Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'Canada'

Negative Space

September 26th, 2022 · Comments Off on Negative Space

In the course of revising a Wired story I’ve been working on, I’ve had to dive into the technical history of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That little research tangent brought me in contact with this lengthy piece about Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who voiced HAL, the movie’s murderous AI system. There’s a […]

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The Mystery of Throatboxing

September 10th, 2012 · Comments Off on The Mystery of Throatboxing

Throat singing is considered something of a female pursuit in Inuit culture, but Nelson Tagoona has no qualms about incorporating the artform’s esophagus-expanding techniques into his beatboxing. Check out the above clip, then move onto this related performance, which took place this summer in front of one of Microkhan’s favorite architectural curiosities.

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The Human Fly, Cont’d

July 27th, 2011 · 2 Comments

Though I can’t quite claim to have solved the mystery of The Human Fly’s identity and current whereabouts, which I wrote about a month ago, I’m happy to report that Microkhan has at least uncovered another thread to the tale. Canadian film director Steve Goldmann popped by the blog to point us toward his documentary […]

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Let it All Come Down

May 2nd, 2011 · Comments Off on Let it All Come Down

If you desire a brief respite from today’s deluge of bin Laden-related news and punditry, take a sec to check out the work of Bern Will Brown. He’s sort of the Paul Gaugin of the frozen north, having settled into the tiny Arctic hamlet of Colville Lake many decades ago. Though he originally journeyed up […]

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The Measure of a Story

December 29th, 2010 · 6 Comments

I toyed with the idea of doing a couple of “Best of…” lists in these waning days of MMX, much as I did last year. But in the course of trying to pull together some worthy candidates from the realms of filmdom, books, and booze, I got to thinking about the criteria I was employing—at […]

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When Bread-and-Circuses Backfires

June 7th, 2010 · Comments Off on When Bread-and-Circuses Backfires

While researching a post about the ever-popular sport of wild cow milking, we came across a paper on the history of Native Canadian cowboys. A healthy chunk of the work is dedicated to the development of rodeo culture among Canada’s First Nations, who were often encouraged to engage in calf roping and bronco riding in […]

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The Sons of Gumby

May 25th, 2010 · Comments Off on The Sons of Gumby

Our beloved WEFUNK just celebrated its 600th show in grand fashion, with sets dedicated to late ’60s soul, Clinton-era hip-hop, and the fine art of locking. Given the show’s Montreal base, they also couldn’t help but throw some north-of-the-border rap into the mix, including the gem above from DJ Format (whose British by birth) and […]

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Where Smirnoff Gets Its Due

April 7th, 2010 · 8 Comments

From the northernmost portion of Canada comes a salient lesson on mankind’s bottomless thirst for booze—a thirst that we’ll go to ridiculous lengths to slake: The announcement of an alcohol task force comes on the heels of a string of bootlegging busts across the territory. At a news conference Wednesday, RCMP Sgt. Jimmy Akavak said […]

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Lord of the Snow

February 16th, 2010 · Comments Off on Lord of the Snow

Big doings up in the Yukon yesterday, as Austrian dog-sledding superstar Hans Gatt captured his fourth Yukon Quest title. If you’ve ever been curious about the strategies employed by professional mushers during their competitive odysseys, we highly recommend the invaluable “Check Point” blog, which is sort of the ESPN.com of dog sledding. We especially enjoyed […]

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Up on Trickle Creek

January 27th, 2010 · 4 Comments

Having spent some time in Alberta’s northern climes, we’ve taken an unusually keen interest in the arrest of Wiebo Ludwig, a religious patriarch with a Luddite streak a mile wide. Having served time for vandalizing oil-industry equipment in the past, Ludwig recently presented himself as man capable of coaxing a fellow pipeline bomber into giving […]

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The Pause That RefreshesDetoxes

December 18th, 2009 · 2 Comments

A debate over the best-ever Coca-Cola slogan recently led us to this useful list, which contains some ad-speak that likely wouldn’t pass muster on today’s Madison Avenue. Our favorite archaic slogan is the one from 1906: “The great national temperance beverage.” This struck us as more than a little humorous, given Coca-Cola’s roots as a […]

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The Demise of “Criminal Insanity”

November 30th, 2009 · 7 Comments

In reading about the murder of four police officers near Tacoma, we were most struck by the prime suspect’s obvious paranoid schizophrenia—a disease that seems to have been wholly untreated, in part because his family members were afraid of staging any sort of medical intervention: As part of the child-rape investigation, the sheriff’s office interviewed […]

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A Bad Time to Get Bitten

August 7th, 2009 · Comments Off on A Bad Time to Get Bitten

We’ve long assumed that antivenins were stocked in every hospital pharmacy, so that snakebite victims need only worry about getting medical attention in time. But, alas, that’s really not the case at all—even mainstream antivenins such as CroFab must often be shipped in to address specific cases, and rarer remedies are getting increasingly hard to […]

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The Technetium-99 Crisis

June 12th, 2009 · 5 Comments

There are already so many reasons to love our Canadian brothers: poutine, Rush, Alex Trebek. But let’s add another to the lengthy list: The nation to our north makes PET scans possible, by producing the bulk of the world’s supply of medical isotopes. Chief among these isotopes is Technetium-99, which is key to safe pediatric […]

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How to be a Millionaire

May 13th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Step one: Join the Hells Angels. Step two: Rat everyone out to the Mounties. Step three: Profit, to the tune of $2.5 million. More on Canada’s “Operation SharQc” here. With the Hells Angels leadership in disarray, it may be their sons who start to step up.

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The Analyzer’s Sad End

February 19th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Back in my days as a cub reporter, I worked the hacker beat for U.S. News & World Report. My first story was about a crack of the Pentagon dubbed Solar Sunrise. It was perpetrated by a trio of young geeks: Two California juveniles and their online mentor, Ehud “Analyzer” Tenenbaum of Israel. The crime […]

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