First up, Tayna tretey planety, a Russian animated sci-fi movie from the early 80’s. It has a wonderfully psychedelic synth soundtrack, and the visual style is foreign, somewhat weary and depressed. My copy is dubbed in French since it was taped off of Radio-Canada in the late 80s, but there are apparently several budget English-dubbed DVD releases of varying quality.

Next, Earth*Star Voyager. This was shown as a two-part Disney Sunday movie in the late 80’s, though it was apparently shot as a pilot for a full series that never happened. In the end, it’s pretty laughable (in the late 21st century of this film, they still use the dorky 80’s computer font on all their signage and UIs), but in that era the sci-fi pickings were pretty slim, so I have some fond childhood memories of this. Seems I’m not alone–it’s at least popular enough to warrant torrents of fan-made DVD versions (since Disney will likely never bother to release this on video).

Speaking of Disney, I’ve recently come across some great Ward Kimball animations from Disney’s earlier TV shows:

This segment from Mars & Beyond is mostly an excuse to create wonderfully whimsical creature animations.

Magic Highway USA has been making the blog rounds lately, and it’s easy to see why. It alternates between sensible and prescient predictions (in-dash GPS) and loopy petrocolonial fever dreams (electric hovercars driving by the sphinx in air-conditioned glass highway tubes!), set to a swinging jazz soundtrack. If you like the style, Paleo-Future has rounded up a great set of publicity stills from the collection of Kevin Kidney.

This was considered an unacceptably radical position just a few years ago, when Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz advanced it in his great book Globalization and Its Discontents. (There’s even a photo of burning fire on the cover.)

Stiglitz’s argument is simple: countries borrowing money are not that different from people borrowing money–in each case, there’s “good debt” and “bad debt.” Poor countries are poor because their economies can’t generate enough wealth for enough people. And the quickest cure for that is usually infrastructure, defined as whatever increases the overall wealth-generating capacity of the economy. Tap water, roads, reliable electricity, and vaccinations are common examples: that’s good debt. Problem is, infrastructure investment is precisely what laissez-faire ideology forbids. Therefore, whatever a country ends up spending a World Bank/IMF loan on, it’s unlikely to increase the country’s ability to create wealth, which means it’s going to be very difficult to pay back the loan: that’s bad debt.

Keynesian economics, first adopted by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and now used by most of the world’s rich countries (the U.S. prominently excepted), argues the exact opposite. Build the infrastructure first, Keynesian doctrine says, even if you have to go into debt, and wealth creation will follow. Now, Keynesianism was orthodoxy in the U.S. from 1932 up till the Reagan era. Even Nixon, Depression kid that he was, stuck to the basic principles–to an extent that’s hard to believe today.

It didn’t quite sink in for me until I saw a UPA Cold War propaganda short at this year’s Ottawa Festival, trumpeting the capitalist virtues of advertising–and realising that the Voice-of-God narrator was talking about Keynesian capitalism. I can’t find a link–shame, the UPA educational shorts are graphic-design marvels–but i took notes:

“In a feudal society, income distribution is a pyramid.” [Xylophone scale.]

“In an industrial society, income distribution is a diamond.” [Balloon-stretch sound.]

That’s a graphical representation of the Keynesian middle class, pumping their increased disposable income into the economy.

“The New Deal gave every two American consumers the buying power of three.” [Timpani drum.]

Surreal.

In the course of trying to prove that the rodeo scene in Borat takes place in Virginia, not Texas, I found this–an apparently authentic report on “Boraq’s” appearance by the Roanoke Times. You’ve got to respect the integrity of the folks who left this up on the website long after the truth came out.

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.

Having finished the book, no longer scared of running into spoilers (it is a murder mystery, after all), I promptly found this essay by Chabon, which neatly confirmed my theory. He came up with the idea for this book, it seems, discovering a Yiddish phrasebook for travellers–and realizing that such a thing no longer had a reason to exist.

In the short term, this attempt at social engineering has been indisputably successful; the congregation is thriving and growing. But, taking a broader perspective, this Wired article suggests the long-term futility of such efforts–telling the story of the profound confusion that erupted when, in 2004, the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma attempted to genetically screen their members for “authentic” Native descent.

But if the young discipline of DNA testing has taught us anything, it’s that the very notion of race is fading, at least from a genetic perspective. The world is populated by mongrels and half-breeds. Even those who base their self-worth on being of “pure” racial stock probably aren’t. Every family tree has a thousand branches.

That’s certainly true of the Orthodox-minded Jewish folks I know personally, many of whom are forced to conceal an ancestry even more muddled than mine from their co-religionists. I hope that at least a few of them can come round by the time I produce some Muggle children.

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 and ten per cent of known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent—those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923—are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are “orphans,” possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind.

Finding a legal resolution to the orphan issue is even more urgent in new media, where there are only decades, rather than centuries, to intervene before a work decays past any hope of restoration. An experimental program to grant individual licenses for the use of orphan works was launched last year in Canada, and may provide an example of how this can be made a standard feature of copyright law worldwide.

(direct link)

Over the past few decades, we’ve seen some prescriptive attempts at introducing gender-neutral pronouns, most commonly some variation on “he-or-she.” But as Wikipedia relates, these constructions haven’t fared too well:

…these well-intended suggestions have been largely ignored by the general English-speaking public, and the project to supplement the English pronoun system has proved to be an ongoing exercise in futility. Pronouns are one of the most basic components of a language, and most speakers appear to have little interest in adopting invented ones.

However, despite the lack of an official solution, the desire to ditch the old usage endured. Soon enough, an elegant descriptive alternative began to spread through the language–perhaps some future scholar can work out exactly when it started. It’s not enshrined in any style guide I know, and it’s still considered nonstandard in print, but I’ve heard it in ordinary speech all my life. And today, I noticed this:

As Facebook goes, so goes the English-speaking world, I’ll wager.