Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

MySpace was the most popular site on the web (for US visitors) last week, with 43 times as much traffic as at this time in 2005. Last week they beat out Yahoo! mail, previously the most-visited site.

Hating MySpace is starting to be like hating the phone company–fun and right, but ultimately pointless.

I’ve seen hella movies the last week or so:

Nacho Libre — Much more hilarious than you thought. I know, I know–it looks like a kids movie. You’ve seen so many ads for it that the mere thought of Jack Black in spandex makes you physically ill. Still, if you liked Napoleon Dynamite, go see this movie.

Pirates of the Caribean: Dead Man’s Chest — as good as the first one. Hilarious. It’s got great special effects, a completely silly story, and Kiera Knightly, which should be enough for anybody.

Superman Returns — A good movie. Not a great movie, but certainly ten times better than you’d've guessed from the trailers. A wee tad too long. Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor is reason enough.

A Scanner Darkly — I can’t believe how many people have never heard of this movie. It’s about drugs and cops and crooks in the future. It’s got Keanu Reeves, Morton Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Rider playing paranoid “substance D” addicts; “substance D” is kind of like speed, kind of like acid, and kind of like dissociative disorder, and the the movie reflects all of that, and well. Supposedly it’s taken almost verbatim from the novel by Philip K. Dick, which I’ll own by tomorrow, and is semi-autobiographical in nature. Check out more at good ol’ Wikipedia

That doesn’t even count the movies I saw at home, which include Le Samourai, a 1967 French movie about a couple days in the life of a hitman. It’s a very beautiful, minimalist, nearly silent movie. It must have defined cool in a world where cool was still being defined. I’ve also watched enough anime to choke a horse (I’ve watched all of Black Cat, Trinity Blood, and Fate/Stay Night in the last week or two) and finished reading Madelaine Albright’s The Mighty and the Almighty, a book–from a former ambassador to the UN and U.S. secretary of state)–about the changing and emerging role of religion in politics, and how we can best harness, as a practical matter, the benefits of religion while trying to avoid the destructive aspects of religious conflict. It’s a great book.

Netflix says I’ve rated 456 movies. That means I need to get out more.

Is it wednesday?

I wish I had two dicks.

I took these pictures from the balcony next to my desk at work. The view is about the same as the one from my window. I like it it’s pretty.

As a bonus, here’s what Hachi looks like if you mush his ears down:

I also got a few pics of the kitties from July 4th. I don’t know why I didn’t take more pictures, except that everybody else was, so I figured we had coverage.

July 4th was a lot of fun. A lot of people came over and partied and made it great. (Thanks ya’ll!) My air conditioner went out in the middle of the party, and it took a couple days to get it fixed, but my house is cool again.

Yeah, so the new place I work, it’s got a break room with like four different kinds of gourmet coffee, all kinds of tea, a freezer full of frozen snacks, a big rack full of healthy and not-so-healthy bagged snacks, a drink fridge full of soft drinks and fruit juices, and fresh daily papers on the tables. There’s pudding and fruit cups and bagels and cream cheese and an XBox and a bunch of other stuff I haven’t found out about yet. All free, or at least part of your compensation.

My computer is a Precision Mobile Workstation M60,which has a widescreen 15.4″ display, and I’m going to get a flat panel to go with it. Natural keyboard and a decent optical mouse.

The people there appear to be nice, and competent. The work is complex and challenging. I’ve got a pass to a private parking garage basically in the warehouse district.

Did I mention there’s breakfast tacos every other Tuesday? Odd Fridays there’s pizza for lunch, and even Fridays a beer bust at the end of the day.

Good luck like this can’t but bode horribly for my future.

For all you people out there that’ve suffered through my untutored theory that the simplest mechanism explaining deja vu is a mental trick that, rather than creating a memory, only recreates the feeling of having one, might find this NYT Magazine article entertaining. In examining the case of people who have deja vu frequently–almost constantly–it surveys a lot of research over the past three decades. One theory they cover points to an area of the hippocampus that psychologists believe creates the “feeling of recollection” that we feel when remembering some real-life event from our past. It seems like this area fire up and create that feeling even when we are not recalling a previous memory, creating a feeling of a past recollection, when in fact we’re only recalling the present.

So it’s possible that I’m more-or-less-kinda-sorta-maybe right; now I can only hope that I actually remember having said conversation with somebody, instead of only thinking I remember it…

Plus, it has the word “anosagnosic” in it. You don’t get that often.

I WAS WRONG WRONG WRONG

“Joker” is by the Steve Miller Band, from way back in the day. I swore up and down that it was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and drunkenly promised that I would get up on the Intarweb and prove it. Well, I proved only that I am a jackass. Casey, you were right. My bad.

Finally, for everybody out there too lazy to be bothered with keeping track of world happenings that affect you, the Times has a interesting Cliff Notes version of the Supreme Court session this year. Not encouraging, but not as bad as it might have been. Kennedy seems to be leaning a little more liberal to balance out the big dose of right that Busholeum added to the court.