Do-it-yourself retrospective

In a piece on the 'technology of the future... opening up the past', Andrew Sullivan writes today about the convenience of DVD rental by mail:

My other half and I subscribe to a mail-in DVD service called Netflix that, for a modest subscription rate, allows us to compile online a queue of films we want to see and posts us up to five movies at any one time.

When you've seen one, you put it right back in the same envelope, send it back and within a day or so the next one in your queue arrives.

But here's the real joy of it: there are more than 60,000 titles to choose from. They go back decades: old treasures you'd find only in the most arcane video rental stores are now available at the click of a mouse and in your DVD player in a few days.

Snap. Me and WotN are hooked up likewise. At the moment we're in the middle of a Coen brothers retrospective. Not that I haven't seen any of these movies already, but it's good to see them all again in sequence and close together. We're up to Miller's Crossing. One particular pleasure is being reminded of lines of dialogue like this one from Raising Arizona:

H.I., you're young and you got your health, what you want with a job?