In keeping with the holiday mood, the “oh, who cares about the horrific state of the world and all the suffering” theme more or less continues this week, with a selection of odd sites with which to kill time. (To help cover all the bases as the year winds to a close — if you’re curious about what you didn’t hear about in 2004, take a look at The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2004).
The BBC shows its quirky and odd side this week. How? By setting up a site dedicated to teenage sexual health awareness. And why is this “odd”? Well, would you make a site for young girls hitting puberty, called Funny Flaps?
Too lazy to write a letter to Santa? Luckily the internet has the answer for you. Go pick your various options, ranging from earnest and serious to crazed and perverse, and create a letter to Santa at The Dear Santa Letter Generator.
What’s better than a wedding? Correct, a wedding where it is obligatory to dress up as a pirate! Go stare and mutter “arrrrr” at The Pirate Wedding Photographs.
Time for things to make you go “awwww”. First off, in a few months’ time they’ll see you as a tasty snack, but for now they’re cute: Baby Polar Bears. And how about a Mexican Salamander?
Stupid-internet-addresses time. The need to have a simple URL online often leads to some wonderful “oops” moments. For instance, take “www.expertsexchange.com”. Now you’d think, at first glance, it’s the home of the transgendered, pre-ops and transsexuals, exchanging useful tips ahead of the final operation. But it isn’t. (The actual site owners clearly went “oops” and set up a redirect from this address, to the final site where it’s made clear just what it is.) Go see what lies behind Expert Sex Change.
Useful geeky online stuff. Ever been hunting for audio or visual material online, and the regular warezkiddie outlets can’t help you? Here’s a web-based audio/video search engine — test drive it at Singing Fish.
Unidentified flying object (UFO) fun. Mainstream coverage for a change, of what was apparently a 1952 Military Engagement with UFO.
Then, if you’ve been dumb enough to fall prey to the advertising and bought yourself an iPod instead of the cheaper and much larger storage capacity of the Creative Nomad, you might be sitting wondering what you can do to make yourself feel better. Why not Hack iPod Graphics?
Feel the need to display just how geeky you are? Go experiment with this next site, which allows you to create your own “Ascii” text — suitable for pasting as your e-mail signature. If you don’t know what this means, don’t be put off — take a look and fiddle at The Online Ascii Generator.
Christmas comes even closer. So naturally, this has to be deconstructed in some way. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean anything hi-falutin’ — it means “let’s show you what happens when you combine a rather big firework with a snowman” at Snowman Boom.
It is the time of year when hopeful businesses try to make money out of the suckers by appealing to “the Christmas spirit — but it doesn’t always work. So, naturally, some wide-awake folks have an online collection going of really vile Xmas displays. To see what happens when the desire to make money combines with no artistic ability, go to The Most God-Awful Christmas Displays Ever.
Staying with Xmas, the wonderfully tasteless T-shirt Hell site pops up yet again. This time it’s because of its fabulous wrapping paper. I mean, I would love a gift wrapped in nicely bright paper with the words “TEARING THIS PAPER SIGNIFIES YOUR CONSENT TO PERFORM ORAL SEX ON THE GIVER”. Be warned, there’s adult language ahead. Look at Funny Gift-Wrap Paper.
Plug-in time. Despite most people playing solitaire on their PCs to pass the time, I find Mah Jong to be quite a fun game that goes a little bit further in terms of involving the mind. Point being, if you’ve got all the necessary plug-ins on your PC, go Play Christmas Mah-Jong.
Then for you Titanic freaks out there, go take — courtesy of the National Geographic — a Virtual Tour of the Titanic.
Virtual online worlds are interesting to snoop around, just to get an idea of the state of current computer technology. This next site lets you stroll around in a virtual city for free, without making you pay first. Go stroll through Zanpro.
On to something important at last. You’ve heard of it being done. Maybe you’ve even seen it happen. Now, at last, you can experience the fun and fear of How To Bend Forks. (I have to mention, seeing as the active link above will be slightly hidden in the final edited column, that the name for the fork-bending site really appeals to my shallow, twisted and happily immature mind — “www.fork-you.com”. Now that’s a site name I can get behind.)
The only serious link this week: if you can cope, take a look at the rather vile pix of the war crimes allegedly committed by the United States, at Fallujah Photographs.
As prices locally just keep going up, pushing more and more folks into debt-slavery, it’s rather useful to find ways of saving money. Although this site is focused on the US, there are still a number of useful items that you could adapt for local use. Browse through the often quite sneaky ways of cheaper living at Sneaky Cheap!.
You will perhaps have seen that newspapers tend to try to outdo each other in coming up with shock-horror headlines, in order to get you to buy the newspaper to “find out what the story is”. Well, I don’t need to use any similar “outraged and shocked” justification for providing cheap sleaze — as long-time readers of this column will have noticed. So for your cheap thrills, without any pretence at “educating” you, be amazed, envious and thoughtful at World Sexual Records.
Time for creative uses for the internet that you may not have thought of. The net itself is a massively informative teaching tool, providing a vast quantity of information on a variety of subjects. But sometimes it’s not.
Take the following sites as an example of the other extreme, when users happily decide to make a point of putting up sites that don’t subscribe to the “providing valuable information” concept. In so doing, these sites create something rather surreal and interesting. The deliberate banality becomes almost exciting. For an example, try the German site known as 100 Ways to Open Beer.
And then, for another example of the deliberate study of an utterly mundane topic — you’ve seen dirty cars where someone has written “wash me” in the dirt on the windscreen? Now look over the photographs of various cars that have been written on. Go to Wash Me!.
Or how about the modern equivalent of whittling — carving pieces of wood to pass the time. Naturally the majority of humans these days are trapped in offices, so the ability to reach up to a tree and break off a branch and sit happily carving a piece of wood isn’t an option any more. But in countless offices, pencils sit waiting for the carving knife. And of course, a website gets created to show other pencil-carvers the results of hours of bored whittling. Go look at the odd results (as well as contemplate the creation of the site itself) of Pencil Carvings.
Then, seeming to be like one of those comedy improv games where players are told to review something seriously when it usually isn’t treated that way, consider the hyperactive yet studious approach of The Candy Critic. (I have to admit, though, even though I don’t eat sugar, the Candy Critic site is great eye-candy.)
And continuing in the “mundane things examined in far too much detail” thread, ever wondered who the people on the backs of playing cards are? Me neither. But this site tells you all you never thought possible about The People on the Playing Cards. Or how about someone who seriously wants to put forward the argument Is Popeye God?.
Do cartoons have skeletons? Not something I’d ever think about, but the creator of this next site not only thought about it, he came up with some graphics that veer between creepy and fascinating. Go stare at Skeletal Structures of Cartoon Characters.
Someone noticed that expensive wine seems to have a dimple at the bottom of the bottle. The deeper the dimple, the more expensive and pricey the wine. Well, that was the theory. He decided to test this — go look at the pix and graphs and perhaps try this experiment in local bottle stores, to see if it holds true for local wine: Wine Bottle Dimple Depth Test.
Taking performance art and anarchy a step further, some people have decided that, just for the hell of it, not only would they give a complete stranger a free bench, they would film this presentation and put it up online. How would you react to a knock at the door and a stranger pointing to a large bench, telling you: “It’s yours”? It’s an 11 meg download, but odd in the extreme: Congratulations You Have Won A Bench!.
Until the next time, if my holiday mood doesn’t get me.