, specifically corn. That’s because the threat posed to humans by mountains of grain is very real—and, unfortunately, becoming more dire with each passing year:

Based upon the cases documented to date, no fewer than 38 grain entrapments occurred in 2009.

Disturbingly, the trend for this type of incident, unlike many other types of farm-related injuries and fatalities, is not improving. Between 1994 and 2002, the five-year average decreased from a record of 29.2 recorded entrapments per year to 18.8 (the lowest since 1987). Since 2002, however, the five-year average has increased steadily to 28.4 incidents per year in 2008 and 31.2 in 2009 which is an increase of nearly 66%.

As in past years, it should be noted that this summary does not reflect all grain-related entrapments, fatal or non-fatal that have occurred, due to the lack of a comprehensive reporting system and a continued reluctance on the part of some victims and employers to report partial entrapments where extrication was required but no public report was made.

Based upon the ratio of non-fatal to fatal incidents documented in Indiana over the past 30 years, which has had an aggressive surveillance program to identify these events, the total number of actual cases could be 20-30 percent greater nationwide.

So what’s causing this worrying uptick in grain entrapments? Perhaps it’s our growing thirst for corn-based ethanol:

There continues to be a direct relationship between out-of-condition grain and a greater probability of entrapment.

The domestic corn demand for ethanol has resulted in the largest build up of storage capacity across the Midwest in history. These factors will result in more corn being stored for longer periods of time than in past years and possibly an increased potential for grain entrapments unless there is a change in current work practices.

There’s a small silver lining here, which is that a lower percentage of grain entrapments are now fatal than in years past. For that, credit the advent of grain rescue tubes, one of the most underrated agricultural gadgets on the market today.

Should you wish to minimize your chances of falling victim to grain, I suggest that you heed the advice offered here. And if you do find yourself buried in corn, just do your best to relax and breathe. Do not, under any circumstances, try to eat your way out of your predicament—even the great Crazy Legs Conti, one of the most revered competitive eaters on the planet, insisted on popped corn when attempting to chew free from a sarcophagus.

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Landing on Planet Mercury

August 31st, 2010


Unlike everyone’s favorite intergalactic MC, I am not bio-enhanced. And that means I must occasionally steal a day to focus on a single project, rather than multitasking as if I’d been blessed with multiple brains. Today is such a day, which means no meaningful Microkhaning ’til after the next sunrise. Apologies, and hope y’all understand.

I will leave you, though, with a bit of beer history. There was apparently a time when Meister Brau was marketed as a classy beverage, a campaign bolstered by the brand’s wise decision to enlist the services of gorgeous chanteuse Barbara McNair. Yet this was before Miller purchased the brand in the early 1970s, and turned it into a product for imbibers whose pockets contain only a few spare nickels. As a result, Meister Brau is now but a shell of its former self—and borderline toxic for anyone who dares toss it down their gullet. The reviewers over at Beer Advocate pull no punches:

Only consume this ice cold. Doesn’t taste like much of anything at ~35 degrees F or lower. If it warms, it becomes face wincing bad, as the flavors of corn grits, cooked cabbage and wet cardboard seep in. Things only go downhill from there. Bitterness is there for the whole ride, with a weighty metallic flavor that’s bolstered by the beer’s fizz. Finishes clean if ice cold. If not, residual flavors of metal and corn grits linger for far too long in the mouth.

Still, it sounds better than Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer.

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Should You Find Yourself Plummeting

August 30th, 2010

Whenever a plane I’m on is close enough to its destination that houses and cars appear, I can’t help thinking to myself: “If I fell from here, could I survive?” There is something about having a visual sense of the ground that makes a parachute-less airplane jump seem survivable. If those motor vehicles can zip along the highways below with such silent smoothness, surely I could manage to flutter to Earth like a feather.

It’s all a ridiculous illusion, of course, as the vast majority of humans who fall more than a scant three stories do not live to tell the tale. But there are some fantastic exceptions, many of which are chronicled here. And based on the handful of incidents in which people have survived drops from well above 10,000 feet, there is even a rough set of instructions for those who wish to prepare themselves for similarly dangerous circumstances. A useful snippet for readers who live in fear of plunging from the heavens:

Just how fast are you going? Imagine standing atop a train going 120 mph, and the train goes through a tunnel but you do not. You hit the wall above the opening at 120 mph. That’s how fast you will be going at the end of your fall. Yes, it’s discouraging, but proper planning requires that you know the facts. You’re used to seeing things fall more slowly. You’re used to a jump from a swing or a jungle gym, or a fall from a three-story building on TV action news. Those folks are not going 120 mph. They will not bounce. You will bounce…

At this point you will think: trees. It’s a reasonable thought. The concept of “breaking the fall” is powerful, as is the hopeful message implicit in the nursery song “Rock-a-bye, Baby,” which one must assume from the affect of the average singer tells the story not of a baby’s death but of its survival. You will want a tall tree with an excurrent growth pattern—a single, undivided trunk with lateral branches, delicate on top and thicker as you cascade downward. A conifer is best. The redwood is attractive for the way it rises to shorten your fall, but a word of caution here: the redwood’s lowest branches grow dangerously high from the ground; having gone 35,000 feet, you don’t want the last 50 feet to ruin everything. The perfectly tiered Norfolk Island pine is a natural safety net, so if you’re near New Zealand, you’re in luck, pilgrim. When crunch time comes, elongate your body and hit the tree limbs at a perfectly flat angle as close to the trunk as possible. Think!

As always in these situations, though, it’s better to be lucky than good. Just ask Vesna Vulovic, who survived the 1973 bombing of JAT Flight 367 for reasons that no one has ever been able to figure out. Vulovic herself credits a slight physiological abnormality:

PB: Looking back at the incident, how do you think you survived?

VV: Nobody knows that. One of them said that I had very low blood pressure. I should never have been an air hostess in fact. I had a lot of coffee to drink before my interview, so that when I had my medical exam I passed. Maybe my low blood pressure saved me. I lost consciousness quickly and my heart did not burst.

American tail gunner Alan Magee also survived a drop from great heights, after being shot down over France in 1943. The secret of his survival? Perhaps it was incessant screaming.

(Image of Free Fall via G.I. Joe: Underground)

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Fleet Street’s Dubious Science

August 27th, 2010


Apologies for the late start to the day, but Microkhan Jr. decided to rob the clan of some much-needed sleep in the wee hours. Unable to get back to the Sandman’s realm once the kid had been pacified, I passed the time by catching up on The World at War. Lots of good stuff there, including a well-reasoned explanation as to why the bicycle enabled Japan’s conquest of Malaya. But my favorite tidbit is cued up above—a classic piece of racial “science” that appeared in the British press prior to the fall of Singapore. Wish I could dig up the cited article, just to see whether the writer cited any research. I am picturing an Oxford Universty laboratory full of Japanese test subjects being spun around on rotating chairs, then asked to walk in straight lines…

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Off the Books

August 26th, 2010


The worst thing about this tale of a Sri Lankan maid’s suffering at the hands of her Saudi Arabian employers is that it’s completely unsurprising. Though the torture the woman endured is notable for its brutality, such abuse is evidently commonplace in Saudi Arabia—to the point that foreign workers are taught to expect beatings:

The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, “Mama,” as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, “will be angry and she will hammer and beat you.”

“This is where you go wrong,” the teacher continued. “That is how Mama beats you and burns you – when you do anything wrong.”

Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune…

The problem would be easy to fix, of course, if Saudi Arabia’s foreign workers were drawn out of legal limbo. They live in the kingdom under sponsorship schemes in which their employers essentially act as immigration officials, with the power to expel their charges from the country on a whim. That reality makes it nearly impossible for abused workers to approach the Saudi Arabian legal system; instead, they can only ask their embassies for assistance, a tact that rarely bears fruit because nations whose economies depend heavily on the remittances of overseas workers are loathe to stir the pot.

The end result is that the few overseas workers who choose to flee their employers end up in desperate circumstances, stranded in shelters with no legal passage home. The recent plight of a handful of Filipino nationals is a case in point:

At least 10 female overseas Filipino workers (OFW) and their 11 children have been staying in the Philippine Embassy-run shelter in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for about 10 months now, with some staying for more than three years, according to a migrants’ rights group…

The schedule of their repatriation is dependent on how soon the Governor will act on the Embassy’s request. [Labor Attache] Valenciano is unable to say when the workers could be sent home.

“The government is of course ready to assist them; it’s just that some of the workers do not have the necessary papers,” he explained, adding that majority of the workers escaped from their employees due to contract violations and abuse.

Currently, there are 142 adult OFWs and 11 children inside Bahay Kalinga, according to Valenciano. The Overseas Workers Welfare Administration earlier said some 800 OFWs are still stranded in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

The bottom line: No good ever comes of letting an entire workforce exist in the shadows, without direct recourse to established legal institutions. And therein lies an important lesson for the folks crafting immigration policy worldwide.

(Image via wokka’s Flickr stream)

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Tragic Bait and Switch

August 25th, 2010


There’s no Earthly chunk of coral that’s more deserving of good news than Bikini Atoll, which the American military infamously bombed to smithereens at the dawn of the Atomic Age. So it was heartening to learn that the island and its immediate surroundings were recently added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, a move that will hopefully do wonders for the tourist trade. (The International Atomic Energy Agency states that brief visits are okay, but that permanent resettlement remains risky because of radiation in locally produced food.)

The rare sliver of cheer for Bikini Atoll provides an excellent occasion to check out this series of interviews with island natives, who recall both their people’s history as well as the terrible hardships of the past 64 years. When the Bikinians were evacuated from their homes in 1946, they had no idea of the generations of wandering and scarcity that lay ahead. A woman names Emso Leviticus recalls just how her fellow Bikinians were convinced to abandon all they knew:

We were elated when we discovered that the Americans weren’t going to hurt us, in fact, the Navy men were very kind and gave us big bins filled with all kinds of food that we had never seen or eaten before like C-rations, chocolates, corned beef and other wonderful things. They took some of us to the ship to get medical attention. One woman named Tamar was very sick, and when she returned, she was all better again. The Americans stayed awhile and I befriended one of the men. He often visited with me and built a cement water catchment for my house.

I can still recall the day when the more important looking Americans came to ask us to move from our islands. All of these new men were wearing beautiful uniforms. After church one day, they asked us to come together on Rosie’s and Dretin’s land called Loto, near Lokiar’s land, to have a community meeting.

We were all there–men, women and children–and we tried to listen carefully to what they were asking our leaders. All of the women became surprised when we found out that they were requesting that we move to Rongerik Atoll or Ujae Atoll. I remember that our leaders answered: “If we have to leave, we would rather go to Rongerik because we don’t want to be under the leadership of another king or iroij on Ujae.” No one dissented in front of the Americans when they asked us if we would be willing to go to another island so they could test their bombs. We had had a meeting beforehand. It had been decided that we would all stand behind Juda when he gave our answer to the man with the stars on his hat and clothes.

We were a very close-knit group of people back then. We were like one big family. We loved each other accordingly. After we made the final decision, no one made any problems about it. We agreed to go along with whatever was decided by our leaders.

It didn’t take long, however, for the Bikinians to regret their decision.

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There She Is, Miss Mizoram

August 24th, 2010


Up to the jawline with work this p.m., so please forgive the video quickie—a look back at the mid-’80s beauty pageant scene in the North-East Indian state of Mizoram. Safe for work, unless your boss objects to one-piece swimsuits. Note the judges’ archaic emphasis on body measurements—perhaps The Feminine Mystique had not yet been published in Mizo?

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Needle in the Haystack?

August 24th, 2010

It’s been ages since I last checked in with Hugh Rienhoff, the Bay Area biotech entrepreneur who I profiled in the February 2009 issue of Wired. For those unfortunates among you who haven’t read the piece, Rienhoff has spent much of the past six years analyzing his young daughter’s DNA, in the hopes of discovering the reason she appears to be afflicted with a genetic disorder that bears some resemblance to Marfan syndrome. He does the bulk of this work in the attic of his home, where he spends countless late-night hours scanning reams of sequencing data.

My story ends with Rienhoff vowing to soldier on after encountering a number of dead ends, and admitting that the work itself has taken on a quasi-spiritual aspect. (He compared his quest to that Peter Matthiessen undertakes in The Snow Leopard, which resulted in zero leopard sightings, but some measure of inner peace.) But according to this recent update, Rienhoff may finally be making some important headway:

There are hundreds of genes that encode proteins involved in TGF-beta signal transduction or regulation, including, says Rienhoff, 32 other members of the TGF-beta ligand family and five known receptors. Moreover, Rienhoff found his daughter had 932 instances of homozygosity. Which one, if any, could account for Beatrice’s disorder?

In late 2009, as Rienhoff trawled through Beatrice’s transcriptome data, one of those homozygous gene variants stood out. “It took God-damn forever to find it. I had to sift through everything by hand,” says Rienhoff. “It was basically just brute force, hand-to-hand combat with this data.”

The allele in question is the insertion of a single T nucleotide in the gene for copine-1 on chromosome 20. Copine-1 is a protein involved in one arm of the TGF-beta signaling cascade. The insertion disrupts the gene’s reading frame and results in premature termination. “So that was cool,” says Rienhoff. “It was the only candidate with an insertion allele causing frameshift and nonsense-mediated decay signals…”

Rienhoff says copine-1 has not been well studied in humans or any other organism for that matter. It is highly conserved, however, indicative of some functional importance. One of Rienhoff’s collaborators is Alan Beggs, a geneticist at Boston’s Children’s Hospital (Harvard Medical School). “He’s been my deep throat in muscle biology,” says Rienhoff.

“By studying the rare, and possibly unique condition in his own daughter, Hugh may have discovered something of basic importance that may also have implications for a much broader group of patients,” Beggs says. “Of course, the ability for a single individual to direct this kind of research into their own genetics is truly transformative for how we view genetic studies.”

I bolded the last point because it really gets at the heart of why this is an important story. Granted, the number of people on Earth with Rienhoff’s brains and expertise is vanishingly small, so it’s not like every parent of an undiagnosed child will be able to run out, buy an off-the-shelf sequencer, and figure out what ails their offspring. But there is the potential for collaborative work, using a network of volunteers and quasi-professionals who each provide a small piece of the diagnostic puzzle. And that network can exist outside the realm of the mainstream health-care system, thanks to the democratization of genetic information.

To put it another way, the Wikipedia approach is coming to ever-more sophisticated corners of health care. And not a moment too soon, given how often people lack access to face-to-face genetic expertise. I, for one, don’t even want to ponder the contortions I’d have to go through to get a referral to a geneticist via my HMO.

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Fortune’s Supposed Favorites

August 23rd, 2010

The morning grog is heavy today, on account of the fact that I stayed up late watching Crossing the Line, a documentary about Virginia native James Joseph Dresnok‘s 1962 defection to North Korea. Despite some clunky Christian Slater narration, it’s a stellar flick—a deeply researched portrait of a man whose tragic background made him yearn for radical change. Dresnok, like his fellow American defectors, had little to no interest in political ideology prior to his move across the demilitarized zone; he simply wanted to escape the emptiness and sadness of his existence at that time, even if it meant risking death.

Apart from being a keen psychological study, Crossing the Line also shines a light on the stilted imagery and lingo of North Korean propaganda. Dresnok and the three other American servicemen who fled north became valuable PR tools for Great Leader’s regime. They were featured in a series of English-language magazines called Fortune’s Favorites, which were intended to encourage further defections by showing what a rip-roaring good time was to be had in Pyongyang. This publication also included alleged pages from the defectors’ diaries, which betray every sign of having been written by government hacks:

Aug. 20, 1962 — Foggy riverside of the Daidong in the morning!

At 10 A.M. we visited the Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition Hall. My impression of the Exhibition Hall will never be given in a few words.

North Korea, that produces everything it wants on its own, is one of the most advanced countries in the world. . . . This was the thing I had never imagined.

Of course, all these owe to the leadership of the Korean Workers’ Party and Premier Kim Il Sung.

Aug. 26, 1962 — Pleasure boats of the river Daidong were resounded with songs and laughter. It made me ponder much. How can they be so happy? Are there nothing to be worried about? Yes, they have nothing to worry about.

If such a gorgeous reality is the product of Communist system, is not the system the true ideal of mankind?

Sept. 20, 1962 — North Korea is an earthly paradise where the rights of labour and rest are guaranteed. . . . I cannot help envying heartily the happy life of the children in North Korea. Comparing with the life of the children here, the life in my childhood was too miserable.

Unsurprisingly, members of the American military proved quite resilient to these transparently false depictions of life on the other side. Blame the overheated prose if you must, but perhaps written propaganda simply doesn’t stand much of a chance of altering hearts and minds.

(Image via Conelrad)

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“A Smith & Wesson Beats Four Aces”

August 20th, 2010


It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce the long-awaited return of Bad Movie Friday, which has been on hiatus for a couple of weeks. I’m bringing it back after discovering a trove of utmost goodness on YouTube—namely, the collection of Andy Sidaris, previously lionized in this space as the writer-director behind the legendary Hard Ticket to Hawaii. Sidaris’s entire oeuvre is a wonder to behold, but for the moment I’ve chosen to share his 1990 Erik Estrada vehicle Guns. I believe the jury is still out as to whether Estrada makes for a good villain; something about his line readings makes me think he was born to play a real-estate pitchman rather than a sinister arms dealer who commands an army of jiggly assassins.

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Demanding Satisfaction, to a Young Nation’s Detriment

August 20th, 2010


It doesn’t take much imagination to mock Kentucky’s oath of office, which contains this gloriously anachronistic bit of verbiage:

I do further solemnly swear (or affirm) that since the adoption of the present Constitution, I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this State nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as second in carrying a challenge, nor aided or assisted any person thus offending.

Funny stuff in 2010, given that contemporary gentlemen so rarely settle their differences by resorting to pistols at dawn. But Kentucky’s outdated oath provides a salient reminder of the threat that dueling once posed to national security. As outlined in a recent issue of The Journal of the Early Republic (paywalled, alas), duels between antebellum military officers deprived America’s armed forces of many of its most talented leaders:

Even though most duels were not fatal, dueling was so prevalent in the decades after Hamilton’s death that scores of men fell by pistol and sword on fields of honor across America. Despite an 1806 law barring challenges between officers, dueling had become so rampant in the Army and Navy that the historian William Stevens once calculated that “two thirds as many officers were killed by dueling as were slain in all the naval battles between 1798 and the Civil War.”

The anti-dueling movement that picked up steam in the 1820s and ’30s helped salvage the officer corps’ integrity, primarily by promoting a public-service message that was the “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” of the day: Dueling equals suicide. By writing and sermonizing about duelists who were self-destructive louts rather than noble soldiers, early 19th-century preachers slowly convinced the masses that shootouts were just gussied-up forms of self-murder:

The itinerant Pennsylvanian book-peddler and moralist Parson Weems imagined a link between
dueling and intentional suicide. Describing young men overtaken by ‘”gambling, goatish lust, or satanic pride,” Weems speculated that the desperate urge to escape their mounting troubles through death was probably very great. “And if they can’t muster patience, to wait long enough to kill themselves with whiskey and tobacco,” he remarked, “they will give way to their brutish passions and provoke some other madman to blow out their brains.”

It was sort of a genius rhetorical strategy, and one that makes the modern era’s more lackluster public-service campaigns seem inelegant in comparison. Parson Weems would certainly have chortled at “Just Say No”‘s lack of cleverness.

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An Alternative to Patronymics

August 19th, 2010

A long, drunken subway ride last night gave me the chance to finish The Black Nile, Dan Morrison’s account of a harrowing trip he took from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. There’s enough grist in this excellent travelogue to craft a dozen killer Microkhan posts, but for now I’ll just limit myself to a quick discussion of the Nuer, one of the major ethnic groups in southern Sudan.

Morrison, an occasional Microkhan correspondent now based in Dhaka, delves into the Nuer practice of ritual scarification, whereby adolescent boys are cut quite deeply on the forehead. As the caption for this gorgeous 1935 photo explains, those who pass through the ordeal are granted great privileges afterwards:

The operation (gar) is a severe one which causes much blood loss, across the forehead from ear to ear. Boys were normally initiated between the ages of 14-16, and a group initiated during a number of successive years belong to an age-set. After initation a youth is prohibited from milking, able to marry, gains a spear and an ox from which he takes his ox-name, and was able to go on cattle raids against the Dinka.

If you’re anything like me, your first thought upon reading that caption was “Ox-name?” Yes indeed:

Men are frequently addressed by names that refer to the form and colour of their favourite oxen, and women take names from oxen and from the cows they milk. Even small boys call one another by ox-names when playing together in the pastures, a child usually taking his name from the bull-calf of the cow he and his mother milk. Often a man receives an ox-name or cow-name at birth. Sometimes the name of a man which is handed down to posterity is his ox-name and not his birth-name. Hence a Nuer genealogy may sound like an inventory of a kraal. The linguistic identification of a man with his favourite ox cannot fail to affect his attitude to the beast.

The use of ox-names obviously reflects the centrality of cattle to Nuer life. Is there an equivalent practice in Western society? The closest thing I could come up with was the sudden popularity of the name Jayden after Britney Spears set the trend.

(Image via the Pitt Rivers Museum Southern Sudan Collections)

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Interview Zero

August 18th, 2010


It’s not very often that I can boast of a warm personal connection to a recently deceased celebrity, so please let me take a moment to vouch for the key role that Sir Frank Kermode played in my development as a writer.

No, I never had the privilege of studying under the lit-crit master. And even if I had, I very much doubt I’d taken much away from the experience—dissecting great works was never my strong suit. (Despite repeated attempts, for example, I’ve never gotten past page three of Finnegan’s Wake.) But back in my college years, I had a notion that I might want to try my hand at non-fiction. On a lark, I pitched one of the campus mags on an idea that, in retrospect, is pretty embarrassing: I wanted to track down and interview Richard Kermode, whose keyboard work on Santana’s Lotus I greatly admired. (His solo on “Incident at Neshubar” is something to behold.) Perhaps in a nod to my future role here on Microkhan, I wanted to reveal a hidden story—the tale of a relatively anonymous musician who, by dint of fortune and talent, had made a big impression on my post-adolescent self.

The mag gave me the green light and I prepared to dig in with gusto. There was just one problem: I didn’t have the foggiest notion of how to start reporting. The Clinton-Era Internet provided little help, and I didn’t yet have the reportorial chops to, say, try and contact Kermode through Santana’s record company. All seemed lost until I noticed that a distinguished British scholar was visiting campus for the semester, and he just happened to share a surname with my favorite keyboardist. Could they be father and son?

Drumming up every ounce of gumption that I could muster, I placed a call to the temporary office of Sir Frank Kermode. When the good professor answered, I stammered my way through my random inquiry—was he, by any chance, related to the musician who had blown my mind on numerous occasions?

There was a long pause—long enough so that I distinctly remember having to ask the professor if he was still there. And then I heard a slight expulsion of breath, followed by a reply I will never forget: “I haven’t any idea who you mean.”

Failure. And yet at the same time, success. When I hung up the phone and exhaled, I somehow realized that I’d started down a promising path—sort of like Luke Skywalker finally learning to beat the training remote aboard the Millennium Falcon. Yes, I’d run into a brick wall. But that’s part of the process. The important thing was that I’d tossed the reportorial dice, and discovered that getting nowhere wasn’t quite as dispiriting as I’d envisioned.

So, many thanks to the late Sir Frank Kermode for inadvertently encouraging my creative and professional maturation. And now it’ll likely be a good long while before I write another post like this. Because the next celebrity who pops to mind as having accidentally egged me along the road to lifelong writing is…Rush Limbaugh. I kid you not.

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Suicide in Sri Lanka

August 17th, 2010


My previous posts about suicide haven’t been particularly cheery, and not just because of the grim subject matter. Everything I’ve seen in recent years has convinced me that our current anti-suicide measures aren’t working particularly well, given the stability of America’s suicide rate over the past half-century. It’s quite discouraging to realize that innovations such as bridge-side barriers may not be so effective after all.

But the news out of South Asia offers a reason for hope. Sri Lanka was able to halve its suicide rate between 1995 and 2005, simply by banning the import of a particularly lethal class of pesticides. Incredibly, this reduction occurred even as the number of reported cases of self-poisoning by pesticide increased. The attempts simply fell short because people were relegated to ingesting less toxic substances than before the prohibition. The implications are discussed here:

There is a growing body of evidence showing that changes in the availability of a commonly used method of suicide may influence not only method-specific, but also overall suicide rates. The strongest evidence for this comes from the natural experiment afforded by the detoxification of the domestic gas supply in Britain in the 1960s. Similar effects on method specific and overall suicides have been documented following the enactment of gun-control legislation and restricting the availability of barbiturates in Australia.

The most relevant example of the influence of the easy availability of lethal methods of suicides in relation to pesticide suicide comes from Western Samoa. In the 1970s and 80s there were marked fluctuations in Western Samoa’s imports of paraquat, a pesticide associated with a particularly high case-fatality (>60%). These variations closely followed rise and falls in fatal episodes of paraquat self-poisoning and overall suicide. Indeed in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the period associated with the highest levels of paraquat imports, paraquat suicides accounted for around three quarters of suicides in West Samoa.

The paper ends by encouraging the likes of India and China to follow Sri Lanka’s lead in banning the import of the most dangerous pesticides—or, at the very least, to limit access to licensed users. Based on the figures from Sri Lanka, as well as the depressing annual stats regarding suicides by pesticide, such measures could literally save tens of thousands of lives each year.

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The Way Back

August 16th, 2010


Back to world headquarters today, via the skies. Many thanks to the Grand Empress for the excellent packing job.

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Before They Were the Enemy

August 13th, 2010


Okay, so maybe our species doesn’t really kill 100 million sharks per year, as is so widely reported. But even if the true figure is closer to 26 million, that’s still a heckuva lot of fish—and far out of proportion to the number of humans who annually perish in shark attacks. Blame Jaws if you must, but it’s obvious we have little respect for the sharp-toothed kings of the sea.

And so it’s instructive to note the relationship that Hawaiians of yore had with sharks, which could be accurately characterized as intimate. A presentation before the Hawaii Historical Society, dated 1892, delves into the curious love that the islands’ residents felt for the seaborne carnivores among them:

The shark was perhaps the most universally worshipped of all the aumakuas, and, strange to say, was regarded as peculiarly the friend and protector of all his faithful worshippers…Each several locality along the coast of the islands had its special patron shark, whose name, history, place of abode, and appearance, were well known to all frequenters of that coast. Each of these sharks, too, had its kahu keeper, who was responsible for its care and worship. The office of kahu was hereditary in a particular family, and was handed down from parent to child for many generations, or until the family became extinct. The relation between a shark-god and its kahu was oftentimes of the most intimate and confidential nature. The shark enjoyed the caresses of its kahu as it came from time to time to receive a pig, a fowl, or some other substantial token of its kahu‘s devotion. And in turn it was always ready to aid and assist the kahu, guarding him from any danger that threatened him. Should the kahu be upset in a canoe and be in serious peril, the faithful shark would appear just in time to take him on his friendly back in safety to the nearest shore. Such an experience, it is said, happened to Kaluahinenui, the kahu of a certain shark, while voyaging in the Alenuihaha channel. The schooner was overtaken in a severe storm and was lost with most on board. In her distress Kaluahinuenui called upon her shark god, Kamohoalii, who quickly came to her rescue, taking her upon his back to the neighboring island of Kahoolawe.

I do wonder whether the makers of Jaws IV: The Revenge were familiar with the Hawaiian notions of shark intuition and locomotion, and used that information to justify their seemingly ridiculous concept.

(Image via Cartoon Scrapbook)

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Tokamak Dream

August 12th, 2010

As part of Wired‘s latest cover package, I’ve got a short piece up about why, exactly, our dreams of nuclear fusion power have never come to fruition. In a nutshell, the problem is that plasma is really devious—we can get it plenty hot enough to produce fusion, in the style of the Sun and other stars, but we can never quite seem to keep it where we want it. Our only reliable means of doing so is to build bigger and bigger containment facilities, though that strategy has obvious limits. Unless we figure out how to build a Death Star-sized tokamak that can orbit the earth and beam energy to our homes, the bigger-is-better method will only work in the realm of the experimental.

But the question is, are those experiments worth the massive investment they require? In the piece, I mention ITER, the international research center that is set to host the world’s biggest tokamak. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the project is now costing a wee bit more than initially anticipated—the price tag for construction alone is now 15 billion euros and counting. And even in a best-case scenario, ITER won’t be fully operational ’til 2026, at which point it’s goal will be exceedingly modest: the production of 500 megawatts of power for a few minutes.

In other words, there will be no straight shot from a theoretical ITER success to commercialized nuclear fusion. Even the greatest optimists admit that it will take generations for any positive ITER results to lead to energy for the masses. So, is the investment worth it, given the high odds of total failure? The Financial Times says yes:

The question is, can Europe really afford not to pursue one of its most ambitious technological and scientific ventures – even if it ultimately fails? After all, its €6.6bn share of the total construction costs is a small price to pay for a potentially revolutionary solution to resolve the EU’s gaping trade deficit in energy of about €400bn a year.

I’m a bit more skeptical, perhaps because I just spent so much time researching fusion’s legacy of failure. But the real issue here isn’t the odds that we can someday mimic the Sun, but rather how we calculate the value of pursuing a line of scientific inquiry when the hypothetical rewards are decades, even centuries away. It’s not very often that we engage in expensive research that will not benefit those who are alive when the research begins. Such projects are tough political sells, and require a special kind of commitment from the researchers themselves—they know they will probably only be historical footnotes. But just because some research is farsighted doesn’t necessarily make it smart.

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The Joys of I-5

August 11th, 2010


I’m out here for work as well as pleasure, which means I’ll be spending the lion’s share of the day’s remainder on the Southern California freeways. Back tomorrow with more nukes-related polymathism, as well as (time permitting) a brief history of 19th-century Irish banditry. In the meantime, please enjoy a highlight from a World’s Fair of yore. Alas, I wasn’t able to locate any footage of Elektro’s canine sidekick.

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Lessons from Vela

August 11th, 2010

Yesterday’s cross-country plane ride gave me the chance to catch up with Jon Lee Anderson’s sobering dispatch from Iran, which pretty much cements the notion that the Islamic Republic will never give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Not that I didn’t already know that on some level—as Anderson so eloquently puts it, Iran seems hard-wired to strive for membership in the global elite:

In the Iranian imagination, a nuclear weapon is essential if the country is to assume its rightful place among the world’s leading nations. Iran once controlled a vast empire that included both Georgia and Tajikistan, and Iranians are proud nationalists, extremely sensitive about what they see as their country’s historic humiliations by Great Britain, the United States, and Russia. At the same time, they hold deep-seated feelings of cultural superiority over their neighbors. This has made for a prevailing world view that is at times both alarmingly naïve and toxically presumptuous.

In an attempt to counter the pessimism I felt after reading Anderson’s piece, I scurried back to the history books to learn all I could about South Africa’s decision to give up its nuclear-weapons program. South Africa did so at an incredibly late stage in the development process, perhaps even after conducting a failed atmospheric test that was detected by an American Vela satellite. (It’s also possible that an Israeli test in South African territory was to blame.)

Yet in reviewing the key lessons to be learned from South Africa’s dalliance with nukes, I came away even less convinced that Iran can ever be muscled or cajoled into abandoning its weapons program. The whole list of lessons is worth reading, just because they’re all so relevant to today’s situation. But this one really stuck out at me:

Although international political isolation may be an instrument to contain individual cases of nuclear proliferation, a point in such an isolation campaign may be reached where it actually becomes counter-productive and really pushes the would-be proliferator towards full proliferation. In the case of South Africa, this point was probably reached at the cut-off by the US of contractual supplies of fuel to both the SAFARI and Koeberg reactors together with the punitive financial measures applied by the US Administration at the time. The little leverage the US had over the South African nuclear programme, was lost.

As previously discussed on Microkhan, South Africa’s situation differed from Iran’s in several key aspects. Not only was South Africa not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty during its development heyday, but it also had some curious notions about using nukes for peace—specifically for large-scale mining operations.

(Image via the Nuclear Weapons Archive)

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In Transit

August 10th, 2010


En route to Los Angeles. Back to blogging as soon as I can reorient the brain box.

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The Journey West

August 9th, 2010


A bit hectic today, as I’m packing and prepping for a trip out to my hometown of Los Angeles. Haven’t been out there since early 2006, before I added the Grand Empress and Microkhan Jr. to the fold. Should be interesting to see how I view the city that made me through a family man’s eyes.

Don’t worry, Microkhan will still be going strong during my Western sojourn, even if I have to dig up my ol’ VIC Modem 1600 out of storage. In the meantime, please content yourself with the legend of Senda, the Inuit sea goddess. Apparently she didn’t have a happy domestic life:

[A] man promised Sedna that he would provide her with plenty of food to eat and furs for clothes and blankets. Sedna agreed to marry him. After they were man and wife, he took her away to his island. When they were alone on the island, he revealed to her that he was not a man at all, but a bird dressed up as a man! Sedna was furious, but she was trapped and had to make the best of it. He, of course, was not a good hunter and could not provide her with meat and furs. All the birdman could catch was fish. Sedna got very tired of eating fish every day.

They lived together on the island for a time, until Sedna’s father decided to come and visit. Upon seeing that his daughter was so unhappy and that her husband had lied to her, he killed the birdman. Sedna and her father got into his kayak and set off for home. The birdman’s friends discovered what they had done and wanted to avenge the birdman’s death. They flew above the kayak and flapped their wings very hard. The flapping of their wings resulted in a huge storm. The waves crashed over the small kayak making it almost impossible to keep the boat upright.

Sedna’s father was so frightened that the storm would fill his kayak with water and that he would drown in the icy waters that he threw Sedna overboard. He thought that this would get the birds to stop flapping their wings, but it did not. Sedna did not want to be left in the water, so she held tightly to the edge of her father’s boat and would not let go. Fearing that she would tip him over, the father cut her fingers off, one joint at a time. From each of her finger joints different sea creatures were born. They became fish, seals, walruses, and whales.

Sedna sank to the bottom of the ocean and there became a powerful spirit. Her home is now on the ocean floor. If you have seen her, you know she has the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish.

Sedna now controls all of the animals of the sea. The Inuit who rely on these animals want to maintain a good relationship with Sedna, so that she will continue to allow her animals to make themselves available to the hunters. Inuit have certain taboos that they must follow to keep Sedna happy. One of these says that when a seal is killed it must be given a drink of fresh water, not salt water.

According to these good folks, Sedna also a knack for dispatching Greenland sharks against her enemies—which included her traitorous father, who allegedly met his end in a shark’s jaws. Sort of like Quint in Jaws, but probably without the John Williams soundtrack.

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Someday Our Prince Will Come

August 9th, 2010

It takes a hard heart indeed not to be intrigued by the intricacies of a Vanuatuan cargo cult, especially one as puzzling as the Prince Philip Movement. The small sect believes that Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, a native of Greece known primarily for his verbal gaffes, is actually a Vanuatuan spirit in disguise, and that he will someday return to the South Pacific nation to bestow unfettered joy on the populace.

And what does Prince Philip think of all this misguided adulation? According to this recent Australian documentary on the cult, he seems bent on tacitly encouraging the worship. A passage from the show’s transcript:

Today the village of Yaohnanen has something to celebrate. It’s Prince Philip’s 89th birthday, and they’re preparing to throw a party for all the surrounding villages. The Duke of Edinburgh is well aware of his exalted status on Tanna. Over the past 20 years he’s been a discreet accomplice in the cult that’s grown up around him – sending photos and receiving the occasional gift.

CHIEF SIKO NATHUAN (Translation): Some people say he comes from England or Greece. But our grandfathers carved a club for pig-killing and sent it off to him with the message that if you’re from Tanna, hold this club in your hand and everybody in the world will know you’re from Tanna. This is the club he’s holding. It was carved here and sent to him. And he kept it to show he’s from Tanna.

Buckingham Palace offers a less-than-spirited response to the documentary’s charges of complicity here. Suffice to say that I find Prince Philip’s actions more than a little irritating. He could easily have squashed the cult long ago by denying his divinity. But perhaps he feels, rather condescendingly, that this cult is a net positive for its followers. Or maybe he just loves the attention—though I can’t see how a lifetime in the British Royal bubble wouldn’t leave him satisfied on that front.

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The Leaf of Allah

August 6th, 2010


Whenever Somali Islamists have managed to carve out some measure of political influence in the Horn of Africa, one of their first legal maneuvers has been to outlaw the chewing of khat. Their stated rationale is simple: Khat causes pleasure, pleasure leads to decadence, and decadence is the enemy of piety. It is exactly the same Puritanical logic the Taliban once used to deprive Afghanistan of musical instruments.

This means that not only are al-Shabab and its allies tremendous killjoys, but that they’re also no great students of religious history. As made abundantly clear in the excellent The Leaf of Allah, a history of khat cultivation and usage in Ethiopia, the leafy stimulant first became popular among devout Muslims, who used it as an aid to worship. The book’s author quotes from the memoirs of a 19th-century Egyptian military officer to make the case:

Toward nine o’clock in the morning, all the guests go to their hosts; there they sit in a circle and begin to read the first chapters of the Quaran, and address all sorts of praises to the Prophet. This done, the master of the house gives each a fistful of khat leaves which they chew in eager rivalry, in order to be able to swallow more easily. If the master of the house is rich, they drink milk; if he is poor, they drink water. After this the same ceremony begins again, reading the Quran, praises to the prophet, receiving and chewing of a fresh fistful of khat, and this goes on until 11 o’clock. As I asked one of them why they were reading the Quran in this way and celebrating, with the eating of khat, the praises to the prophet, he answered me.

“We read the Quaran and we bow to the Prophet because this plant is known to the saints and it permits us to keep vigil long through the night in order to worship the Lord.”

As the book goes on to describe, this practice was long loathed by Ehtiopians’ Christians, who deemed it intemperate and persecuted Muslim khat merchants. How ironic that the region’s self-appointed saviors of “true” Islam have now adopted the Puritanical attitude of the so-called Crusaders they purport to revile.

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If You’re Feeling Sinister

August 5th, 2010


Last night, I finally started working my way through The World at War, which I’ve long heard is the be-all and end-all of World War II documentaries. With only a single episode under my belt, I’m not yet equipped to verify the veracity of that statement. But there’s no disputing the filmmakers’ skills at digging up devastating footage. The series debut is chock full of haunting clips, depicting precisely choreographed Nazi youth festivals, a frolicking Eva Braun, and young girls screaming their lungs out as Adolf Hitler drones on about the injustice of Versailles. Given all we know about where that pageantry led, it’s tough to imagine more sinister images.

If you crave some small taste of what The World at War has to offer, check out this astonishing collection of full-color World War II clips, via the Romano Archives. It’s a hodge-podge of training films, amateur footage, and newsreels, some of which has been set to cheesy music. In the spirit of last night’s viewing, the ones I’ve been drawn to today are those that depict “normal” German life during wartime. The clip above, for example, shows Nazi soldiers and citizens enjoying a day at the circus, seemingly oblivious to the incalculable human suffering all around them. Though if you look closely, those smiles sure do seem wan and forced, as if there were men with guns on the edges of the scene forcing them to look content.

More banal-yet-tragic footage worth a look: Eva Braun on skis, the German hand-grenade championships, and, most depressing of all, Nazi sympathizers in New Jersey.

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When Best Intentions Fall Flat

August 5th, 2010

In addition to railing against American imperialism and digging up the bones of long-deceased heroes, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has taken a keen interest in improving his nation’s literacy rate. One of his key initiatives was a $50 million-plus program to teach 1.5 million Venezuelan adults to read, primarily by providing financial and job opportunity incentives. Just two years after the program’s 2003 launch, Chávez pronounced it a rousing success that had completely erased illiteracy in his native land.

Impressive stuff, until you scratch beneath the surface a bit. As it turns out, the results weren’t nearly as dazzling as the Chávez government claimed. For starters, the program wasn’t nearly as large as Caracas claimed—there’s just no way the budget figures jibe with the reported number of literacy trainers. And there were massive inefficiencies, too, caused by program materials that focused on political indoctrination rather than reading skills, and incentives that could be achieved without attaining full literacy. As a result:

Even if one attributes all of the reduction in illiteracy observed between the first semester of 2003 and the second semester of 2005 to Robinson, the estimated cost would be $536 per pupil who learned to read. In contrast, a recent study by UNESCO of 29 international adult literacy programmes estimated the average cost per successful learner to be $47 in sub-Saharan Africa, $30 in Asia, and $61 in Latin America. Under a more conservative – yet still optimistic – estimate of program success, namely that the total number of people who become literate through the program was only 48,327, then the cost per newly literate person would be much higher, at US$1,035.

But was this simply a case of public mismanagement? Perhaps not—perhaps the effort was doomed from the start, owing to a very basic misunderstanding about the neurological differences between children and adults:

Politicization, inadequate incentives, and budgetary problems are, however, common characteristics of large-scale literacy programs which do not appear to distinguish Robinson from many other cases of previous failures. Indeed what is remarkable about the record on literacy programs is that, despite a broad diversity in approaches, there are few cases of resounding success. Recent research has suggested that the problem may be in the cognitive model underlying the design of most literacy programs. As Abadzi (2003b) has argued, cognitive research has found that the process of learning to read in adult individuals may be systematically different from that in young children. The results of this literature suggest that significant changes must be made to the basic design of adult literacy programs in order for them to be successful.

This issue actually came up in some recent Microkhan comments. Children and adults have different ways of coping with the world in large part because their brains function in distinct ways. And so it would make sense that the methods we use to teach children to read—the handholding through phonics, the dissection of sentence structure—won’t work with adults who have been exposed to language for decades.

I’d like to think that there’s a better way to increase adult literacy. But if it’s really going to cost $1,035 per success, it might be worth asking whether those resources might be better allocated to helping scores of kids who are just beginning their educations.

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Risk and Reward on the Gulf of Aden

August 4th, 2010

If you haven’t yet checked out the Financial Times much-discussed breakdown on the economics of Somali piracy, do yourself a favor and allocate a few minutes’ worth of reading time. The piece won my heart by using buccaneer salary estimates to convey some perspective on how the notion of “dangerous work” differs so sharply between nations:

The figures debunk the myth that piracy turns the average Somali teenager into a millionaire overnight. Those at the bottom of the pyramid barely made what is considered a living wage in the western world. Each holder would have spent roughly two-thirds of his time, or 1,150 hours, on board the Victoria during its 72 days at Eyl, earning an hourly wage of $10.43. The head chef and sous-chef would have earned $11.57 and $5.21 an hour, respectively.

Even the higher payout earned by the attackers seems much less appealing when one considers the risks involved: the moment he stepped into a pirate skiff, an attacker accepted a 1-2 per cent chance of being killed, a 0.5-1 per cent chance of being wounded and a 5-6 per cent chance of being captured and jailed abroad. By comparison, the deadliest civilian occupation in the US, that of the king-crab fisherman, has an on-the-job fatality rate of about 400 per 100,000, or 0.4 per cent.

Let me add to the statistical zest by noting that a top-flight king crab fisherman can make upwards of $10,000 per day—though, granted that figure was bandied about before the Russians came along and started diluting the stock.

(h/t Russ Mitchell)

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The Khat Economy

August 4th, 2010


Where would the Ethiopian economy be without the mild, broadly illegal stimulant known as khat? Apparently in quite dire straits:

Coffee and khat exports earned Ethiopia close to 737 million dollars, which was 36.9pc of the total foreign exchange of two billion dollars that the country earned in the 2009/10 fiscal year with 36.5pc, 729.1 million dollars, coming from China.

Ethiopia’s foreign exchange income from exports for the year increased by 37.9pc to two billion dollars from last year’s 1.45 billion dollars, surpassing the 25pc the government had planned for.

Revenue generated by coffee and khat exports far exceeded that of last year, showing an increase of 40pc and 51.5pc respectively, while exports of leather and leather products plunged by 25.4pc.

There are several reasons that khat has become such a mainstay of the Ethiopian economy, starting with the strife in neighboring Somalia, which has undermined its capacity to export the drug. More important, the illegality of the trade bolsters prices, so that a small patch of khat can earn a farmer just as much as several acres of coffee. My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, based on reported U.S. street prices and a very liberal markup estimate, reveals that a pound of Ethiopian khat allocated for export will wholesale for around $20. Compare that to current coffee prices, which are considered sky-high at $1.80 per pound.

These facts obviously give the Ethiopian authorities an incentive to look the other way regarding khat exports, despite the fact that much of the merchandise heads for markets where the drug is illegal. (Khat is legal to possess and chew in Ethiopia, though the government has recently tried to crack down on usage among motorists.)

The alacrity of shipment is key to the trade, because khat is a drug that loses potency quite quickly—so quickly, in fact, that it declines from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule IV drug in a matter of weeks after harvest. (See here for the complete DEA schedule tables.) That means that khat smugglers operate under extreme time pressure, especially once the goods are offloaded from ships or planes to ground transport. And yet khat keeps making inroads wherever East African migrants may roam—to the great delight of the Ethiopian treasury.

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The Small Pleasures of Camel Meat

August 3rd, 2010

Last week I chimed in about the seemingly never-ending quest to bring deposed Chadian dictator Hissène Habré to justice. To add to that sad story, it’s worth remembering how Habré first gained international notoriety: the 1974 kidnapping of French archaeologist Francoise Claustre, who was held for nearly three years before gaining her release through the intervention of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi. Known to the French as L’affaire Claustre, the entire kidnapping saga was a clusterfuck of the highest order. When Claustre’s husband flew to the Chadian desert in 1975 to negotiate with Habré, he, too, was taken hostage. Then the French government paid a multimillion-dollar ransom, only to have Habré pocket the money and hang on to his captives. By the time the ordeal was over, Habré was not only extremely wealthy by Chadian standards, but also a folk hero for outwitting the nation’s former colonial master. The year after Claustre’s release, he was named Chad’s prime minister—quite an achievement for a desert guerrilla.

What fascinates me about this case isn’t necessarily how it bolstered Habré’s political fortunes, though, but rather how Claustre managed to endure her long, terrible captivity. It was never easy:

She told one interviewer she contemplated suicide because her life had become so desolate. She told another the biggest treat she and her husband, who was kept in a separate enclosure, had was the camel meat that occasionally spiced up their diet of rice, vegetables and fruit.

Yet as an academic at heart, Claustre also did her best to keep learning while imprisoned in the desert:

While a captive, Mme. Claustre said, she taught herself to read and write Toubou, the language of the rebels, and performed normal cooking and cleaning chores done by Toubou women. “They understood my distress,” she said. “And I tried as much as I could to integrate myself into their family life.”

This may sound ghoulish, but I think there is much to be learned about human psychology by studying how people respond to traumatic circumstances such as extended captivity—especially in non-judicial situations such as the one faced by Claustre, in which the outcome is never certain. People have all sorts of different coping mechanisms, of course—I’ve always been struck, for example, how much Terry Anderson relied on religious faith to see him through his seven-year ordeal in Beirut. But those who survive the experience all seem to share one common trait: a notable lack of self-pity. That’s not to imply that they don’t feel bitterness, toward both their captors and those back home who seem to be sitting on their hands. But to pull through that sort of sudden, undeserved loss of freedom, one cannot dwell too long on what might have been.

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Off the Canvas

August 3rd, 2010


Apologies for deserting you yesterday, but I was completely pancaked by what appeared to be the dreaded Osaka flu. A good night’s sleep and some orange-flavored Gatorade seems to have restored me to halfway decent health, so I’ll soon be posting anew about Chadian kidnapping, Malaysian snake control, and the challenges of increasing adult literacy in the developed world. Thanks for your patience.

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