Day 141: Nauru – A Place You Probably Never Knew You Wanted To Visit

For those of you looking to escape the world, I may have found the place for you. It’s cozy, out of the way, and you can pack light. Just remember to bring your satellite internet uplink or else that box set of West Wing seasons you’ve been meaning to catch up on, because there isn’t a lot to do there.

Nauru (pronounced Na-oo-ru) is the tiniest republic in the world. Covering only 21 square kilometers (about 8 square miles), it’s an island in Micronesia, so close to the equator you can smell it. The population is about 9200. That’s an entire nation made up of roughly the same amount of people as you’d find in the end zone section at a Cleveland Browns game, tucked onto an island about an eighth the size of Cleveland itself.

Though hopefully they're a little less unruly.

At one time there were twelve tribes living on the island in relative peace. They were all descended from Micronesians and Polynesians, and had no reason to quarrel. Then the white folks showed up. Early white passers-by (who had named the placed ‘Pleasant Island’ because the locals were so damn jovial) would trade guns and liquor for water and supplies. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not long after the local tribes had acquired guns, they found reasons to use them. Civil war broke out between the twelve tribes, and the population shrunk from about 1400 to 900 by 1888. Things were ugly on Pleasant Island, and that wasn’t helped by the fact that Nauruan warriors dressed like this guy:

He looks like a Venusian Palace Guard in a 1954 low-budget sci-fi movie.

Luckily, the Germans showed up and brought some peace to the island. They annexed the joint and hung their hats there for almost three decades. In 1900, phosphate was discovered. Phosphate can fetch good money, so the struggling little island had found itself an economy. Germany might have been able to cash in on the Nauruan good fortune, but they got themselves embroiled in a war instead. Read more…

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Day 140: Don’t Mess With A White Woman – The Hannah Duston Story

If high school history classes were filled with the world’s most extreme displays of badassery, no one would ever ditch to go smoke behind the A&W. History needs more wow-factor. It needs more Hannah Duston.

This is the story of a Puritan woman who was forced into an awful situation. Then she John-McClaned the hell out of it.

The tale opens on March 15, 1697, in the colonial town of Haverhill, Massachusetts (home of lovable TV personality Tom Bergeron). King William’s War was raging – this was one of numerous wars between the English and French over pissing rights in the New World. Both nations had allied themselves with various native tribes, which made for a lot of blood running through what would eventually be streets.

The Legolego tribe remained wisely neutral.

Like any good Puritan family, Hannah and her husband, Thomas, liked to reproduce. At this point they had nine kids, one of whom had been born only a week earlier. Thomas was out working his field when he first noticed the Natives approaching.

The Natives’ strategy was to break off into small groups and attack multiple buildings in the town at once. It worked; they torched nine homes and killed twenty-seven people in the attack. But not Thomas Duston. Thomas Duston took the hell off. Read more…

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Day 139: Psychophysics, Qu’est-ce que c’est?

The trajectory of this writing experiment is going to fly through some pretty personal space, I’ve accepted that. One of my goals in this exercise is to learn more about myself, why I am the way I am. To that end, I’ll be employing today’s topic – psychophysics –  to help me learn why I am so completely indifferent on the subject of nougat.

Apart from sounding like the most awesome high school science course ever, psychophysics is the scientific study of the relationship between stimulus and sensation. All I really know about this science is what little I’ve skimmed on Wikipedia today, so I’m going to completely misuse it as much as humanly possible. Because this is a solo project, I will be acting as both subject and observer in this experiment. I’m not sure if that is scientifically ethical, especially since it didn’t work out so well for Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, but even that disaster earned a sequel, so I should be okay.

For the required nougat, I will be utilizing the candy bar variety. I know, nougat is sold on its own, mixed with nuts and fruit or whatever, but I grew up near a convenience store, not a confectionary. My encounters with nougat – and my subsequent indifference to it – were forged by the good people at Hershey’s, Cadbury, etc. For this experiment I have purchased a Costco box of Mars (Milky Way for Canadians) and Three Muskateers bars. Using a scalpel and most of my weekend, I removed all traces of chocolate and caramel, leaving me with a stack of unappealing beige slabs. It looks like the most boring animal in the world broke into my house and pooped its beige feces all over my kitchen counter.

I first experimented with the Odor Detection Threshold. I moved to an empty spare bedroom, which may not be lab-pure, but shouldn’t contain any intrusive smells from other foodstuffs, scented candles, potpourri, or seared flesh (I do most of my at-home branding in the den). I deposited three turds of nougat on the dresser, then exited the room. I reentered slowly, keeping track of when I first noticed the odor. Conclusion: I have to be within 2 inches in order to smell the nougat, partly because it doesn’t give off any significant aroma, and partly because my entire house smells like my eldest bulldog, Rufus.

That is to say, not especially good.

Read more…

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Day 138: Batman And Lesbians!

Here’s a little soupcon of insight into how an article is born. Today I happened upon the topic of Batman. For the briefest of schoolboy in-breaths I thought I’d struck gold with my second Dark Knight-themed article. Then I looked closer.

Batman is a city.

A city in Turkey, to be precise. Okay, I thought. I’m sure the locals have embraced the name and opened a bunch of Batman-themed stores and restaurants, right? Actually, no.

Batman is an oil-boom town, having sprung to vibrancy post-1950 upon the discovery of that same bubblin’ crude that turned my own hometown from a fur-trading frigid cold northern gateway into an oil-rich frigid cold northern gateway. Batman’s Wikipedia article is long and detailed, and contains no mention of Gotham’s Caped Crusader.

...but you know he's there somewhere.

Well, almost no mention. There is one tiny anecdote that jostled its way through the door and crouched within the ‘In Media’ section. It seems in 2008, Batman mayor Hüseyin Kalkan announced that he wanted to sue Warner Brothers and director Christopher Nolan for using the name ‘Batman’ without prior permission from the city.

I didn’t make that up. To one reporter, Kalkan claimed he was flattered that Warner Brothers was doing their part to make the Batman name famous, but he felt that he couldn’t in good conscience allow them to do so without having asked permission. Another article presents his assessment of damages: the Batman films are allegedly responsible for a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate in the city of Batman. Holy misplaced Batarang! Bruce Wayne is killing innocent civilians!

I’m wondering if there are parts of turkey in which political office is determined by who can spout off the most crazy in a single press conference. Read more…

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Day 137: Bill Whatcott – Spreader Of Hate, Possibly Has A Small Penis

You see this guy? I would never advocate violence toward another human being, but more than anyone else in Canada, this guy deserves to eat crap. I’m not using that as an expression either – I won’t encourage violence, but I will encourage any waiter / busboy / cook that sees this guy in their restaurant to find a way to sprinkle some fecal matter into his club sandwich.

I hesitate to call him a man… he is so, but only by its most vile, dishonorable definition. A better appellation might simply be a flabby cracker. A flacker.

So why does this flacker have me in such a flap? Well, Bill Whatcott is one of those free-speech advocates who demonstrates his advocacy by telling everybody else that how they live their lives is wrong. He’s one of those devout “Christians” who skim past the ‘God is the only judge’ stuff so that he can judge everyone else. Bill is the pustule on democracy and western freedom that reminds us that even liberty has its baggage.

Rather than intersperse today’s article with photos pertaining to my subject (I’d rather not look at any more flacker pics today), I’m just going to scatter in some pictures of things that make me smile. Think of them as meditative escapes to keep my disdain in check.

 

If you are gay, you are a personal affront to Bill Whatcott. You are invading his existence by breathing, and by being who you are. Bill wants to turn the public against you. He wants everyone to see you as diseased, sinful, and destructive to society. He has distributed leaflets door to door, depicting images of diseases that he believes exist because of gay sex. Pardon my bluntness, but someone needs to stick a dick in this guy’s mouth and shut him up.

Bill is a strict pro-life flacker. He has also plunked into mailboxes a variety of leaflets that depict dismembered fetuses in an attempt to sway people to his side. I’d bet if I handed him a leaflet featuring a photo of a topless woman as a part of my “Hooray Boobies” campaign, he’d call it filthy pornography. But this is about how Bill gets Bill’s message out.

Read more…

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Day 136: A Strange Slice Of Saskatchewan

It goes without saying that anyone whose Wikipedia article describes him as a “Finnish-born sailor, farmer and Canadian madman” deserves a kilograph here. I had bungled on to the story of Tom Sukanen while researching my original topic, the Great Wall of Saskatchewan.

This is a real thing. Over the course of nearly 30 years, a Saskatchewan farmer named Albert Johnson stacked a bunch of stones together to build a cementless, mortorless wall. The wall-shaped pile is more than 3/8 of a mile long, averaging between six and twelve feet along the way.

It'd be an 8 hour drive for me to see this... I think it looks worth the effort.

You probably can’t see it from space, nor will it repel any invading hordes, but passes for a tourist attraction in Saskatchewan. As it turns out, so does Tom Sukanen.

Tom was born in Finland. He learned to build ships and set off to the Promised Land of America when he was 20. For whatever reason – and I’m sure there is a reason – most of the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish immigrants were shipped off to the northern states. Tom landed in Minnesota.

He met a young Finnish girl who was stranded alone on her farm after her father had died. It’s a sweet story of a young romance, but don’t let the swelling string section distract you – Tom was not altogether stable.

Tom and his wife became farmers together. They did about as well as farmers could do in that early chunk of the twentieth century, meaning they were able to squeeze a passable living off the land, while finding time to pop out three daughters and a son. Life was idyllic on the Sukanen farm.

Then Tom took off. In 1911 he left his family – no one is quite certain why. Perhaps he was trying to find a better life for his flock, or maybe he’d just had enough of Minnesota. Maybe he’d had enough of his wife – she wasn’t invited. Read more…

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Day 135: Monkey Brains – A Truly Offal Food

I thought this was a joke. Did Ms. Wiki really serve me up a helping of monkey brains for today’s topic?

Delicious. Fortunately, as this is a high-turnover project that only allows for a tiny window of research, I won’t be able to seek out and review an actual dish of monkey brains. Instead I’ll rely on the foolhardy boldness of others.

“Very delicious.” Those words allegedly came from Paul Burrell, Princess Diana’s butler. Though the veracity of this claim is up for debate, he states that he was served monkey brains on banana leaves and coconut palms during a foreign visit. He describes the texture as ‘melt in the mouth’. I’d imagine there are a number of things with a melt-in-my-mouth texture (like poop, for instance) that I have no desire to try.

Alright, maybe I’m being too quick to judge. After all, we eat foods that other cultures would find revolting, don’t we? Even my own grandparents, raised under the strict rigidity of almost-kosher Orthodox Judaism, would turn their noses at my love of bacon.

But that’s just crazy. Bacon is bacon, while brains are slimy and disgusting, right? Not to mention the risk of contracting Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. I don’t know what any of that is, but it sounds worse than the indigestion I’m already experiencing just thinking about it.

Monkey brains are not a common dish in many cultures. It seems to get tied in with either tradition or superstition. For example, the Anyang tribe

"Annyong."

…of Cameroon have a history of feeding a monkey brain to a new tribal chief while another senior member of the group would eat the heart. Is that really any stranger than stuffing a bunch of seasoned bread inside a dead bird’s ass at Thanksgiving?

In Indonesia, monkeys have become quite scarce because their brains are so prized as a foodstuff. They believe that monkey brains will cure impotence, and since internet-bought Viagra is often a scam, I guess monkey brains seem like the more viable alternative. Read more…

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Day 134: Ephemera & The Cult Of The World Calendar

Today’s topic is ephemera. Defined as transitory written matter that is not intended to be saved or preserved, it is naturally something that folks in our society save and preserve to a ridiculous extent. People collect ephemera like they’ve found the lost written prophecies of King Jehoiachin. I’m sure somewhere in the murky basement stash of my youthful souvenirs I’ve still got the set list I snagged from a 1994 Pink Floyd show I saw. That’s just ephemeridiculous.

Concert tickets are big in the ephemera world. I used to hang on to my ticket stubs, as though I’d never remember that I saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse unless I maintained possession of this evidentiary paperwork.

I think the aspiring hoarder needs to look at a wider variety of ephemera with which to fill those pesky empty corners of floor. Like airsickness bags.

Because who doesn't want to hang out with the guy with all the barf bags?

Curator Steven J. Silberberg maintains the collection showcased at www.airsicknessbags.com, an impressive display of over 2200 puke-sacks. I assume that, like most collectors, Mr. Silberberg prefers to handle only unused bags. He even offers a Starter Kit for those who are looking to succumb to the addictive rush of barf-bag collecting. No dollar amount is set, the page simply offers three bags mailed to anyone who shoots him an email. I’m seriously considering doing this, if only to witness the look of exasperation on my wife’s face when they show up. Read more…

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Day 133: Of Folds And Smith

It’s never easy writing about someone I admire. I run the risk of babbling, and sounding like a gushing fanboy, instead of the award-winning journalist that I’d rather pretend to be. A couple of days ago I found a unique take on the Beatles, which allowed me to write intelligently about their work, and avoid falling into the trap of, “Isn’t that chord just before the vocals come in on ‘Sun King’ so frickin’ awesome?!”

Today I’m tackling the Ben Folds Five. First, allow me to expunge the giddy music nerd inside me: I’ll go on record that I believe Folds to be among the finest songwriters and musical minds in the business today. He is also one of only a half-dozen celebrities around whom I would be truly fan-struck and tongue-dumb to meet. Which I did (though briefly), and I totally was.

Ben Folds Five have reunited for a new album, and they’ve opted to grab their marketing machetes and slash a new path through the distribution wilderness for the disc’s release. Using Pledgemusic.com, they are offering a free download of their new track, and upgrading each of their fans to Vice President of Promotions for the BF5’s de facto label. In short, they’re shirking traditional marketing methods (which makes sense, since their music hardly meshes with the bilious pap that record companies like to promote these days), and turning to their fans to inspire their friends and family to come to their senses and check out the new record.

Yes, I still call them 'records'. A 'disc' is something in your spine or something the Tron dudes throw around.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it was done before – sort of – in a different realm. Last year, filmmaker Kevin Smith released his brilliantly Tarantinonian Red State through the word-of-mouth of his fans, a tour, and by harnessing our culture’s new lifeforce: social media.

Apart from the fact that Smith is another one of those six or so art-makers with whom I’d love to sit down and brain-pick, there are a surprising number of similarities I’ve noticed in the career and artistic arcs of both Smith and Folds. Read more…

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Day 132: Diagnosis – Jumping Frenchmen Of Maine…?

As a public service message to my readers, I’d like to inform you that you are all somehow diseased. For most of you, this extends no further than the general diseases of our society: inherent greed, chronic materialism, finding the films of Katherine Heigl to be funny, and so on. But some of you are enduring far greater tribulations than the rest of us.

My intent is not to mock the afflicted (unless you have the Heigl thing, then you’re open to full-contact derision), but merely to offer the occasional scarcely discussed disorder to allow you all to self-diagnose by eventually finding one which probably mostly pertains to you.

If you happen to be a French-Canadian working as a lumberjack in the state of Maine (and I’m aware that this constitutes roughly 37% of my reading audience), you may want to get your nerves checked out. In 1878, George Miller Beard discovered a rare disorder in which the ‘startle’ reflex is exaggerated. Not being a slave to the ‘-itis’ or ‘-ilia’ school of psychological condition naming, Beard dubbed this the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine.

Not to be confused with the theatre troupe of the same name. Performing all week at the Westbrook Rec Center.

Beard was an American neurologist in the late 19th century. The Wikipedia article rather insensitively mentions that he “immediately jumped” at the chance to witness this phenomenon. Ha ha. Read more…

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