William Wordworth’s “To Toussaint L’ouverture” works beautifully today as a meditation on loss and rebirth: TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy of men! Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough Within thy hearing, or thy head be now Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den; – O miserable Chieftain! where and when Wilt thou find patience? Yet […]
Tags:earthquakes·Haiti·poetry·Toussaint L'ouverture·William Wordsworth
One of the most ghoulish-yet-wise sayings we’ve ever heard is “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” (Or, a bit more accurately, “poorly constructed buildings do.”) So as soon as we heard news of Haiti’s latest natural catastrophe yesterday, we knew the death toll would be high. There is little chance that the nation’s relatively weak […]
Tags:California·concrete·earthquakes·engineering·Haiti·Iran·natural disasters
We’re gonna use the khan’s prerogative to spend the rest of today on our ongoing Secret Major Project™. In our brief absence, please take a few seconds to check out Big Daddy Kane at his finest. While we may heartily disagree with his eschewment of escargot and the word “rendezvous,” we can scarcely deny that […]
Tags:Big Daddy Kane·hip-hop·housekeeping·Michael Jackson·music
For reasons too drab to mention, we recently stumbled across this sordid 1982 tale about a self-described “mountain man” who turned murderous. We were struck not so much by the brutality of Henry Burton Merrill’s crimes, but rather by the media’s insistence on referring to him as a “hermit.” And that got us thinking, naturally, […]
Tags:California·crime·divorce·eremitism·Herman the Hermit·Los Angeles·religion
Medical history’s dustbin is full of well-meaning treatments that were basically guaranteed to increase a patient’s misery. Several months back, for example, we wrote about the use of Torpillage to treat victims of shell shock. Now, via the journals of the great Irish explorer John Palliser, comes news of a 19th-century Native American rabies remedy […]
Tags:asbestos·John Palliser·medical history·Native Americans·rabies·wolves
Atop one of our record shelves sits a fossilized trilobite, given to us by a dear friend of the Grand Empress. We’ve long cherished the gift, but as we went about some cleaning chores while catching yesterday’s Ravens-Patriots tilt, a troubling thought entered our consciousness while giving the arthropod a shine: how do we know […]
Tags:arthropods·crime·fossils·fraud·Heinrich Harder·Morocco·trilobites
We here at Microkhan headquarters have been been shy about expressing our love for modern pentathlon, by far the most underrated sport in the Summer Olympics. And so we were recently overjoyed to discover that none other than Dolph Lundgren, one of the finest actors of the past half century, shares our affinity for the […]
Tags:Bad Movie Friday·Dolph Lundgren·Hard Ticket to Hawaii·Invasion U.S.A.·modern pentathlon·movies·Olympics·Pentathlon·sports
During one of our recent discussions about food taboos, a sage commenter noted that one of the theories regarding such prohibitions is that they aid social cohesion—if we can all agree to, say, eschew beef or Funyuns, we instantly have something that defines us in opposition to “The Other.” Given the inherent creepiness of that […]
Tags:cults·food·Guyana·Jonestown·politics·psychology·sushi·Unification Church
Of the twenty abandoned cities chronicled on this list, none seems quite as spooky as Agdam. Once home to 150,000 Azerbaijanis, the city’s population is now officially zero, thanks to the ravages of the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Agdam was supposed to the capital of a new republic, but was instead destroyed by retreating Armenian soldiers in […]
Tags:Agdam·Armenia·Azerbaijan·Nagorno-Karabakh War·ruins·urban design
Last night while cooking dinner, we decided to rev up a documentary that’s been languishing on our Netflix Instant queue for ages: Witch Hunt. Suffice to say that we weren’t anywhere near prepared for the ensuing 90 minutes, in which the filmmakers unwind a completely devastating J’accuse regarding the Kern County child-abuse panic of the […]
Tags:California·crime·economics·John Stoll·law·movies·South Korea·Witch Hunt
Just before we broke for Christmas, we posted about the possibility that America’s recent love affair with unsaturated fatty acids may be part of the reason our crime rates have dropped so precipitously. Now comes word that fat may have another positive application: curing folks afflicted with witiko psychosis, which (allegedly) causes a sudden craving […]
Tags:Algernon Blackwood·bears·cryptozoology·Native Americans·psychology·witiko psychosis
In the midst of prepping a forthcoming post on urban population trends, we randomly stumbled across this 1959 video from the Bureau of Mines, in which asbestos gets its praises sung by an amazingly eloquent narrator. Historical curios such as this can only make us wonder which of today’s miracle products will eventually be revealed […]
Contrary to what we learned in Mrs. Glickman’s Algebra II class lo those many years ago, mathematics is not a language that transcends all cultural barriers. That’s because tackling math problems requires a willingness to give in to abstraction, a leap that not all cultures are equipped to make. Just check out how the Saora […]
We’re in the midst of trying to close two Wired pieces, including the gargantuan epic that took us out to Kenya last fall. More soon, honest—in the meantime, a sonic rarity worthy of your highly valued ears.
Over the past several days, no ad campaign has been as inescapable as the one hyping Food Network’s recently aired “Super Chef Battle”. The innumerable commercials and Web banners that ran in support of the event made it seem like a culinary version of a Thunderdome match, crossed with the Apollo Creed versus Ivan Drago […]
Tags:ancient history·Croesus·food·Food Network·Herodotus·Mario Batali·Roman Empire·TV
Back during our days writing Slate‘s “Explainer” column, we were once asked to tackle a statistically tricky question: Could self-styled moral watchdog William Bennett really have, as he claimed, broken even playing high-stakes slot machines for over a decade? (Quickie answer: Almost certainly not, unless the man is blessed with Ashley Albright levels of luck.) […]
For anyone with even a passing interest in cult psychology, San Diego State University’s Jonestown Archive is well worth a thorough gander. Our favorite section, of course, is a compendium of primary sources that date back to Jim Jones’s earliest days in Indiana. Among the choice morsels contained therein is a petition that all members […]
Tags:cults·Guyana·Jim Jones·Jonestown·Peoples Temple·psychology·religion·Soviet Union
