So I was all like, "That totally looks like Keanu Reeves," and she was like, "Yeah, I guess," and I was totally all like, "Whoa."

Let me back up. I spent Veteran's Day afternoon at the Legion of Honor, which as it turns out, is not so much about honor or legions thereof, but more about classical European oil paintings, primarily from the 16th century up until the middle bits of the 20th, with a dash of mummies thrown into the mix. Radical!

So there was a room full of various French oil paintings, and a man was sketching a painting of one of the portraits in front of him. I kind of snickered, mockingly telling my friend Yelli that it looked like the actor Keanu Reeves. But then I instantly felt embarrassed, and thought to myself, Geez Amity, you need to get over your childhood crushes and stop seeing them everywhere. Turns out it was a portrait of Frenchman Paul Mounet (1847-1922) who, oddly enough, was also an actor by trade!

But just moments ago, my friends, something totally mind-blowing this way blew. I happened upon this very video, I totally forget how (it wasn't by thoroughly investigating ever obsessive fan site I swear!):

The likeness is just too awesome. Obviously, I thought, Keanu Reeves must indeed be immortal.

Compare:

Keanu Reeves: Revisited

I've always held a great love for the actor Keanu Reeves and his impressive body of work. It all began with Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which led me to seek out The Razor's Edge, My Own Private Idaho, and of course Point Break. (Side note: Point Break--the next Rocky Horror Picture Show?) His range is ambitious--the man played Buddha for chissakes. He turned down the Val Kilmer role in Heat to play Hamlet in a Canadian theatre production. Also, he once conversed with me, mono a mono, for no shorter than 10 minutes at an L.A. diner. I told him one of my favorite films of all time was Point Break; he said he was sorry because it is a really cheesy movie. I was sure he must have been high, having strolled in with his motorcycle helmet on even after sitting down and taking a booth (it had been removed after I struck up a conversation). It was everything anyone could ask for in a celebrity encounter. He told me that if I wanted to get to Palm Springs that day, I'd better leave soon to beat the traffic. Later, as me and my friends sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I told them, "Keanu warned me about this." It was rad.

Anyways. He has a new movie coming out called Street Kings and I highly recommend viewing it to celebrate 4/20. Here is a classic before-he-was-famous gem:



And here's a story about his new film, hot off the UK Press Association:

Reeves Street Kings shoot 'intense'

Keanu Reeves admits he found himself in the middle of a pretty intense shoot while filming new cop movie Street Kings.

"This shoot was very intense but you didn't have time to unwind and get ready for the next day so that focus I really enjoyed," he says.

"When the film was done there was some couch time."

As LAPD cop Tom Ludlow, Reeves was involved in every scene, and had to immerse himself in a much grittier, violent world.

"I got a lot of help from my director (David Ayer)," he says.

"He kind of felt I was a little too fuzzy and warm so he put me in situations to get into my non-fuzzy world.

"I met with a lot of police officers who were very generous with sharing what the job was like and I trained with some weapons guys so it was just really imagination. Trying to internalise the stories that I heard and going from there.

"In the end you're trying to fulfil and hopefully realise the scene."

However, despite the gritty subject material, Keanu still has faith that not everybody can be completely nasty.

"No I don't think we're all bad, otherwise what would Santa do?" he smiled.

THE NYT UNCOVERS A GLITCH IN THE MATRIX!



So some professor of philosophy at Oxford claims we have a 20% chance of living in a Matrix-like scenario whereby we are all just computer simulations from some "Prime Designer", or some nerd on a couch with a (literal) god complex.

This supposed Dr. Bostrom told the NYTimes in a recent article,“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that...is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

Yeah, and my gut feeling is that you're 90 percent full of shit, and marginally retarded. But the NYT columnist goes on to indulge this theory, revealing less about Bostrom's opportunistic philosophical indulgences and more about his own inflated sense of journalistic righteousness:

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

Oh what a tangled web you've weaved little NYT self-aggrandizer.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

It's like Russian dolls...whoaaaaaaa! He leaves us with this, in regards to how the end of the world (or whatever "world" that we know)could play out:

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

Cute (;

LET ME BE YOUR INFORMATION CHOREOGRAPHER (or not)

From the May issue of Harper's Magazine:

"The promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the roiling plentitude of information. It's the ability of individuals to choreograph that information in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the gravitational pull of a broad and open commons to 'rip, mix, and burn'-to curate. This new sort of curator, in effect, is one definition of a blogger: an amateur experimental librarian for the Internet, the curator of (in blogger/writer Cory Doctorow's phrase) a digital 'Wunderkrammer', a private informational choreographer who has made her alignments public."
--Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "A World in Three Aisles"