This week’s column is mostly in a “back to work and school” random weirdness and fun mode. Well, that is apart from this opening cluster of serious sites. (First we freak you out and depress you, then we hit you with the stupid, cool and silly stuff, so that you can relax. It’s a time-honoured media tactic.)
I ran across this utterly disturbing set of photographs at the BBC, which needs to be seen, as it conveys the horrors of the current so-called “war on terror”.
The back-story: United States troops at a roadblock open fire on a car filled with a mother, father and their five children. The troops kill the parents. Suddenly there are five young children, some of whom are wounded, alone in the world at a roadblock, surrounded by their parents’ murderers. Now go look through the sequence of photographs at US Troops Kill Parents and Leave Five Children Orphaned.
And for more reality-check stuff, there’s an “unembedded” journalist at work in Iraq, by the name of Dahr Jamail. To get a sense of life down on the ground, read Iraq Weblog.
Then, the 9/11 “end the secrecy” movement continues to spread. Consider the vast quantities of evidence at ReOpen 9/11. Also, via the Centre for an Informed America site, there’s this very good overview showing that the collapse of the World Trade Centre was anything but due to the official reasons. Read The Tower Collapse.
Okay, gear change. How far would you go to show that you are a computer game fan? Would you get a tattoo of your favourite game character? Take a look at some real fans at Gaming Tattoos.
Then, this ought to give the religious conservatives a reason to whine at me. What’s better than selling your soul? Yup — buying someone else’s soul! If there’s a celebrity you like — or hate, for that matter — why not buy their soul and play with it in whatever bizarre rituals you get up to on a boring Sunday afternoon? Go sniff out the celebrity of your choice, and Buy a Celebrity’s Soul.
If you’d like to visit a tropical island paradise, try to ignore the Truman Show sense of déjà vu and stare in awe at the weirdness of The Indoor Tropical Island Resort.
Clear Channel is a large corporate conglomerate with which — if you listen to Howard Stern’s radio show — you’ll be very familiar. Clear Channel operate like a giant machine that gobbles up small, independent radio stations, and turns them into uniformly “government-friendly” outlets for corporate music and adverts.
I’ve noticed the Clear Channel logo on local billboards for various radio stations, but I’m not sure if it’s the same monstrous corporation. Anyway, with that info as background, and to get an idea of why Clear Channel is not a good thing, take a look through the lengthy list of Songs Clear Channel Banned from Airplay after 9/11.
If you’re a happy watcher of human beings, then have some fun absorbing the tips and tricks of unconscious tell-tale signs of deceit, at How to Detect When Someone Is Lying to You.
Ghost towns are fabulously interesting places — deserted villages and towns where everyone has moved on, leaving the streets and houses and buildings empty, making it seem like something out of a Stephen King novel. Apparently, we have a few ghost towns in this country, but no one seems to have done the clever thing of taking pictures and listing where they are.
(And thus spawning a whole new tourism industry that’s just as valid as the ones built up around staring at whales or staring at farms where wine is made.) Have a look through the pix of eerily empty towns, at Ghost Town Gallery.
For a virtual version of real-world ghost towns, amble through this online cyber-graveyard of companies that no longer exist — complete with screenshots. Visit The Dot Com Graveyard.
What’s better than just having a car? What about having a car that you’ve engineered and fiddled with to turn it into a robot? Go see what happens when technical expertise meets the real world, at The Real Life Transformer Robo Car.
Privacy goes bye-bye time. Spotted this news item a little while back: an inventor has come up with a device that can see through walls. Not just fuzzily see through them, or recreating heat imagery, but effectively strip away the walls visually, as if they didn’t exist. Oh, wonderful. It’s only a matter of time before the military and governments start playing with it, in order to snoop on us. Go read about the device known as The Angel Light.
Now for some accidentally “found” art that’s more than a little bit creepy. Someone apparently lost a digital camera in the woods somewhere. Someone else found it, and decided to put the pictures in the camera online. There’s an odd sense of Blair witch territory as you scroll down through the pix online at Strange Pictures Found in Woods.
Then, for more found art, browse through this latest signs site filled with odd and weird “official” signs created by authorities to let us know something. There are a lot of totally strange pictures of real signs — some of which you have to wonder just what the makers were thinking. Go to Swank Signs.
If you have more bandwidth than sense, how about a 40-meg download of a Norwegian lecture on how to disco dance. The fun starts about halfway through the clip as the music kicks in and the Nordic boogie monster erupts: Learn to Disco Norwegian Style.
Staying in this “minimal sense” theme — if you have more money than sense, then how about buying props and objects used in Hollywood movies? Want the Jaguar used in Gone in 60 Seconds, for instance? It’s available. Go wade through the objects and clothing used by the stars at Screen Used.
There was once an entire decade where a weird, mindless mindset was in vogue. Try wading through the horrific styles and fashions of Seventies Design.
I’m not sure what country this comes from, but picture the scene: it’s cold. Cold enough to make frost on a street full of parked cars’ windows. Naturally, for one aspiring cartoonist, this means it’s a blank canvas just waiting to be used. Go look at the pictures of cute characters drawn on frosted windows of parked cars: Frosted Cartoon Characters.
Things to make you go “Awwwww’ #875895950. This time, it’s the total cuteness of a baby koala bear, resting on someone’s hand. Go stare at Baby Koala. For a glimpse of a really happy expression on a little squirrel’s face that just tells you it’s having a fabulous time with its life, try The Happy Squirrel!.
For more “awww” reactions, you can’t go wrong with weddings. Well, maybe you can. Take for example the strange, odd and regrettable choices made by people at this site showing major lapses in taste by marriage-headed people. Browse through And the Bride Wore….
Reality is complex sometimes. Actually, it’s complex all the time — it’s just here in South Africa where everyone lived in a little naive bubble for 40 years where everyone thinks that ethnic differences are the most complicated thing you could imagine. This is, of course rubbish, and something the rest of the world has mostly worked out and worked through, decades back. Try a taste of a real complicated daily problem, such as this site by a gay Christian, talking about the problems of Nudity in the Gym.
Or to see something that’s a lot more frightening than the midi music file embedded in the previous page, what’s better than having a preserved animal corpse in your home? Yes, you guessed right — having a preserved animal corpse that you can use to store liquor in! I’m not kidding.
See the depths to which humanity has sunk, at The Stuffed Squirrel Liquor Decanter. And here’s still more atrocities committed on the animal kingdom — this time it’s to sell a product to cover the natural claws of dogs and cats. Go wince at the pictures of Soft Claws.
What’s better than being a geek? Correct! Rewriting the lyrics to popular songs and replacing them with cool geek versions. (Like Losing My Connection, The Twelve Days of Uptime and Somewhere over the Network.) Trust me, it reads a lot better than it sounds. Go browse through the many, many rewritten songs at Songs Rewritten By Computer Geeks.
More geek stuff. It’s time you started learning about the basics of internet security. Hopefully, when reading this, you already have the basics set up on your PC. The basics — in case you didn’t know — are an antivirus program, an anti-spyware program, an anti-Trojan program and a firewall. Don’t believe the companies that try to tell you that their product “does it all”. They don’t. You need one of each to stay minimally secure online. That said, go learn something at this site, which is designed to help net users get a bit more knowledge about net security. Try Über Hacker.
For another useful online site filled with links to goodies to help the new user get up and going, there’s the Incredible Internet Guy!.
(For your info, I use Kaspersky Antivirus, Ad Aware for spyware, The Cleaner and Pest Patrol for Trojans, and Zone Alarm as a firewall. I also don’t use Internet Explorer — Firefox Mozilla is a free, alternative browser that prevents most of the pop-ups and spyware from being installed. Don’t be frightened — it looks almost the same as the browser you’re used to, but it works much better. Get it at Firefox Browser.)
Alternatively, if you’re happy with what you’re using, then you’re probably one of the people who’d buy The Popcorn Fork!.
It’s time for the increasingly infamous and popular “morally regrettable” end-of-column links. (Some info — for the more elegant among you — the word “flange” is er … ahem … a slang term used by certain folks to describe a part of the anatomy. No, I’m not getting more specific.) For the crude and lewd among us who snigger at accidental crudity, try the otherwise totally innocent page advertising a tool known as The Safety Boy Flange Spreader.
Finally, I was going to put a link to a two-meg file I found, known as The Teenage Mutant Porno Turtles, but after a bit of reflection, decided that it was just too wonderfully tasteless and pornographic to put here. Sorry.
Until the next time, if my own ethics don’t get me.