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.

To reward your steadfastness, we’d like to offer up a very special Bad Movie Friday entry: 1989’s Millennium, starring the truly mismatched pair of Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd. We distinctly remember catching this at our local omniplex as junior-high students; it was one of the first times we ever left a theater and thought to ourselves, “Is it possible that some movies are just a complete waste of time?” Stephen Holden dug the knife in with glee:

Long before Winston Churchill is invoked by a smirking humanoid named Sherman at the conclusion of ”Millennium,” Michael Anderson’s film about time travel has proven itself worthy of admission into the pantheon of movies that are so awful they keep an audience in stitches. The movie is so inept in almost every particular that even its love scenes, when a grimacing Kris Kristofferson mashes his grizzled face against an impassive Cheryl Ladd, are likely to produce giggles.

The nickel-and-dime pyrotechnics consist of unspectacular showers of sparks and billows of phony-looking smoke. When the time travelers enter and leave a scene, they step in and out of an animated blue-and-white funnel of the sort one might expect to see in a cleanser ad.

Poor Cheryl Ladd. The ’80s just weren’t her decade.

The situation in Nunam Iqua could scarcely be more different. Residents of the Alaskan village have to go out of their ways to stock up on victuals—bigtime:

Shopping trips to the nearest villages – Alakanuk is the closest neighbor at 13 miles away – can be dangerous. To get groceries, travelers sometimes snowmachine over thin ice or boat across the lower Yukon with its shifting sandbars.

Ann Strongheart wrote of a shopping trip to Emmonak last winter with her now-deceased husband. They hired a sitter for their baby daughter, hauled a plywood sled and doubled up on a single snowmachine because gas prices were too high to take separate vehicles.

“When we got on the Yukon, my husband had to keep a close eye out for overflow,” she wrote, adding that it can leave deadly holes in the ice.

At Emmonak, the next closest village, the couple bought 34 items. Diapers cost the most, with 144 totaling $82.55. Six fruit cocktail cans went for $17.34, and a bag of generic Cheerios cost $6.99.

The 50-mile round trip exceeded $500 when Strongheart included the 12 gallons of gas.

We will doubtless keep Ms. Strongheart’s struggles in mind the next time the Grand Empress sends us to the corner for a couple of Dragon Stouts.