I’ll be participating in the latest installment of Adult Education, which bills itself as “Brooklyn’s favorite useless lecture series.” This month’s theme is the ever-cheery “War,” which means I’ll be presenting the tale of Pvt. Herman Perry, the man at the heart of my 386-page labor o’ love. Rest assured that this will be no mere reading, but rather a multimedia spectacular replete with images guaranteed to melt your ocular receptors. An example that was left on the cutting-room floor accompanies this post—a couple of American soldiers displaying a Burmese tiger they caught on an off-day. As I describe in the book, such tigers were a constant menace to the men building the Ledo Road. As a colonel from the 45th Engineer General Service Regiment wrote in his diary in June 1944:

Tiger killed soldier in Warazup. Next night badly mauled another soldier and next night killed native—animal apparently forced to dry ground a/c the flood.

There are, of course, few tigers left in the jungled hills that line the Indo-Burmese border. And those that remain are evidently face a new threat in the form of a Burmese businessman with ties to his nation’s ruling junta.

Perhaps the greatest of these athletes was Matti Nykänen, a four-time Olympic gold medalist from Finland. At his youthful peak at the Calgary Games, “Matti Nukes” was nothing short of dominant—a human being who seemingly had been placed on this Earth to bridge the gap between man and bird. (Watch him at his finest here.)

But since retiring from the sport, Nykänen has revealed himself to be a deeply flawed individual. The Guardian recounted the champion’s sad decline earlier this year:

Before long, Nykänen was approached by a group of businessmen bent on transforming him into a recording artist: the initial brief was for the world’s best ski-jumper to record an album with the world’s worst, Eddie the Eagle. In the event, Nykänen’s first album, a compendium of perky Scando power pop, was released in 1992 and sold more than 25,000 copies. Plans for international endorsement deals were scuppered, however, by Nykänen’s complete inability to speak any foreign languages, leaving him thrashing around as the biggest fish in a familiar Nordic pond.

Beset by financial problems, Nykänen worked briefly for a premium-rate phoneline dispensing celebrity relationship advice; the equivalent in this country of calling up Live Genuine Essex Housewives and getting Paula Radcliffe on the phone. With a sense of clanging predictability, he was then jostled into the foothills of public office, only for the party built around him for the 1995 parliamentary elections to collapse at the last moment. From there it was a short step to his debut working as a striptease act in a restaurant (Nykänen claims to have retained his dignity by never appearing fully naked) and meeting sausage manufacturers Tapola with a view to finagling a sponsorship deal.

Instead, Nykänen fell in love with Tapola heiress Mervi Tapola, marrying her for the first time in 2001, then divorcing and marrying her again three years later. In the event, marriage has hardly proved a balm to Nykänen’s flailing private life (in all he has had four wives, and two children). In October 2004, he was found guilty of aggravated assault for a bizarre knife attack on a family friend: Nykänen stabbed his victim for besting him in a traditional Scandinavian finger-pulling contest – a game of linking middle fingers across a small card table and attempting, on the referee’s whistle, to yank your opponent out of his seat and over to your side. Then, four days after his release from prison, he was arrested again for attacking Tapola, and sentenced to another four months.

Alas, like so many famous athletes before him, Nykänen keep burning through his chances: He is now headed back to prison for 16 months, for yet another vicious attack on his wife.

When someone of Nykänen’s great physical accomplishment botches their post-career life so terribly, I find it tough to understand. Here is a man who was able to handle some of the most intense pressure in the world, and succeed marvelously. Yet ordinary tasks such as money management and human relationships seem beyond him.

There are a variety of potential explanations, ranging from the emotional immaturity of those who spend their formative years practicing a sport for 12 hours a day, to depression that stems from the removal of one’s longtime reason for being (i.e. to win competitions). Whatever the case might be with Matti Nukes, I do sincerely hope that he gets his act together during his forthcoming stint behind bars. Perhaps he needs tougher love than the Finnish penal system tends to offer.

Update Apparently there is a 2006 film about Matti Nukes, the title of which apparently translates as Matti: Hell is for Heroes. If any Finnish-speaking readers have seen this, please advise. (Related: Do I have any Finnish-speaking readers? If I do, that will totally make this blog enterprise worth all the effort.)

Home was handicapped. No saxophones or trombones; the best he could find to smite was a bloomin’ lyre. Nero was restricted to a Stradivarius.

Both made their mistake, it seems, for jazz, we learn, is the brand of racket which best suits the destructive motif. It is Bolshevized Wagner, Carrie Jacobs Bond in a Soviet tune.

In short, jazz is wicked. Dr. Frank E. Morton, acoustic engineer for the American Steel and Wire Company and a leader in the music trades convention which is to be held in the Drake hotel next month, says it’s the black sheep of the melody family.

“Jazz,” he said last night, “expressed hysteria and incites to idleness, revelry, dissipation, destruction, discord, and chaos. It accords with the devestating, volcanic spirit that has burst forth over the world in the last six years…

“Make music virile. Put red blood into it. Associate it with two-fisted men who do things. Keep away from the jazz abominations. Restore the orderly harmonized organization of industrial and social life with good music. Bring back ‘Home Sweet Home.’“

Dr. Morton, consider yourself fortunate that you shed your mortal coil before the advent of sinister-clown hip-hop. I very much doubt you would have had the fortitude to endure the sonic experience.

So what should replace quicksand in the corner of the American imagination reserved for nightmares? I’d like to humbly suggest grain, specifically corn. That’s because the threat posed to humans by mountains of grain is very real—and, unfortunately, becoming more dire with each passing year:

Based upon the cases documented to date, no fewer than 38 grain entrapments occurred in 2009.

Disturbingly, the trend for this type of incident, unlike many other types of farm-related injuries and fatalities, is not improving. Between 1994 and 2002, the five-year average decreased from a record of 29.2 recorded entrapments per year to 18.8 (the lowest since 1987). Since 2002, however, the five-year average has increased steadily to 28.4 incidents per year in 2008 and 31.2 in 2009 which is an increase of nearly 66%.

As in past years, it should be noted that this summary does not reflect all grain-related entrapments, fatal or non-fatal that have occurred, due to the lack of a comprehensive reporting system and a continued reluctance on the part of some victims and employers to report partial entrapments where extrication was required but no public report was made.

Based upon the ratio of non-fatal to fatal incidents documented in Indiana over the past 30 years, which has had an aggressive surveillance program to identify these events, the total number of actual cases could be 20-30 percent greater nationwide.

So what’s causing this worrying uptick in grain entrapments? Perhaps it’s our growing thirst for corn-based ethanol:

There continues to be a direct relationship between out-of-condition grain and a greater probability of entrapment.

The domestic corn demand for ethanol has resulted in the largest build up of storage capacity across the Midwest in history. These factors will result in more corn being stored for longer periods of time than in past years and possibly an increased potential for grain entrapments unless there is a change in current work practices.

There’s a small silver lining here, which is that a lower percentage of grain entrapments are now fatal than in years past. For that, credit the advent of grain rescue tubes, one of the most underrated agricultural gadgets on the market today.

Should you wish to minimize your chances of falling victim to grain, I suggest that you heed the advice offered here. And if you do find yourself buried in corn, just do your best to relax and breathe. Do not, under any circumstances, try to eat your way out of your predicament—even the great Crazy Legs Conti, one of the most revered competitive eaters on the planet, insisted on popped corn when attempting to chew free from a sarcophagus.

I will leave you, though, with a bit of beer history. There was apparently a time when Meister Brau was marketed as a classy beverage, a campaign bolstered by the brand’s wise decision to enlist the services of gorgeous chanteuse Barbara McNair. Yet this was before Miller purchased the brand in the early 1970s, and turned it into a product for imbibers whose pockets contain only a few spare nickels. As a result, Meister Brau is now but a shell of its former self—and borderline toxic for anyone who dares toss it down their gullet. The reviewers over at Beer Advocate pull no punches:

Only consume this ice cold. Doesn’t taste like much of anything at ~35 degrees F or lower. If it warms, it becomes face wincing bad, as the flavors of corn grits, cooked cabbage and wet cardboard seep in. Things only go downhill from there. Bitterness is there for the whole ride, with a weighty metallic flavor that’s bolstered by the beer’s fizz. Finishes clean if ice cold. If not, residual flavors of metal and corn grits linger for far too long in the mouth.

Still, it sounds better than Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer.

It’s all a ridiculous illusion, of course, as the vast majority of humans who fall more than a scant three stories do not live to tell the tale. But there are some fantastic exceptions, many of which are chronicled here. And based on the handful of incidents in which people have survived drops from well above 10,000 feet, there is even a rough set of instructions for those who wish to prepare themselves for similarly dangerous circumstances. A useful snippet for readers who live in fear of plunging from the heavens:

Just how fast are you going? Imagine standing atop a train going 120 mph, and the train goes through a tunnel but you do not. You hit the wall above the opening at 120 mph. That’s how fast you will be going at the end of your fall. Yes, it’s discouraging, but proper planning requires that you know the facts. You’re used to seeing things fall more slowly. You’re used to a jump from a swing or a jungle gym, or a fall from a three-story building on TV action news. Those folks are not going 120 mph. They will not bounce. You will bounce…

At this point you will think: trees. It’s a reasonable thought. The concept of “breaking the fall” is powerful, as is the hopeful message implicit in the nursery song “Rock-a-bye, Baby,” which one must assume from the affect of the average singer tells the story not of a baby’s death but of its survival. You will want a tall tree with an excurrent growth pattern—a single, undivided trunk with lateral branches, delicate on top and thicker as you cascade downward. A conifer is best. The redwood is attractive for the way it rises to shorten your fall, but a word of caution here: the redwood’s lowest branches grow dangerously high from the ground; having gone 35,000 feet, you don’t want the last 50 feet to ruin everything. The perfectly tiered Norfolk Island pine is a natural safety net, so if you’re near New Zealand, you’re in luck, pilgrim. When crunch time comes, elongate your body and hit the tree limbs at a perfectly flat angle as close to the trunk as possible. Think!

As always in these situations, though, it’s better to be lucky than good. Just ask Vesna Vulovic, who survived the 1973 bombing of JAT Flight 367 for reasons that no one has ever been able to figure out. Vulovic herself credits a slight physiological abnormality:

PB: Looking back at the incident, how do you think you survived?

VV: Nobody knows that. One of them said that I had very low blood pressure. I should never have been an air hostess in fact. I had a lot of coffee to drink before my interview, so that when I had my medical exam I passed. Maybe my low blood pressure saved me. I lost consciousness quickly and my heart did not burst.

American tail gunner Alan Magee also survived a drop from great heights, after being shot down over France in 1943. The secret of his survival? Perhaps it was incessant screaming.

(Image of Free Fall via G.I. Joe: Underground)

The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, “Mama,” as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, “will be angry and she will hammer and beat you.”

“This is where you go wrong,” the teacher continued. “That is how Mama beats you and burns you – when you do anything wrong.”

Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune…

The problem would be easy to fix, of course, if Saudi Arabia’s foreign workers were drawn out of legal limbo. They live in the kingdom under sponsorship schemes in which their employers essentially act as immigration officials, with the power to expel their charges from the country on a whim. That reality makes it nearly impossible for abused workers to approach the Saudi Arabian legal system; instead, they can only ask their embassies for assistance, a tact that rarely bears fruit because nations whose economies depend heavily on the remittances of overseas workers are loathe to stir the pot.

The end result is that the few overseas workers who choose to flee their employers end up in desperate circumstances, stranded in shelters with no legal passage home. The recent plight of a handful of Filipino nationals is a case in point:

At least 10 female overseas Filipino workers (OFW) and their 11 children have been staying in the Philippine Embassy-run shelter in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for about 10 months now, with some staying for more than three years, according to a migrants’ rights group…

The schedule of their repatriation is dependent on how soon the Governor will act on the Embassy’s request. [Labor Attache] Valenciano is unable to say when the workers could be sent home.

“The government is of course ready to assist them; it’s just that some of the workers do not have the necessary papers,” he explained, adding that majority of the workers escaped from their employees due to contract violations and abuse.

Currently, there are 142 adult OFWs and 11 children inside Bahay Kalinga, according to Valenciano. The Overseas Workers Welfare Administration earlier said some 800 OFWs are still stranded in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

The bottom line: No good ever comes of letting an entire workforce exist in the shadows, without direct recourse to established legal institutions. And therein lies an important lesson for the folks crafting immigration policy worldwide.

(Image via wokka’s Flickr stream)

The rare sliver of cheer for Bikini Atoll provides an excellent occasion to check out this series of interviews with island natives, who recall both their people’s history as well as the terrible hardships of the past 64 years. When the Bikinians were evacuated from their homes in 1946, they had no idea of the generations of wandering and scarcity that lay ahead. A woman names Emso Leviticus recalls just how her fellow Bikinians were convinced to abandon all they knew:

We were elated when we discovered that the Americans weren’t going to hurt us, in fact, the Navy men were very kind and gave us big bins filled with all kinds of food that we had never seen or eaten before like C-rations, chocolates, corned beef and other wonderful things. They took some of us to the ship to get medical attention. One woman named Tamar was very sick, and when she returned, she was all better again. The Americans stayed awhile and I befriended one of the men. He often visited with me and built a cement water catchment for my house.

I can still recall the day when the more important looking Americans came to ask us to move from our islands. All of these new men were wearing beautiful uniforms. After church one day, they asked us to come together on Rosie’s and Dretin’s land called Loto, near Lokiar’s land, to have a community meeting.

We were all there–men, women and children–and we tried to listen carefully to what they were asking our leaders. All of the women became surprised when we found out that they were requesting that we move to Rongerik Atoll or Ujae Atoll. I remember that our leaders answered: “If we have to leave, we would rather go to Rongerik because we don’t want to be under the leadership of another king or iroij on Ujae.” No one dissented in front of the Americans when they asked us if we would be willing to go to another island so they could test their bombs. We had had a meeting beforehand. It had been decided that we would all stand behind Juda when he gave our answer to the man with the stars on his hat and clothes.

We were a very close-knit group of people back then. We were like one big family. We loved each other accordingly. After we made the final decision, no one made any problems about it. We agreed to go along with whatever was decided by our leaders.

It didn’t take long, however, for the Bikinians to regret their decision.