We thought of that piece while watching the above trailer for this week’s Bad Movie Friday entry: 1980’s Alligator, which sought to bring the Jaws/Piranha/Orca formula to the streets of Chicago. As the professor type notes early in the clip, the titular creature could not possibly eat enough to stay alive—there’s a reason that modern alligators don’t max out at 36 feet. But the film never quite explains how its villain manages to survive, except to suggest that it’s just really, really adept at chomping on people.

We’ll forgive that plot hole, though, give that screenwriter John Sayles—yes, that John Sayles—did come up with a rather clever way of explaining the gator’s impressive size:

By now you may be wondering how a creature which normally grows to a size of 15 feet, 150-200 pounds in ideal conditions, can be transformed into a two-ton dynamo while living in the cold, murky, dirty sewers of Chicago.

The answer is hormones. An evil lab technician is trying to develop a serum which will accelerate the growth of animals. He experiments on dogs. This technician isn’t exactly another Jonas Salk, and he loses plenty of dogs. The dead dogs are secretly tossed in the sewer where they become, you guessed it, alligator food.

A clip from the final scene, in which the gator crashes a ritzy wedding, can be viewed here. Be forewarned: It features an obviously fake alligator eating several people, including a poor young thing in a French maid costume. A blood-like substance that may or may not be ketchup is visible. There is excessive, high-pitched screaming. And the old guy in the white tux is a loathsome human being.

But the upside is that we’ll have plenty of great tidbits to Microkhan as we plow through, starting with this historical tidbit from the excellent Slaying the Dragon. While we knew that our American predecessors were fond of booze, we had no idea of the depth of their affection:

Between 1790 and 1830, America fundamentally altered its pattern of alcohol consumption. In 1792, there were 2,579 distilleries in the U.S. and annual per capita alcohol consumption was 2.5 gallons. In 1810, there were 14,191 U.S. distilleries and annual per-capita alcohol consumption had risen to more than 4.5 gallons. By 1830, annual consumption had risen to 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol per person. Problems of public drunkenness and disorder, and the impact of drunkenness on family life, intensified in the midst of this collective spree.

For comparison’s sake, today’s most drunken nation, Luxembourg, boasts a per-capita consumption rate of just 4.1 gallons.

Some obvious ideas pop to mind as to why early Americans were such prodigious drinkers. The lack of potable water in many areas probably made whiskey the safer bet, in terms of avoiding terrible diseases (save for cirrhosis, of course). Most lines of work involved heavy and dangerous labor, and alcohol dulled the monotony and physical pain. Leisure opportunities were few and far between, save for the easy-to-obtain pleasure of gathering with one’s comrades and knocking back a few jugs of XXX.

But we think there’s also something to be said for those decades as being America’s adolescence, a time when experiments in self-destruction are often integral to finding one’s way in the world. The excitement of being part of the American experiment obviously fed into a sense of overconfidence, bordering on hubris. (See: Manifest Destiny, The War of 1812, etc.) If America was fated to become such a great and mighty nation, then copious amounts of alcohol could only add to the fun without causing any real problems.

Eventually, of course, we grew out of this phase, to the point that our social values tilted too radically in the other direction. But nations are just vast collections of human beings, and humans change their minds several times over the course of their lives. In theory, a happy equilibrium is found after several missteps. We’re not too sure how close we are to getting there, though—the existence of Bud Select 55 makes us think our relationship to alcohol still needs to evolve a bit.

More great photos of Phagwah parades past here. And you can read about the history of the parade here. We tried to find some info on the festival’s celebration in Guyana itself, but didn’t come up with much of interest. Perhaps that’s because Guyana is a nation whose culture flourishes most beyond its physical borders; the number of Guyanese living abroad far exceeds the motherland’s dwindling population.

We hoped to find an answer to our question in this Japan Focus article. But we came away traveling on a whole different intellectual track, after doing a double-take at this line:

East Germany sold a total of almost 34,000 political prisoners to the West at an average fee of 90,000 Deutschmarks.

Whoa. That sounds like quite a bustling business, and our first instinct was to assume that the writer misplaced a comma somewhere. But sure enough, the GDR raked in substantial dough selling inmates to West Germany—a grand total of nearly 3.5 billion Deutschmarks between 1964 and 1990, presumably all in hard currency that the country so desperately needed. Considering that East Germany’s total annual exports didn’t top $3.5 billion until the 1980s, the ransom cash that the Erich Honeker regime raked in may well have kept the nation afloat during some mighty lean years.

So vital was the prisoner trade to East Germany’s fiscal health that the country snuck in bona fide crooks amidst the dissidents, just to glean some extra cash—or just to rid itself of troublesome citizens:

An internal note by Herman Kreutzer shows of the Ministry for Intra-German Relations show, for instance, that in October 1973 30 percent of the transports consisted of criinals and were therefore “extraordinarily bad.” This became a public issue in 1973, when a series of former prisoners committed crimes in the Federal Republic,and it was subsequently discovered that Bonn had paid for their release. The most spectacular case, causing a flood of letters requesting a stop to the purchases, concerned the “Taxi Murder in Hanau.” One month after their release, two former prisoners shot a taxi driver and stole 137 DM. Since the Federal government kept track of every transport, it turned out that the GDR sometimes just filled the coaches with ordinary criminals without receiving payment for them. Kreutzer almost desperately states in the file that it was impossible to send these people back since, according to the Federal constitutional law, they were West Germans, as were all Germans.

It also strikes us that the West vastly overpaid for these prisoners. The average ransom seems to have been several thousand dollars more than what private companies now pay when their employees are snatched in the developing world. The passions stirred up by the Cold War may have warped the market somewhat.

Many bears live in Alaska and many people enjoy the outdoors, but surprisingly few people even see bears. Only a tiny percentage of those few are ever threatened by a bear. A study by the state epidemiologist showed that during the first 85 years of this century, only 20 people died in bear attacks in Alaska. In the 10 years 1975-85, 19 people in Alaska were killed by dogs.

This stat may actually say less about the relative peacefulness of bears than it does about Alaska’s canine woes. According to this 2009 study, the state has by far the highest death rate from dog attacks, at 11.83 per 10 million people. (Yes, we realize that Alaska has well under 1 million residents. The paper expresses everything in that unit.) Similarly tiny and rural North Dakota, by contrast, didn’t have a single dog-bite fatality between 1979 and 2005.

See the full map of dog-bite fatalities by state here.

More gadgets for eggheads here. And don’t miss the site’s definition of a Haugh unit, which is used to measure “the internal quality of an egg.”

But the equation changes a whole bunch when the transaction isn’t between two citizens, but rather between a citizen and the government. In such a scenario, people tend to work the angles as much as possible, even if the consequences of getting caught can be dire. We were reminded of this curious fact upon reading an account of the Indonesian government’s efforts to rid a Borneo district of bird flu:

To protect local residents from the worst possibilities, a total of 7,000 infected chickens were culled.

Local authorities paid the owners a compensation of Rp12,500 (US$1.40) for every culled chicken, Endang said.

However, not all people welcomed the amount of compensation. Instead of giving up the positively infected chickens for culling, they hid the poultry and just handed over small chickens, he said.

As a result, the efforts to control and halt the spread of bird flu in Garut district were not so successful.

The first American parallel that popped to mind was the gaming of gun buyback programs, which have often been undermined by people who swap near-worthless firearms for disproportionate sums.

The main problem here, of course, is cynicism—a feeling among citizens that if there is no upside to playing by the government’s rules, since corruption or incompetence will ultimately cancel out any deal’s good intentions. That’s not an easy feeling to counter, especially since it’s often justified. (Eminent domain, anyone?) So maybe the only solution is to outsource buyback programs to private enterprise, who at least might be better equipped to determine fairer pricing than government bean counters. $1.40 per chicken strikes us as pretty low.

Anti-Mormon films reached their zenith with the 1917 A Mormon Maid. Produced by Famous Players-Lasky, the film opened on Valentine’s Day at New York’s Strand Theater. It ran sixty-five minutes on five reels and was described as the most advertised film in the history of cinema up to that time. Such a high-profile production, with a familiar plot featuring Danites and polygamous intrigues, could no longer be justified by anti-Mormon sentiment; rather, motivation now came from within the industry itself, as the film was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the success of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation two years earlier. The connection between the two films cannot be overemphasized, particularly in the fabricated connection between the Ku Klux Klan and the Danites; one intertitle even tells us that the Danites’ hooded costume (historically nonexistent) was the direct predecessor of the KKK’s. The strategy worked, as critics lauded the film and audiences flocked to it across the nation.

The trailer for another infamous Mormonsploitation film, Trapped by the Mormons, is available here. Back then, it must have seemed terribly unlikely that a Mormon-made film could ever snag a bigtime Hollywood star. But Anne Hathaway eventually proved the conventional wisdom wrong.

It was refreshing, then, to come across this detailed breakdown of exactly how much Nollywood filmmakers stand to earn each time they commit their vision to Video CD. As you might have already guessed, budget control is key to preserving any semblance of a profit margin:

An average producer spends between $15,000 and $25,000 to produce a Nollywood film. Some people may find this level of investment commitment ridiculous, accounting for the apparent low quality of the film products, but indigenous film producers in Nollywood argue that based on the present available distribution opportunities any increase in the production budget renders the project non-viable.

Theatrical release revenue for a “good” film released through the present theatre route in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya combined is approximately N10 million. Less cost of advertising and other distributor’s incidentals, a producer can expect about N6 million ($40,000) from the distributor. Local DVD (Video CD) distribution in Nigeria and Ghana revenue is an additional $15,000. United States distribution rights are bought for a maximum of $15,000 by the “Big Three”: Sanga Entertainment, Executive Image and Franco Films.

European rights usually go for a maximum $5,000. Therefore a “good” Nollywood film can net $75,000.

That net could easily double if the Nigerian government was more aggressive about going after pirates. So far, though, Lagos-based authorities have been lackadaisical about enforcement.

If you want one last Nollywood jolt before starting your day proper, we recommend Pieter Hugo’s series of interpretative portraits. But be forewarned: Some of ‘em are pretty graphic, especially if you love cattle.