| If You Thought Giving Birth Online Invaded Privacy... |
| From Rock to Rock in Scotland |
| Surf the Great Northern Expanses |
| Looking for a Place to Go or Stay? |
| Lesbian Find-a-Date |
| Not the National Enquirer |
| Car Repair Scam Alerts |
| Messing About in Boats |
| Antiques Roadshow Online |
| Antique Tips |
| Good Jokes, Bad Jokes |
| Virtual Stock Exchange Eliminates Questionable Clause |
| Sheep Move, Wolves Follow |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
If You Thought Giving Birth Online Invaded Privacy...
The Net seems just a little more sordid this evening. Sure, given one free typing hand you can find online porn sites galore, but this? Two recent high school graduates have pledged to lose their mutual virginities in full view of Web spectators on August 4. At least one e-mail campaign aims to "SHUT THIS OBSCENE WEBSITE DOWN !!!" through pressure on American legislators, but besides its obvious ignorance of the right of free speech, the letter does make one good point - there are no posted warnings for children. The site ramps up on July 18, and we have questions: Have Mike and Diane practiced? Do they have sponsors - does Mike have a Nike swoosh tattooed on his butt? Is this their allotted 15 minutes of fame or will it last more like 15 seconds? We may never find answers -the site is extremely busy and difficult to download - but keep trying. We know you will.http://www.ourfirsttime.com/
SURFING SITES
Spiffy Experimental Web Design
Gurus tell us that Web sites must be designed to inform, advise, or sell. Navigation has to be simple and logical, and the reason for the site to exist very obvious. Right? Wrong! If you visit Spiff, you'll realize a Web site can let you wander with no clear direction as you experience images, colors, wonderful effects and some meaningful words about love, life, stars, flying, and more. If you can find them, the Venus page will intrigue you, the Love page will move you, and the Pixel page's little animated fly will amuse you intensely for no good reason. Spiff is an adventure, graphically beautiful, conceptually stunning, and pleasurable to the senses. Who needs navigation anyway?http://www.manipulation.com/spiff/
http://www.capecod.net/~gbenoit/
From the elegant lines of water towers in Chicago and Sabadell, Spain to the kitsch of the giant ketchup bottle in Collinsville, Ill., someone has found romance in one of the most universal and unimaginative features of cityscapes. Why bore your Disney World visitors when you can stick mouse ears on your water tower, or put a handle on it and call it a teapot in Lindstrom, Minn.? We enjoyed touring the decorated towers, but we're not really sure we'd want to have to actually live with any of them in our burg.
http://members.tripod.com/~watertowers/index.html
The Museum of Questionable Nostalgia
The Museum of Questionable Nostalgia features RealPlayer grabs on the pictures and sounds of your (well, OK, our) youth. Remember games like Mystery Date, the lifesized doll Patti Playpal and the theme song of the "Hercules" cartoon ("softness in his eyes, iron in his thighs")? If nostalgia lights your fire, the items featured here combine that rare thrill of childhood crap with the sheepish acknowledgement that you once enjoyed such items as Mr. Machine.http://www.dreamsandbones.com/museum/museum.htm
http://wwwfights.com/
Strange Objects Found in Dog Feces
Did you wonder what happened to the foil wrapping of those chocolate Easter eggs your dog consumed last year? This site's detailed stories explore awesome puppy appetites and their often uncomfortable consequences. From tales of tinsel pulled from a terrier's bottom (15 inches long!) to an exploration of a huge quantity of Brillo pads in turd (they went rusty blue!), the stories may make your stomach turn. A strand of Mardi Gras beads in his own dog's poo inspired the author to set up this site. We recommend visiting with a doggy bag handy.http://www.concentric.net/~slaroche/poop.html
Let's start with a warning for the kids. See the URL? See the abbreviation "vdsc"? See our headline? See which word the site uses for "poop"? OK, on with the show. This site lets you select about a dozen mostly incomprehensible parameters like impact, evaporation rate, and "tempurture" - but not percent tinsel, sadly. Play for hours or avoid like a pile of dogshi - er, dogpoop.
http://www.chocodog.com/vdsc/
Care for a short news bite with a chaser of style and humour? In addition to Haiku Headline of the Day's 17-syllable international and local news, you can now get your info with the comic flair of a limerick or submit your own. Here's one example:
Well Microsoft launched 98
but the views from these windows ain't great.
That Bill Gates - what a joker!
It's still mediocre!
Once more it's a death worse than fate.
http://www.coolwebsite.com/
Aaron Bacall is an artist whose single-panel pen and ink cartoons have been published from the New Yorker to the Saturday Evening Post. This site offers a quick sample of some choice selections on such topics as lawyers, computers, relationships, golf, school and even the nightly news, all likely to make you chuckle and smile. If you like what you see, you can contact him for custom cartoons.
http://www.reuben.org/bacallcartoons/
The Gourmet Spot Hits the Spot
In step with the times, the Gourmet Spot isn't all champagne and caviar, but more your daily bread made sublime. Tutorials teach basic techniques and supply great tips. For example: cool boiling water a few degrees before you pour it on your coffee; boiling makes a bitter pot. Recipes abound (albeit of varying quality), some from famous restaurant chefs. More advanced cooks might bookmark the metric conversion calculator and the cook's thesaurus, which gives advice for ingredient substitutions. Links take you to restaurant guides for major cities. And food industry professionals can hook up with the non-profit group, Second Harvest, and help feed the more than 30 million Americans who suffer from hunger.http://www.gourmetspot.com/
Working Stiff: The Trials and Tribulations of Working Life
Somehow this site manages to mix Cosmopolitan Magazine deep-dish with public broadcasting high-mindedness, all rolled up in non-sentimental workers' populism. A feature titled Twisted Knickers gives savvy legal advice about how to survive an office romance. For the full-color glory and gore of mating with one's cubicle mate, jump to the Kiss and Tell true stories postings. Or read the diary of a riverboat casino worker who describes card-counting gangs and glassy-eyed 70-year-old gambling addicts rushing the doors at opening time - then brawling over their favorite slot machines. The site is part of the PBS project, the Web Lab. If you're stiff enough, they might pay you 150 bucks to spill your work-a-day story, too.http://www.pbs.org/WebLab/workingstiff/
Meet the man who makes Craig Stadler seem neat as a pin. Mike "Fluff" Cowan has toiled in relative obscurity for most of his life, but when in 1996 Tiger Woods's team chose the veteran Fluff to shepherd the wunderkind down the fairways and across the greens, his white coveralls stepped into pro golf's trimmest shadow, and a new media darling emerged. With cookie-duster moustache, unapologetic cigarette, weathered visage, and thick torso, he's the perfect study in contrast to his clean-shaven, clean living, fresh-faced charge. At his Web site, Fluff introduces you to his favorite restaurants - hot dogs, ribs, loose meat, and Thai preferred - and offers sound golfing advice, even for those of us who don't see loft over the treetops as a viable shot. Who could resist a man who compares the feeling of Tiger's win at the Master's to front row seats at a Dead concert?
http://www.fluffsite.com/fluffon.html
If you like glamor, you may well like the premise of the new e-zine World Extreme: adventures by world-class athletes documented by top photographers. Interviews with champion surfers and movers and shakers such as the president of a sports agency help personalize this site, which covers aspects of high-profile outdoor competition often overlooked by news media. We found a background piece on sports models and advice on buying a racehorse, neither of which, alas, we've been able to put to practical use. We also came across a few "404 Not Found" error messages (perhaps the Webmaster was on safari), but these did little to abate our enthusiasm. Skiers and landscape lovers should check out the excellent photo gallery. Our favorite here, on the Competitions page, is a tongue-in-cheek article entitled "Pro-Leisure Tour", which concludes: "Thanks to daddy's (sic) fat wallet, the successful resort bum gets to trek to exotic places and has images taken that mirror adventure, excitement and the reasons for which we are grateful to be alive!" Tell us about it - fortune should smile so on us all!
http://www.worldextreme.com/
Birds, Butterflies, and Bradys
Here's the story of Christine TarskiWho was living outside Dallas in a field.
She's a Mining Company guide who had a problem.
She thought her fate was sealed.
One day to the rescue came Deb Simpson
Who was busy with a Web site of her own.
She's specialized in building gardens
And with her help, the field has grown.
Read about their exploits with the black clay
When the garden expert met the bird maven
How they overcame the obstacles before them
That's the way it became a Bird and Butterfly Haven
(You know the chorus.)
Birding: http://birding.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa060998.htm
Gardening: http://gardening.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa060998.htm
If you think the online world has left ethics in the dust, think again. Censorship, hate groups, hackers, pornography, copyright and intellectual property law, medical practice - these and many other topics of frequent public and private debate are the meat and potatoes of Astrolabe: Ethical Navigation through Virtual Technologies, part of a project sponsored by Ohio State University and International Advisory Board to explore ramifications of policies, practices, and attitudes on the Net and elsewhere in the e-world. The Ethical Navigations forum invites readers' comments on posted topics; the Question of the Week also offers participation. The project includes a peer-reviewed online journal in HTML and PDF formats and a CD-ROM.
http://www.cgrg.ohio-state.edu/Astrolabe/
The ever-expanding Mining Company now has a site on multiculturalism with features that focus on bilingual education and the cultural makeup of the Internet. The guide, Jennifer Hicks, teaches Orientalism and Native American issues offline. At 8 p.m. ET each Monday, Hicks holds a chat and opens the floor to multiple cultures, countering third-world women's often just accusations that first-world feminists turn speaking about them into speaking for them. Soon, the site promises, others will be able to make their voices heard via the bulletin board as well.
http://multicultural.miningco.com/
"The Hotlist - Global Issues That Affect Almost Everyone" offers public forums and links to background articles on the environment, human rights, and trade. Each major category contains discussion and points to resources on hot topics in the evening news, such as global warming, genetic engineering, human rights, and the arms trade. The site reflects genuine concern about physical and social forces that shape our world and our future. Some may fault it for not taking a stand on the issues it covers but, as a gateway, that is not its purpose. The summaries are modest but admirably well-balanced, the links well chosen and diverse.
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Vines/8066/HotList.html
NewHoo: Volunteer-Driven Web Index
The brains behind NewHoo hope this Web directory will become a megasite "by relying on a vast army of volunteer editors", according to its invitation to "Become a NewHoo Editor". The NewHoo home page may remind you of how Yahoo and other giant search darlings once looked, with a bare-bones list of categories (arts, business, computers, games, and so forth) and no banner ads. NewHoo usefully provides thumbnail site descriptions with many of its links. How many times have you wished for a site description on a search results page elsewhere? But will enough people contribute to make NewHoo as powerful as its well-established, well-heeled older competitors? We guess an infusion of capital would help it become "the largest human-edited directory of the Web" but the challenge is enormous. Then again, remembering the humble academic beginnings of Yahoo! makes us think anything is possible on the Web.http://www.gnuhoo.com/
Free Online Business Card and Calendar Templates
There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but at Originalab you can avail yourself of the free services of a friendly little designing robot that will create a business card, calendar, type chart, or greeting card. Choose the font, color layout, and design, and a few seconds later you can download the resulting PDF file. Clean, fast-loading, and easy to use, this generous site is worth a visit.http://www.originalab.se/
This site won't make you jump up and down with glee at its creative design or glamorous graphics, but it may be useful for business folk. Deal Consulting has posted some interesting business columns, and provides info on everything from the use of business models to personal development. Now, you know we don't usually focus on business or financial sites, but this one's worth a gander.
http://www.dealconsulting.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Armed only with a solar-powered Mac, Paola Arosio and Diego Meozzi are driving across Scotland in a Twingo to look at rocks in places with amusing names like Studley Roger. Granted, they're pretty impressive rocks. It's an interactive tour of stone circles, standing stones, cairns, and hillforts put together in cooperation with the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network. It's no small undertaking; this is a two-month expedition. On the front page of the site, you can check their odometer, filmometer, and tea-ometer (how many miles, how much film, and how many cups of tea they've gone through).http://www.stonepages.com/stones/tour/
Surf the Great Northern Expanses
A tightly tailored Web portal, Alcanseek searches the Web for all things Canadian and Alaskan. Aimed at both travelers and residents, the site provides free classifieds, homepages, and chat areas as well as valuable guides to weather, road conditions, wildlife watching, lodging reservations, and more. You can also have brochures snail-mailed to you from a site form.http://www.alcanseek.com/
Looking for a Place to Go or Stay?
We quickly found a condo vacation to our liking in Travel Guides Online, electronic companion to the Travel Guides series of books. The more popular your destination, it seems, the more likely you are to find something suitable in one of this site's free, easy-to-search databases. We searched for a family vacation in Illinois and found one - in Indiana. That's OK - our fantasies take us to warmer climes. You can search for bed-and-breakfast establishments, elegant small hotels, "All-Suite Hotels", Pacific Rim hotels, and among 14,000 golf courses around the world. The site has brochureware for several Travel Guide books, and the bookstore (associated with Amazon.Com) is only a click or two from most pages.http://www.travelguides.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
If other chicks are your scene, this site will provide you with all you need to know to score. With netiquette advice, the option for screen names, and an easy to use classified ad generator, things could heat up soon.http://www.girldates.com/
Do you sneak peeks at the National Enquirer while waiting in line at the grocery? Get more scoops and weird and wacky gossip in the NetEnquirer.
http://www.netenquirer.com/
This site has some juicy information for consumers about auto repair fraud and rip-offs. While the site is essentially a promotion for the author's book, the free info will help you watch for potential scams when you take your car in for repairs.
http://www.carinfo.com/
This small boat resource will prove fun for anyone who enjoys rowing, putt-putting, or sailing. The site takes articles and commentary from the twice monthly print magazine.
http://mims.com/maib/
Many watch the Antiques Roadshow for the sheer joy of seeing somebody discover that some hideous vase is worth thousands. The online version offers an itinerary and details of their 1998, as well as contests that challenge you to identify curios.
http://www.pbs.org/antiques/
If it's antique or collectible, you'll find tips about it at this site/newsletter. Get news you need like how to pre-order Nascar Barbie or where to find gramophone needles. Search the archives or submit a question of your own.
http://collectorsweb.com/
Children and the easily offended should avoid this site, although it does seem to offend equally and without prejudice. Some jokes you could tell your grandmother; others you might be embarrassed telling anywhere. Basically just dumb humor with a few hidden, tinsel-like gems.
http://www.net-ent.com/lol/index.html
CORRECTIONS
Virtual Stock Exchange Eliminates Questionable Clause
In NSD 4.19, we reviewed the Virtual Stock Exchange and in so doing wrote that registration came with this clause: "From time to time, we may make our database of user information (including email addresses) available to other parties for promotions and solicitations of goods or services that may be of interest to VSE." That is no longer the case.http://www.virtualstockexchange.com/
We covered a fiendishly difficult little puzzle in "Hard Brain Teaser" in NSD 4.09. Latecomers and anyone still trying to solve it can now find it at this URL.
http://fitz76.hypermart.net/wolves.html