An exceedingly quick Bad Movie Friday this week, as we need to duck away and deal with some weighty matters. So we’re going with a slam dunk: Cyborg Cop, directed by quasi-legendary Sam Firstenberg (aka the man who gave birth to that cinematic abomination known as American Ninja). While Firstenberg may have some action chops, […]
Tags:American Ninja·Bad Movie Friday·Cyborg Cop 2·movies·Sam Firstenberg
In the midst of researching a forthcoming post on the economics of sports bribery, we’ve been learning a heckuva lot about the backstory on Shoeless Joe Jackson, the baseball great whose legacy is tarnished by the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. We dig the fact that Jackson was a linthead who spent his childhood working […]
We realize you need no convincing that life in a Bangladeshi brothel is beyond abysmal. But this NGO’s dispatch from the frontlines of the South Asian nation’s flesh trade is still a stunner. As if a prostitute’s lot in life wasn’t bad enough already, there is now tremendous pressure on brothel employees to warp their […]
Look, we’re as excited as the next khan about the forthcoming FIFA World Cup—if Paraguay wins it all, we stand to make a pretty penny. But our enthusiasm for soccer’s top tournament pales in comparison to the love we feel for the Kabaddi World Cup 2010, currently taking place in Punjab, India. Longtime readers already […]
The upheaval in Kyrgyzstan has been both violent and quick, with autocratic president Kurmanbek Bakiyev electing to flee as soon as his security forces proved themselves incompetent. It seems like just yesterday that Bakiyev came to power amidst the hope spawned by the Tulip Revolution. And now destitute Kyrgyzstan is back to square one, in […]
Tags:Coltan Revolution·Kurmanbek Bakiyev·Kyrgyzstan·mobile phones·politics
Last night, we attempted to offer a pal of ours some reassurance. He’s expecting his first kid this summer, and he naturally has mixed feelings about what the future holds in store—the unabashed joy of ushering new life onto Planet Earth, of course, but also the loss of a whole bunch of personal autonomy for […]
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 […]
We’re just days away from the Sudan’s hotly anticipated elections, and no one can say for certain how the process will unfold. But after reading this haunting dispatch, we fear that violence will mar the nation’s fledgling attempt at democracy. It was written by photographer Pete Muller, who has been accompanying music-star-turned-aspiring-politician Mary Boyoi on […]
Tags:Mary Boyoi·politics·Sudan
In our haste to post about Dave Tompkins’ vocoder opus, we neglected to mention one of the book’s best features: the fact that it highlights an epic Klaus Kinski performance about which we were entirely unaware. Despite our passable knowledge of French, we can’t quite grok the plot of 1979’s Zoo zéro based on the […]
Tags:Klaus Kinski·movies·vocoder
The nexus between technology and music is obviously a topic of great interest ’round Microkhan headquarters, so we couldn’t have been any more delighted to receive a gratis copy of Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop a few weeks back. The book is everything a […]
Tags:books·Dave Tompkins·hip-hop·How the Wreck a Nice Beach·Kraftwerk·music·technology·vocoder·World War II
Until their 2010 first-round draft choice inevitably blows out his ACL before scoring a single point, we will not blog about our beloved Los Angeles Clippers again. But we couldn’t let this dismal season pass without dredging up an anecdote that sums up the franchise’s eternal woes in about as concise a package imaginable. It […]
Tags:basketball·Donald T. Sterling·Los Angeles Clippers·sports
Staying on the ancient sports theme, we’d like to call your attention to the clip above, which depicts the not-so-delicate art of bull leaping. (We’ve got it cued up to the good stuff, so click away in the knowledge that you’ll be wasting zero time.) What fascinates us about this sport is not so much […]
Another lost season for our beloved Los Angeles Clippers has got us thinking about what fate our team would have faced in a less forgiving age. It’s easy to forget that sportsmanship is a rather recent innovation, and that athletes in the ancient world often faced dire consequences should they lose a single contest. We’re […]
The last week’s been mighty rough, as we suffered through an illness akin to that which Pip endured toward the end of Great Expectations. Yet just as Dickens’ hero pulled through the ordeal to hear the joyous news that Joe and Biddy got married, we have come through the other side with lifted hearts and […]
Tags:books·Charles Dickens·comics·competitive eating·Great Expectations·housekeeping
