http://retrovirus.com/brunch Wed, 26 Dec 2007 21:54:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Justina and I took advantage of the holiday to go through our video collection and get rid of all the old VHS tapes that we'd never watch again. VHS really has a horrible bulk-to-quality ratio! However, I did unearth a few gems that I thought I'd lost. First up, ... http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/12/forgotten-treasures/ So it looks like the New York Times has embraced the idea that the World Bank/IMF causes severe economic damage to poor countries. These institutions offer loans in exchange for the broad adoption of Reagan-style laissez-faire policies, which have a lousy overall track record when it comes to creating ... http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/12/from-heresy-to-orthodoxy-and-back-again/ No one knows for sure who he was, that Middle Eastern man in an American flag shirt and a cowboy hat who was supposed to sing the national anthem at a rodeo Friday night in the Salem Civic Center... In the course of trying to prove that the rodeo scene in ... http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/11/borat-rashomon/ Speaking of which, when I was in Vancouver the other day I happened to walk by the original steam clock precisely at noon: Circa 1977, go figure. http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/11/steampunk-vs-cyberpunk/ I just finished reading Michael Chabon's exquisite The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a detective story set in the present day of a parallel universe where Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Jewish refugees of World War II to settle in Alaska. The Holocaust was therefore brought to a premature end, with two ... http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/11/yiddish-policemen/ Fascinating NYT article on a small Syrian Jewish congregation in Brooklyn that, beginning in 1935, decided on the strictest interpretation possible of the Orthodox intermarriage ban. They'll permanently exclude not only the offending member, their new spouse, and their children, but all of their future descendants. In the ... http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/11/the-no-1-jewish-community-on-planet-earth/ An article on digital library projects in the latest New Yorker has a helpful explanation of the orphan works problem: A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between five ... http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/11/orphan-works/ Precious. http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/10/blame-the-juice/ Marlies found the most remarkable item on YouTube today. At first I thought it was another fan translation...but it turned out to be something much more ambitious: (direct link) http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/10/quiero-ser-famosa-my-first-fan-remix/ So in the one linguistics class I took in college, I learned that changes in the way we use language can be "prescriptive" (spreading from authorities out to the general public) or "descriptive" (vice-versa, when some creeping nonstandard thing that ordinary people do eventually becomes the right way to do ... http://retrovirus.com/brunch/2007/10/long-live-the-new-third-person-singular-neuter/