Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

I haven’t been posting a lot because I got this massively bad-ass 42″ high-resolution television. This thing is awesome. Halo 2 looks good enough to make you want to immediately run out and eat large quantities of some kind of psychedelic. Tekken 5 looks like Tekken 5, only even prettier. And Gran Turismo….it’s a completely different game. Completely different. It runs in 1080i. Those flashy little blobs that used to be located in the middle of your screen? They’re now signs pointing the correct direction through the next turn. When the sun is out the tarmac turns into a golden snake writhing into the distance. You can see forever. It’s very nice.

I got for a good price, which I’m paying to a friend of mine in installments. I spend all my time watching it. Movies look really incredibly good too. HDTV cable looks hella good. The Discovery Channel in HD is a revelation. The only bad point is that it definitely creates a “best seat in the house”, which there wasn’t before, due to the brightness falloff from less-than-optimal viewing angles.

Gotta few videos from various people at work, with varying degrees of wrongness. First there’s a Total Eclipse of the Heart, then there’s this guy getting hit in the face with a car (word from my buddy is that he lived.). Then there’s Napoleon Dynamite gives you the top ten signs that you’re not the coolest kid in school.

I never really read the Iliad, but, hey, Troy was pretty all right, sort of, and I read a lot, so I figured I’d check it out.

I’m kind of surprised by the pages and pages of descriptions of ludicrously gory death and dismemberment. It seems ironic to me that the same people who are out there campaigning against the violence in modern movies and television probably have something like the Iliad in mind as more suitable entertainment.

I started out reading the Butler version, as it’s the best of several public domain versions available online (most notably at the most excellect Project Gutenberg), but I found a new, and eminently readable, new translation, which I’ve read for the last couple of books and am growing rather fond of. It’s by Ian Johnston, a research associate at Malaspina University-College in British Colombia. Thanks Ian!