So you’ve worked out that everyone on the road except you is a moron. But there’s still the chance that you could fall victim to an attack of road rage at some point. Take a look at a site designed to provide a useful outlet to drivers. Reach for the gun and take the safety off as you step out of the car en route to Above Average Driver.
Alternatively, for all the schmucks out there who never managed to get a university degree but are still proficient in things like driving badly or littering — at last a diploma is possible. Join Schmuck University!
Feel the need to go a-wandering with a rucksack on your back? Obviously you can’t do that sort of peaceful gypsy thing in this country, but in other places in the world where there’s a structured society, a working police force and some democracy, you can. Go browse longingly and think of the open road at BackPackers!
One of the best things about being in a democracy is the fun to be had from becoming a serious pain to the fumbling people in government who aren’t doing their jobs. I’m talking about discovering the anarchic glee to be had in faxing your local council or MP on a daily basis. Emails just get deleted, but faxes make big piles of paper they have to file. For lots of phone numbers and contact info on a city you used to be able to walk around at night in, go to Johannesburg!
It was small, plastic, able to be held in one hand, and in its day it confused some of the finest minds in the world. No, I’m not referring to PW Botha’s brain, I’m talking about Rubik’s Cube which briefly invaded the world in the days before MTV gave stupid kids something to stare at. Dig out your cube and finally work out How To Solve Rubik’s Cube.
You’ve seen the ads on TV for the various junk foods available — the artery-clogging greasy burgers and fried chickens — well, instead of blowing your hard-earned money in order to get your weekly (or daily fix), why not just make some of the allegedly secret recipes at home? For a range of pretty good ‘clones’ of famous foods from Macdonald’s to KFC, get cutting and pasting at Top Secret Recipes.
Just to show that very little is secret anymore, why not take a look at satellite pix taken of the Survivor 3 camp, which was sniffed out and tracked down ahead of any official pronouncements. Yup, the next load of rapidly thinning money-hungry danger seekers are on this continent already. Go to Survivor 3.
And then if you feel that handing out a million US bucks is a little tacky in this day and age of mass starvation, why not find a charity organisation that you can donate some money or time to, at Anti-Survivor.
The film that became one of the definitive looks at the Vietnam War and the human condition is back. This time it has been completely re-edited and has a lot of new footage. If you were lucky enough to see Apocalypse Now on its first release, then enough years have gone by to get a fresh perspective on this mother-of-all-art-movies-disguised-as-war-movies. Hopefully the local distributors will demonstrate that they actually know something about films and release Apocalypse Now Redux.
Slightly geeky stuff. I don’t know how applicable this next bit of info is to our own ‘cringing beneath the weight of an outdated and evil monopoly’ telephone system, but for a cheap way of making a DSL connection, requiring a specific kind of connection from the phone company and two DSL modems, go read up on the info (and let us know!) at Make Your Own DSL Connection!
For a dose of really weird, fun and often dark cartoons, go nuts cutting and pasting in the archive of The Parking Lot is Full.
So what happens if you set up an online computer in a New Delhi slum for poor non-English speaking kids to play on? What sort of things do they end up finding online, and downloading? Pretty much the same kind of things that everyone else is. For a look at an interesting experiment in child psychology, go to Online Experiment.
Until the next time, if KFC hit-squads don’t get me.
Ian Fraser is a playwright, author, comedian, conspiracy nut, old-time radio collector and self-confessed data-junkie. Winner of numerous Vita and Amstel Awards, he’s been an Internet addict and games-fanatic since around 1995, when the Internet began to make much more sense than theatre.