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The Times has more on this curious story:

Mr. Koo said that diminishing the proper role of English on signs threatened to alienate non-Asian customers and residents. He is proposing a measure that would require all storefront signs to be at least 60 percent English. Businesses would face fines if they did not comply.

“This is America, no? If I go to a Polish neighborhood and only see Polish signs, I would not be comfortable,” said Mr. Koo, a Republican. “New York is a city of immigrants, and English is a way for different ethnic groups to communicate.”

He added that the legislation was needed so that police officers and firefighters could quickly identify stores in case of an emergency. . . . .

He wants inspectors with the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs to enforce an obscure state law, passed in 1933, that requires businesses to display their names in English. The law was intended to protect consumers from fraud by underground shops during the Depression, but it has seldom been applied.

Is the Fraud rationale plausible? Some are not persuaded.

John C. Liu, the city comptroller, a Flushing resident who is of Chinese descent, said Mr. Koo’s proposal recalled the early part of the 20th century, when some native New Yorkers railed against the Yiddish on signs used by Eastern European Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side.

“Trying to justify this as a public safety issue is hogwash,” Mr. Liu, a Democrat, said. “The real premise behind the sign law is that some people are longing for the good old days.”

I know Montreal has similar laws that require signs to be in French,  but I don’t know of any other similar ordinances in the United States. Would this be permissible under modern commercial speech doctrines?

A cool interview with Danny, owner of the Shore Store, and the employer of the Jersey Shore cast.

No one is happier than Danny, whose life changed in 2009 when MTV asked to rent his house (“the biggest house in town,” he says) for the season. According to him, the network handed him a check and asked him to move out in four days. He happily obliged and relocated to a nearby condo.

Soon, the cast began working at his gift shop…but attracting customers was a little tougher than anticipated.

“Everyone who came in had to fill out release forms, and since no one had seen the show yet, it was tough,” he says.

Everything changed the following year. By then, Jersey Shore was raking in the ratings, every person in the country was quoting characters (a few gems: “GTL. Gym. Tanning. Laundry” and ‘The shirt before the shirt”) and droves of fans were lining up to enter Danny’s store. Since 2010, sales have been up 50 percent, he says.

“Dealing with the crowd was the craziest thing; we had to instruct kids to be normal in the store…it was nuts…only in America,” he says.

I visited the Shore Store, and can attest the place was packed! Good for Danny!

I remember watching the 20th Anniversary Special. I would have been a Junior on August 1, 2011 in High School (about to start my Senior year, which was somewhat interrupted by 9/11). I feel old.

Update: Random aside. On 9/11 when the news was still trickling out, one of my classmates told me to check MTVNews.com. Oh Staten Island.

In Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court effectively ordered California to release upwards of 30,000 prisoners due to horrible prison conditions.

It seems that Venezuela, notorious for dangerous, unruly, and despicable prisons, is taking a cue from the Golden State, and is about to release 20,000 prisoners (40% of the prison population) to ease overcrowding.

From CSM:

Just a month after a deadly prison siege in El Rodeo prison outside Caracas, Venezuela in which some 30 people died, Venezuelan authorities have announced plans to release 40 percent of the country’s prison population.

Newly-appointed Minister for Prisons Iris Varela said that the release of some 20,000 prisoners would ease overcrowding, a major issue in jails across Venezuela and the entire region.

“Of the country’s 50,000 prisoners, 20,000 should be out of jail,” Ms. Varela told a local newspaper. The country’s 30 prisons are designed to hold around 12,500 inmates.

And who are they releasing? Like California, the non-dangerous prisoners.

“In prison there are people that do not pose a danger to society, such as shoplifters who have no history of violence. They can be handled outside prison,” she said.

Though some fear that the release of prisoners may result in an increase in crime (this was Justice Alito’s fear in Brown).

Venezuela is considered one of the region’s most dangerous countries, with the murder rate in Caracas comparable to that of warzones such as Baghdad. While many prisoners may have gone into jail for minor crimes such as shoplifting, they will no doubt have been hardened by the “Dante-esque” conditions inside, according to Humberto Prado, who helps run the Venezuelan Prison Observatory.

Stay tuned. And somehow, I got 16/16 on the Latin American quiz. I must be thinking way too much about the Continent or something. I even located Paraguay!

From Engadget:

Some people never forget a face and the same, it seems, can be said for the internet. With some off-the-shelf facial recognition software, a connection to the cloud and access to social networking data, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have proved tagging can be the everyman’s gateway to privacy violation. Using a specially-designed, AR-capable mobile app, Prof. Alessandro Acquisti and his team conducted three real-world trials of the personal info mining tech, successfully identifying pseudonymed online daters and campus strolling college students via Facebook. In some cases, the application was even able to dredge up the students’ social security digits and personal interests — from their MySpace pages, we assume. Sure, the study’s findings could have you running for the off-the-grid hills (not to mention the plastic surgeon), but it’s probably best you just pay careful attention to that digital second life.

If only someone predicted this in 2009. If only.