We’re coming up to the last month or so before the release date of the special, “extended” version of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on DVD. Don’t be stupid and buy it locally. I bought the extended version of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers from Amazon.com in the United States, and it only cost me about $30 (or R180). Locally, the evil, profiteering shops were selling it for more than R900. So don’t buy it locally.
Currently, the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King extended-edition DVD costs just R147 ($23). That’s all. If you have a multizone DVD player, go order the American version, or just read about all the extras on the four-DVD set at Amazon.com: Lord of the Rings 3 Extended.
Otherwise, if you want a version that you know will be the right zone for your player, costing just R255 (£22), go to UK Amazon.
And if you recall the special box set of the previous versions, which was selling locally for a rip-off price of R1 200, book in advance the five-disk box set and buy it for a mere R380: UK Amazon 5-Disk Box Set LOTR 3 Extended.
A site to bookmark and use regularly, to help you immediately convert any overseas prices into rands, is The Online Currency Converter.
Then, staying with entirely bypassing local shops and overpriced local distributors of products, do some comparative shopping (mostly for sound-related goodies and gadgets) at ECoustics.
For the latest desktop and notebook price and speed comparisons, go get a sense of how much we’re being ripped off locally and stare at The CPU Scorecard.
To find comparative prices and reviews on just about anything, use the Cheapest Prices Search Engine.
eBay is the place where things are bought and sold online. Not just regular things, though — there is a huge range of bizarre products and services that folks have cheerfully offered online; some serious, others clearly joking. There are too many wild, vile, obscene and funny products to even start listing some of my favourites here, but go wade through and find your own classics at Bizarre eBay Offers.
Some of the classics which I can show here range from Imaginary Online Girlfriend to the bunch of rifle-wielding nuns offering to beat up your kid at Does Your Kid Suck?.
It must be nice to be part of a country that at least started with a tradition of revolution, free speech and democratic ideals. Keeping on with the theme of Americans showing off their political viewpoints in a simple way (as those who waded through the hundreds of naked students pix in last week’s column will recall), here’s another site filled with similar attitudes. It’s simply folks posing with signs showing their choice of candidate. It’s odd, but fun — go look at True Americans.
And for more photo weirdness, consider this: there’s a family that has a tradition of taking pix of themselves each year on June 17. Go see how time advances in this amazingly odd page, starting from 1976. Look at The June 17th Family Photographs.
For people who like answering questions and allegedly finding out about themselves, go try the often odd questions at The Humility Machine.
Or, to find out something you maybe didn’t want to know — such as why personal hygiene is a good thing — read the story and look at the pix of The Belly Button Plant.
If you’re lucky enough to be bored and a mother — or just curious as to what a “bored mom” might get up to — then consider the options (which seem to range from a variety of cosmetic enhancements to lightweight pram adverts) according to Fun Stuff for Bored Moms. (Yes, the “It’s as if Feminism Never Happened” Award goes to this site.)
For no real reason, if you’re one of those folks who like to learn new stuff just for the hell of it, dip into an online dictionary specifically dedicated to big-sounding words, which will guarantee you a beating from irked friends if you try using them. Go to The Grandiloquent Dictionary.
For a dictionary that operates in reverse, how is this for a useful idea: put in a concept and the dictionary will tell you what the word is that you’re looking for. Neat, huh? Test-drive The Reverse Dictionary.
Despite what you may think, that Father Christmas image you’re familiar with comes to you directly from Coca-Cola’s advertising department. For centuries prior to this, the general “Santa” image is an amalgam of a whole cluster of different legends. One of them is St Nicholas. As we are approaching the merchandising atrocity known as “Christmas”, find out what you didn’t know, at Discovering the Truth about Santa Claus.
If you’re like me, then you really enjoy glimpses of old advertisements from a time when propaganda wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now. There’s something gloriously naive about old ads — whether they’re from the Victorian era or the early 1980s. Take a look at an assortment of grabbable ads at Old Adverts.
And worth a special mention, just to show you how times change, look at the ad from the 1980s for a 7Meg “massive” hard drive, costing £3 500. at The Massive Hard Drive!.
Here’s a small site with the potential of becoming a monster over time. You know those holiday snaps you took, where you kinda wonder who the hell the person is who wandered into frame at the last minute, or those drunken snapshots, where you still don’t know who it is you have your arm around? Well, here’s a site where you can find out. (My fave is the one of someone’s dad who decided deliberately to get into other people’s photos grinning like an idiot.) Have a look at the subtle joys of That Was Me!.
Here’s something for the geek in your life. I’m sure its going to end up as an e-mail message being sent around the net, but until it does, go read Five Geek Social Fallacies.
Staying with geeks, if you have way too much time on your hands and have the urge to conduct assorted science experiments, browse through the wide range of experiments you can do with food, clothes, at the office and more, at Hunkin’s Experiments.
Still more geek stuff: this time in the PC genre. There are many urban myths surrounding computers and information technology in general, so why not learn to separate fact from fiction, so that you’ll know when a tech-geek is lying to you? Read PC World‘s excellent consumer-advice article Busting the Biggest PC Myths.
If you’re interested in finding out exactly what the hell all those assorted things are that appear to be running on your PC, do some quiet edjikation at The Process Library.
As a geek, you would have run across assorted icons and imagery from the East, whether it’s simple manga or advanced Nip Pop. Among the constantly spreading memes from the Pacific Rim region is that of the Hello Kitty character. Go learn stuff at 30 Years of Cute.
Need to steal some great T-shirt graphics? It’s nostalgia heaven, and note the whining self-serving “home taping is killing music” slogan that companies once tried to use on us. Find and grab your designs of choice at Vintage T-Shirts.
More free stuff, especially for the Font Fairies among us — those geeks who really get off on having lots of different font options on their PCs. Find the font of your dreams at Acid Fonts.
If you’re being bugged by Christians, then this site can provide you with a good reality check to counter those cultists endless uses of the Bible to justify assorted stupid ideas (as well as ruining television on Sundays). Take a good long read through the reality check and listing of atrocities and vile actions that aren’t talked about by Christians, in the quietly and damningly accurate site known as The Dark Bible.
And then, once you’ve realised how inherently funny this “belief” thing is, choose the type of card you want and Send Someone an E-Card from God!.
Before anyone starts complaining, let me remind you of the Ambrose Bierce definition of “blasphemy” — which is “your irreverence towards my deity”. So there.
Wasting-webspace area. Here’s something you didn’t need to know, but someone else thought it deserved a whole lot of webspace. Find out just how scarily precise some folks are, in their directions on How to Make The Best Tacos Ever!.
The highly-regrettable-names section. I’m not sure exactly what country this next person hails from, but its from an official personnel photo section of some obscure government department, so in case you thought the name “Frikkie”, for instance, is a silly name that no parent should use on their kid, go stare at the man called Mustafa Kunt. Or, to see a name that I’ve been called on occasion, look five down, and then five across, for the person alarmingly called Ginger Minge.
Given the dumbass, Orwellian hijacking of language that is taking place here — where squatter camps are called “informal settlements”, students awkwardly called “learners” (gee, what are people who walk? “Walkers”?) and poor people who the government hasn’t helped at all are called “previously disadvantaged” — it’s rather pleasant to see a company deciding to go to the other extreme. Think about how handicapped people are treated locally, as if they’re all trainee Christians who aren’t trying to get happy, laid and have fun like the rest of us. Then go stare thoughtfully at a company that makes wheelchairs with a name that cuts through the semantic crap: Spazz Wheelchairs!.
My editor made the sad mistake of suggesting I start a blog online. After checking with him that I wouldn’t get fired, regardless of what I wrote — especially seeing as the blog is more or less under the auspices of the Mail & Guardian Online — I began writing my thoughts out, without too much censorship. To me a blog is basically an online journal of one’s thoughts.
Yes, it’s a whole bunch of other things as well, but I’m choosing to treat it as simply an online journal to rave on, and talk about whatever I fancy. So, if I get abruptly fired, it’s because of this 🙂 Take part in the blogging process and start your own. Don’t just be a consumer of information. Provide your own. Go browse the M&G Blogspot.
Perhaps oddly related is this very cool analysis of why people behave differently when they’re online. If you’re curious about the differences in behaviour between online and offline, then settle in for some serious reading at The Psychology of Cyberspace: The Online Disinhibition Effect.
What do you do if you’re one of the survivors in a world where the undead have taken over? Correct! You make an online blog detailing the day-by-day unfolding horrors that you face. It’s strange and interesting reading. I wish I’d thought of doing that. Go take a look, and start at the very beginning of Day-by-Day Armageddon.
Until the next time, if local shop owners don’t get me.