As the year is hurtling to a close, it’s time to relax. So this week is dedicated to a large array of interestingly silly stuff as well as fun things to idly look at — while killing time at the office and waiting to go on holiday.
First off, now you too can play at being Dr Frankenstein, and build your very own creature online. Well, alright, it’s not really a
creature, but it is a monster, regardless. Go to Build A Better Bush.
History and advertising fans may recall the rise of strange and often lethal machines in the late 19th century, using
electricity to “cure” just about every ailment you can think of. The public coughed up to get shocked, wear odd helmet
devices and sit inside assorted apparatus, which would then be charged up, supposedly with “cleansing electricity”. Well,
just to show that maybe those long-gone mad inventors and nuts were actually on the right track, note this recent news
headline from Yahoo — Magnetism and Electricity May Treat Strokes.
Life-is-stranger-than-fiction time. Read through the lapses in IQ at The Gallery of Absurd Labels and Adverts.
In other news, you might want to see what happens when a big tow truck meets the ocean, at Tow Truck Gets Towed.
Remember when, once upon a time, the world was young, and the cheesy TV show The A Team was considered really cool? Fast forward to the here and now, and to someone’s science project. Go take a look at retro-worship gone weird and meet The A Team Robots.
Strange purchases section. So how do you keep your toddler safe? Naturally, the idea of just “being around” isn’t simple enough — so how about a decoy child for your home, so that if someone retarded wants to break in and kidnap your child,
they’ll grab the fake one. Well, that’s just one of the possible reasons for this next site. Although I’m at a loss to tell which target market is being appealed to here, given the advertising copy saying stuff like “Amazingly Realistic Doll Fills Your
Home with the Charm of a Little Girl!” Hmmm. Possibly dodgy. Go stare at Hanging With Hannah Doll.
Staying with both dodgy ideas and children — if you’re curious about what happens when well meaning biology teachers get bloodthirsty students to draw parts of the body, go browse the decidedly creepy collection at Student Drawings of The Body. Or if you’d rather examine the inside of your body in a more structured way, go play at the BBC’s Interactive Body.
It’s appeared here before, but now — given all the desperate attempts by shops to unload their cheap ‘n nasty digital cameras with ‘X megapixels!’, and in the process, educating the public into the need for higher pixel rates for their digicams — I thought it could be fun to show you something that’s a step beyond. Go browse and zoom in and out of A 2.5 Gigapixel Photograph.
And more science stuff. Curious about where you are in relation to overhead satellites? Naturally the site doesn’t list half of the secret militray equipment that’s in orbit around us, but you can still find a fairly large quantity of various
civilian satellites and space-gear at the rather cutely-named Heavens Above!.
The “hand out free CDs” approach in hopes that the suckers will sign up with you is still in its infancy here in SA — but in the US, it’s become something of a joke among online users, as the free CDs pile up. One of the most mocked companies is
the ISP AOL (America OnLine) which sends out tens of thousands of CDs that end up up as coasters and makeshift frisbees. One of the long suffering recipients of all those free CDs decided to do something with them. Go stare at the admittedly very cool-looking AOL CD Throne.
Urban redecoration time. And this is something fabulous to see. You know those little electricity boxes that are everywhere on the street? Check out an amazing and artistic revamp of these otherwise bland and boring objects. Get inspired to do the
same with your local electrical boxes. Look at the very beautiful urban paintings at Tarted Up Electricity Boxes.
If you’ve spent any time online — and especially in the hugely antagonstic and social enviroment known as MIRC (Internet Relay Chat) — you’ll have run across l337 (“leet”) little hacker-types with their own language and etiquette. It’s never too
late to join the cyber-armies online. Go learn something at the urban dictionary and Discover the Meaning of L337. For the aforementioned IRC application, which can make your online internet experience into something very social and fun,
download the free IRC program at MIRC.
And as a few people in Johannesburg discovered last week, when the electricity dies, life changes somewhat when there’s no power to get online. To be prepared for the next time, browse through the useful and fake information at What Should I Do If The Internet Goes Down.
Still more geek fun. I can’t tell if this is real or not, but see which (if any) of these questions you can answer at Microsoft Interview Questions. Then, what do you get for the geek who has almost everything? Wired magazine helps out. Go perv over Science Geek Gifts For All.
Online test time waster! Take the quiz to see if you can Tell the Difference between Muslim Fundamentalists and Christian Fundamentalists.
And here’s a stupid site for you: just to see what can be done with way too much time on your hands, (and a copy of Photoshop), go see Celebrities Before and After Marriage.
Free stuff! As an alternative to MS Paint and the expensive photo-applications on the market, go download and try out the open source paint and photo manipulation tool known as Paint Net.
I seem to have changed my name to Raspy Smurf, which makes sense in a way. Go see what smurf you become at the highly useless but fun Smurf Name Generator.
(Then, just a bizarre footnote to the above site: for the heck of it, I put “Nelson Mandela” into the smurf name generator — and got ‘Jurassic Smurf’. Coincidence? I think not.)
Recipe time. For those of you on diet, run like hell. For everyone else, go drool over the pictures and step-by-step instructions on making the mother of all junk food creations by combining different fast foods into one frightening and
tasty artery-clogging feast. Go stare in awe at Extreme Fast Food.
At last, a serious item. For an interesting article (with links) to demonstrate that perhaps things are not quite what they seem to be, read Kerry’s Silence Indicates Complicity With Vote Fraud.
Because (to mis-use a quote from Woody Allen) I was lucky enough to have been breastfed on falsies, I lack the weird sexual fetish that people generally seem to have with the female breast. Still, I’m aware that I’m in a minority on this. So, for
those of you out there who weirdly believe that the lumps of fat on the female chest are somehow “sexually arousing” — you’ll probably get off on this next site. It’s artworks made by using breasts. Go see Breast Pals!.
The Japanese, as you may have noticed, have a different approach to just about everything. First off, do some browsing
through this fabulously interesting (and expensive) site which caters to the Japanophiles by selling common or garden
Japanese items, ranging from sweets and childrens schoolbooks, up to various kinds of anime and fetish DVDs. My favourite is the T-shirt section, where you can buy a t-shirt saying (in Japanese) “I want a Japanese Girlfriend” and of course the ever popular “Baku Gaijin” (“Stupid Foreigner”) Yup, that’s me. Go browse JList – Japanese Goodies. For something different, try Learn To Use Japanese Toilets.
And finally, still staying with the Japanese, we get to the morally regrettable site section, here at the bottom of
the column. Although there’s no nudity, this site does carry an adults-only suggestion. So … what’s better than farting?
Correct — women farting! And naturally, if this concept is pleasing to you, then you’ll want to buy videos and DVDs of lots
and lots of women pointing their (clothed) bottoms at the camera and breaking wind. Hold your nose and stare at the many pix and adverts at this Japanese fart-fetish site called Please Listen To My Farts.
Then, just to show that I can get into the spirit of Christmas and the goodwill stuff, along with everyone else, here’s The
12 Days of Christmas as sung — er — farted by elves.
Until the next time, if seriousness doesn’t get me.