BREAKING SURF
| Blogging and Editing |
| Spam Wars: Spam vs. Direct Marketing |
| Quality Assurance in Open-Source Projects |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| The History of Baseball Uniforms |
| Crazy for Cows |
| We Apologize to Your Cousin and Katherine Mieszkowski |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
US Congressional Report on Terrorist Attacks of Sept. 11, 2001
The "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" was prepared by members of the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress. It's 858 pages thick and was just posted online as we went to press, so we have only a general idea of what's in it. The media is already all over it, but the beauty of the Web is that you can go read it for yourself. You can download the report as a full 5.51-MB PDF file or in smaller chunks section by section.http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/911.html
User-Hostile E-Mail Process at the White House
You used to be able to simply e-mail the President via the White House Web site, but with some 15,000 e-mails a day to handle, the White House staff has decided to blunt this nasty, raw force of democracy. Now, if you want to submit opinions about government policies or ask questions of government officials, you must face a cumbersome nightmare of forms that can involve as many as nine Web pages. Part of the process requires a fair bit of identifying information, an indication of whether you support or oppose government policy, and selecting the subject of your e-mail from a list. Once you've waded through the tedious process, you must confirm that yes, indeed, you did intend to send that e-mail. There may be sound reasons why the White House had to improve its management of the deluge of messages, but nobody is impressed with the new system, which seems to convert ordinary communication into fodder for surveys and data collection. CNET has a story, and the Register reports that the new system is so unpopular, it was inundated with so much critical e-mail that, for a while at least, the system was brought to its knees. Ironically, the White House site suggests that you might just want to consider snail mail or even a fax for that really important communication. Nasty business that, wanting to communicate informally with your government. White House Web Mail: https://sawho14.eop.gov/PERSdata/intro.htmCNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-1027156.html
Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/31829.html
France Tries to Bid Adieu to "E-Mail"
The French have a tradition of trying to maintain purity of language. Not too many other countries have an equivalent of the Academie Francaise, which hands doen edicts on proper language use, and instead prefer to let language evolve naturally. Not the French. France's Culture Ministry recently announced that the word "e-mail" will henceforth be stricken from proper and official French. The word to use is "courriel", a contraction of "courrier electronique" which is in widespread use among the colonists in Quebec. There's a minor rebellious ripple propagating through the French online community over this. The situation makes you wonder how the French are supposed to order tacos and pizzas. ZDNet and CNN have blessedly brief takes on the inanity.ZDNet: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-1027357.html
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/07/18/france.email.ap/index.html
Property, Open Source, Regulation, Ideology, and Saving the Net
Doc Searls, blogger and editor of Linux Journal, has sewn together a fine piece of word cloth out of a variety of linked but separate thoughts. He focuses on how to save the Net as we know it: an independent, non-commercial, unregulated medium of two-way communication. It is threatened, he writes, by the interests of those corporations and government agencies that would profit by controlling it. Searls starts off slowly, to our minds, but hits his stride when he starts talking about the convergence of content providers and major ISPs and their regulatory perspectives. The editorial has generated much discussion, at the Linux Journal page and at Slashdot.Linux Journal: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6989
Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/23/1144211
Woz would be Steve Wozniak, immortal now in the pantheon of computing gods for co-founding Apple. Wozniak has started a new company called Wheels of Zeus, which plans to create a network, wOzNet, that will use electronic tags to let you keep track of your animals, children, or property. Low-power, low-bandwidth wireless technology will keep track of stuff or creatures which have embedded or attached GPS-equipped tags. The tags can be tracked within one or two miles of a base station and the base stations can network together to cover a wider radius. Associated software will be able to do things like send alerts if your kids sneak into a neighbor's yard or if your TV set starts roaming the neighborhood street grid. wOzNet differs from simpler RFID technology in that it has longer range and uses GPS location information. Wozniak is reportedly not too concerned about the privacy implications of this technology since it will use encryption to prevent others from snooping on your tags. It remains to be seen if the public at large will embrace this kind of tracking ability, though it's a fair bet that governments around the world will love it.
http://www.woz.com/
Inkblot-Based Passwords: Innovation from Microsoft
Are all your passwords the same? Do you use combinations of easy-to-remember words and numbers like your social security number, name, and address? You should already know that passwords generated in this fashion are weak. To cure what is a plague of weak security, Microsoft researchers have taken a completely different tack: inkblots. That's right, the Rorschach test lives, and the implementation is amazingly clever. In tests of the concept, researchers asked individuals to examine a series of computer-generated inkblots. The subjects write a short description of what they see in each of 10 inkblots - for example, the sample, to us, was "flying ogre". By taking the first and last letters of each description, the users created strong passwords that were specific to each of them. When presented with the inkblots again, subjects seem to recall the same descriptions, and so can also recall the same password. Over the course of a week, many of the subjects had committed the passwords themselves to memory and could reproduce them at will. It is not clear if this research will make it into any product and we're skeptical of how secure such a system could be, given the known patterns of letters in words, but the concept does break the mold of password status quo.http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx?id=417
Speedy Windows Password-Cracking
You'll be happy to know that it now takes only 13.6 seconds to crack your Windows password, down from a pokey 1 minute 41 seconds. It's been known for years that Windows passwords are ridiculously insecure, mostly because Microsoft either accidentally or deliberately did not use crypto techniques which add random information to encrypted passwords. Crypto researcher Philippe Oechslin demonstrated that he can speed up password cracking by essentially trading memory for time. His algorithm uses a large pre-calculated look-up table to speed the decryption. Linux/Unix fans should not gloat too much - it would take only 4,096 times longer to crack their passwords with this algorithm - that's only about 15.5 hours on a moderately powerful home computer. Oechslin is not releasing his code or look-up tables, but if you can understand the paper you can easily write your own. We bring you the CNET story, the paper, and even a related demonstration Web site that will crack most Windows alphanumeric passwords in about 30 seconds.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-5053063.html
Oechslin: http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/pub/lasec/doc/Oech03.pdf
Web Cracker: http://lasecpc13.epfl.ch/ntcrack/
Six Degrees of Friendster-ation
It's said that everyone on the planet is separated by a mere six links of friend-of-a-friend, the so-called six degrees of separation. At Friendster's Web site, you can navigate a network of friends-of-friends and build your own connections with new digital friends. The concept behind of Friendster is simple. People usually meet new friends through mutual acquaintances. Friendster lets you do this electronically as you create a digital version of your social network and map out connections to other social groups. In theory, you could meet your next spouse this way. In practice... - well, we'll see. Already, some people are auctioning their Friendster networks on eBay, promising to make the buyer hipper than hip. Can money can buy online cool and social cachet? We're pretty sure it can in the real world.... Wired covers the site.Friendster: http://www.friendster.com/index.jsp
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59650,00.html
RIAA Ramps Up Legal Assault on File-Sharers
Flush with recent legal success, the RIAA continues to go after individual file-sharers, at a clip of some 75 subpoenas a day. It has stated that it intends to file at least several hundred lawsuits over the next two months. US copyright law is flexible and penalties for each illegally offered song can range from $750 to $150,000. With a court ruling that forces ISPs to turn over names of suspected file traders in its pocket, the RIAA is a lawyer's wet dream. Verizon has received at least 150 subpoenas in the last two weeks. Oddly, the RIAA's lawyers have sent no subpoenas to AOL Time Warner, which is not only the largest ISP in the US but is also the parent company of Warner Brothers Records, an RIAA member. We're sure that's strictly an isolated coincidence. Fox News and Cleveland.com have the news, and TechTV did some digging in the public records to find a bunch of targeted file-sharers, identified by username.Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,92351,00.html
Cleveland.com: http://tinyurl.com/hyqy
TechTV: http://www.techtv.com/news/culture/story/0,24195,3484600,00.html
BuyMusic Download Service Ambitious But Flawed
Buy.com has unveiled BuyMusic, an ambitious new online music download site designed to compete with Apple's iTunes Music Store. The popularity of iTunes Music Store was apparently a direct incentive to Buy.com CEO Scott Blum, who is quoted as saying that the Mac-only iTunes is on the "wrong platform". Thus BuyMusic.com is squarely targeted at Windows users. BuyMusic only provides music in Windows Media 9 format (available for flavors of Windows only) and brands the songs with digital rights management restrictions that vary among songs. The restrictions contrast with the iTunes scheme, which lets you copy any song to other computers and burn it to CD-ROM as many times as you want. The BuyMusic service boasts of 300,000 songs and lower prices than other music download sites, although every song we looked for was priced at 99 cents, same as iTunes. In fact, one person found an album for less on Buy.com than the download price at BuyMusic. If you find that sort of thing entertaining, watch the denizens of Slashdot predictably tear BuyMusic to shreds.BuyMusic: http://buymusic.com/
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/22/1641216
Unfaith's Metallica Hoax Fooled More Than It Should Have
When the teachers among us lecture journalism undergrads on computer-assisted reporting (yes, threads of academia run through our emperor's clothes), our students learn how to decipher URLs. A recent hoax article allegedly from MTV had Metallica suing Unfaith over the use of the chords E and F. While many people did not put such an outlandish claim beneath Metallica, whose members quite actively support the RIAA's campaign against file-sharing, we (and our students, we hope) clued in to the fact that the MTV page with the article was not on an MTV server, but on ScoopThis.com, a site designed by Unfaith singer/songwriter Erik Ashley. Hmmm. Furthermore, the real MTV site had no indication that this article existed. Hmmm, hmmm. The mystery was solved when Ashley revealed on Unfaith's own site that the suit was a hoax - but not before several media outlets that would have known better with even the simplest fact-checking fell for it. CourtTV has more.Hoax: http://www1.scoopthis.com/411/met_uf/stc_met_uf_mtv.htm
Ashley: http://www.erikashley.com/
Unfaith: http://www.unfaith.net/pages/hoax/
CourtTV: http://www.courttv.com/news/cow/071703_metallica_ctv.html
If hunting naked women with a paint gun is your idea of a good time and you've got $10,000 to spare, you might be able to arrange your very own private hunt thanks to Michael Burdick. Of course, you won't be able to mount the trophy rack over the fireplace, but you will be able to relive your exploits on videotape. Burdick has been flogging videotapes of naked babe hunts at his Hunting for Bambi site and the news team of Las Vegas's KLAS have reported that he offers the real thing to folks with the necessary fees. The KLAS site has the story, complete with the expected outrage from women's groups, spluttering from Las Vegas politicians (the hunts are held in the nearby desert), and a psychologist's warning about the dangers of mixing violence and sex for some men. KLAS reporters went along on a hunt, and interviewed both the hunter and the girl he bagged. The girls involved wear only sneakers and eye protection, but they like the money: $1,000 for getting nailed or $2,500 for avoiding that ugly splash of paint. KLAS's local competitor, KVBC, suggests that the hunt story is a hoax designed to help Burdick sell more videos. We're willing to bet that it is a clever hoax - you may not need that bank loan after all. Lost in all this is the irony - Bambi was a male, remember?
Hunting for Bambi: http://www.huntingforbambi.com/
KLAS: http://www.klas-tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1363796
KVBC: http://www.kvbc.com/Global/story.asp?S=1365239
Which DVD Format Is Most Compatible?
As anyone who has recently tried to buy a DVD writer can attest, there is a bewildering variety of formats from which to choose. What's worse, not all DVD formats are compatible with each other. You can easily wind up with a DVD drive that won't play disks created on another drive. CDR-Info decided to wade into this standards mess and test DVDs recorded in the various writer formats on a bunch of DVD players. They tested over 1,000 combinations of writer, media, and player. The result? "The content created on a DVD-R/RW writer using a write once DVD-R disc played back in virtually all (96.1 percent) of the DVD players and DVD-ROM drives used in the research. DVD+R discs played back in 87.6 percent of the devices tested." There you have it. Whatever you buy, make sure it can play and write DVD-R disks. The full report is on the Web site.http://tinyurl.com/hi0n
The Success Story of PaidContent.org
If you've ever dreamed about being your own boss and of making your living through the Internet, the story of Rafat Ali is a refreshing tale of hope. Ali used to work for the Silicon Valley Reporter. About a year ago, he started PaidContent.org, a blog intended to raise his profile as a journalist. As word that there was something special about his site got around, companies started asking him if he took advertising. He didn't at first, to avoid any difficulty with his employer, but he's devoted all his professional time to his site for the last half-year and now accepts ads. The discussion of paying for online content is a niche that Ali has milked effectively, with a unique combination of original reporting and links to other sources. Ad revenue is so good that he's made as much in six months as he would have made in a year working as a journalist. Still, it's no easy ride, as this Wired interview with Ali reveals. For one thing, he operates on New York time, which puts him somewhat out of kilter timewise with his London surroundings. For another, he misses office scuttlebutt and water-cooler gossip. Overall, though, he's more than happy with the way things have turned out for him.PaidContent: http://www.paidcontent.org/
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59603,00.html
Results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2003
The 2003 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in. The author of this year's worst potential opening line is Mariann Simms of Wetumpka, Ala. Visit the contest site for some truly inspirational writing, then hike over to Simms's own site for other weirdness. You'll like the penguins.Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2003.htm
Simms: http://humormeonline.com/
ONLINE CULTURE
The nature of blogging is the focus of serious contention in the blogger community, and it cuts to the very core of blogger practice and responsibility. A blogger named Mark Pilgrim took issue with Dave Winer's habit of revising his blog posts, and a debate ensued among bloggers about whether it is better to edit an original blog entry or to add an additional post to amend or correct the content of that entry. The core issue is one of accountability, authenticity, and accuracy. If you are wrong or overly insulting in a blog comment, is the blog-righteous path to delete/replace or add a correction and leave the original alone? The question has no answer yet. The Burningbird blog looks at the issue, and at least as much value is added by the bloggers who posted responses there.Pilgrim: http://diveintomark.org/
Winer: http://scripting.com/
Burningbird: http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/001356.htm
Spam Wars: Spam vs. Direct Marketing
Consider the world's biggest companies - banks, food industrials, credit card companies - many of which frequently and successfully use direct marketing. They want nothing more than to be able to e-mail you a nicely targeted message that will persuade you to part with some cash for, in most cases, a legitimate and useful product. Unfortunately for them, spammers are filling your mailbox with offers of penis enlargement and windfalls, giving you lots of incentive to ignore or try to shut down the whole commercial e-mail industry. Spammers are ruining the game for the direct marketers, who think of themselves as good guys, although consumer opinions on that point vary. So, what's a multinational to do? They want the spammers to go away, but do not dare support anti-spam laws in case such laws close off their own lucrative business opportunity. Fast Company has a good article that lays out their dilemma and tells how the direct marketing industry is positioning itself in the spam wars.http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/73/spam.html
Quality Assurance in Open-Source Projects
One of the frequent claims made about open-source software is that it tends to get better faster, and ultimately has fewer bugs than commercial software. If this is fact, it's certainly worth investigating the quality-assurance (QA) practices used in open-source projects. Luyin Zhao and Sebastian Elbaum from the University of Nebraska did just that and produced this paper. They created a survey designed to quantify aspects of QA in open-source work and sent it off to a bunch of developers. Their methodology was not particularly rigorous, but the results do provide a rough guide to how QA is done in open-source projects. The answer contained in these statistics is that open-source QA is a chaotic and inefficient practice, which makes it all the more amazing that it seems to work quite well.http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~luyin/OS_Quality.pdf
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All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
Ilium
Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight
Linux Security CookbookSURFING SITES
Kevin Cornell's Amazing Sketchbook
Do yourself a favor and browse through this entertaining online sketchbook, created by artist Kevin Cornell. It's possibly the most impressive use of Flash we've seen. Inside the more than 100 pages, you'll explore Cornell's visual odyssey of mayhem, obscurity, and chaotic fun. The site is brilliantly designed and a cinch to navigate. Use the Switch Pages button to peruse the sketches page by page or simply enter a page number into the Input a Page box and jump to your choice. While many of Cornell's drawings may be unsuitable for children, the satirical and audacious nature of his work beckons for recognition. As part of your exploration of Cornell's imagination, don't forget to check out the notes available by clicking on various images in the sketchbook.http://bearskinrug.co.uk/sketchbook/
Serendipitous Surfing with BananaSlug
BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous netsurfing using Google. Typically when you search for something on Google, you maybe look at the first one or two pages of results and never find what's buried any deeper. You never know what, in the 3,083,324,652 other pages indexed by Google, might be vaguely related to your search. True, most of the time you don't care, but hey, there are those really slow days. The BananaSlug site allows you to seed your searches with random search terms, then goes to Google so you can see what odd results you may get. You get to choose the type of seeds, ranging from themes from Shakespeare, jargon, tarot cards, proper names, and so on. What you get in most cases is related to what you searched for, but in neat and unexpected ways.http://www.bananaslug.com/
In the US, monarchs and dynasties are nothing of significance, stray facts in schoolbooks. Much of the rest of the world takes a very different view. Nearly every Brit can rather casually list every monarch (and family or dynasty) in the correct order. It's no big deal. The Almanach de Bruxelles is a reference Web site of present and former dynasties in Europe, southeast Asia, and Africa. The site is huge. It claims 6,000-plus pages and that may be understatement. For most of the individuals listed here, you'll find a wealth of information, including a list of heirs. This is a serious site, devoted to the concept of royalty. The Glossary is a don't-miss group of pages that list every possible title and form of correct address.
http://www.almanach.be/index.html
The Archives of Universal Studios
Universal Studios was founded nearly a century ago, and is now the world's largest music company and a major force in the film and TV industries. With so much history behind it, the company decided to form a department dedicated to historical archives. What's presented online is engrossing, and can best be followed with the sparse but definitive Timeline pages. Some of the few images presented along the timeline are outrageously campy. Technicolor came along in 1941, but should have been more accurately called "Tricolor". Click on Exhibitions for a cool look at Alfred Hitchcock, among other presentations. The site seems to be a work in progress, as some links produce only a statement of future attractions. Or maybe that's just the movie-biz side of things rearing its head. You'll need to bring your own popcorn.http://archives.studio.universalstudios.com/index.html
The murder in question occurred in November 1849 at Harvard Medical College. The definitive book about the case is a few years old, and the PBS show aired in early July, but there will be reruns. The companion Murder at Harvard site offers a full synopsis of the show, inside details on how the production was created, photos of documents from the time, and much excellent reference material. George Parkman, an unpopular and wealthy Boston physician disappeared after last being seen walking towards the college. His body was found under odd circumstances, which led to the arrest of John Webster, a Harvard chemistry professor. Webster was accused, tried, convicted, and executed for the crime. The event was the talk of the town in 1849. Was it a proper conviction, or a miscarriage of justice? There's enough information here for you to decide for yourself.
http://www.pbs.org/amex/murder/
Stand-Up Site Covers Urinals of the World
"The best place to piss away your time on the Internet" is how Urinal.net describes itself, and who are we to disagree? There are hundreds of urinals from all over the world on display here and they come in all shapes, sizes, and states of cleanliness. The opulent porcelain and marbled splendor of the Victorian public restrooms of Rothesay on the Scottish Isle of Bute are fit for a king, or at least a king-in-waiting, as Prince Charles is said to have relieved himself there. But we feel the British heir to the throne would balk at the thought of using the filth encrusted porcelain pits of the Bohemia Nightclub in San Francisco or the outdoor splash-mark-swathed, cast-iron receptacle in a bar in Eizeringen, Belgium. There is a categorized archive here and the site even has its own search engine, but a good place to start your urinal odyssey might be the Top 10 Urinals section, which includes the urinals in the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, those on the International Space Station, and even some "urinettes" or ladies' urinals.http://www.urinal.net/
Indoor plumbing may be all most readers know, but it wasn't so long ago that many Americans went out back to do their business. Indeed, a reasonable number of outhouses still exist in the rural US. The Outhouses of America sites honors our past plumbing with every possible detail imaginable, and some unimaginable. Learn how to build a working house. It's not as easy as you might think and the results of getting it wrong are generally extremely unpleasant. The site even has pages devoted to an annual outhouse race. All that seems to be missing is an outhouse with power and an Internet plug so you can set up a desktop in it.
http://jldr.com/ohindex.shtml
House gymnastics was conceived when friends James Ford and Spencer Harrison were putting up a blind in their house. Boredom got the better of them and instead of working, they began creating and "busting" moves that are a weird combination of yoga, breakdancing, gymnastics, walls, furniture, and ceilings. There are now 25 official house gymnastics moves like the banister snake and staircase handstand. As the names suggest, this is very much a discipline that incorporates the elements of your living space; moves are built around such features as banisters, door frames, and furniture, which means that anyone with access to an apartment or house can participate. There is now a growing community of house gymnasts all over the world, and Harrison and Ford are spreading the word with a book, a DVD, and this quirky little Web site.
http://www.housegymnastics.com/
Welcome to the extraordinary world of competitive toe wrestling. It's like arm-wrestling, but, well, with toes. It's a sport with a history, albeit a fairly short one, having been invented in an English pub in 1976, and there have even been efforts to elevate it to an Olympic event. We sense that toe wrestlers are more likely to be the kind of people who hang around pubs rather than honing their athletic prowess, and as if to prove this point one of the photographs in the picture gallery shows a contestant dressed in a jacket made of beer mats. There is some disappointing news for netsurfers who fancy a chance at competitive toe wrestling - the tenth Annual World Championships have just been held, so you'll have to wait a year if you want a tilt at champions Alan "Nasty" Nash or Karen "Kamikaze' Davies".
http://www.worldtoewrestling.org/
Bizarre and Imaginative Japanese TV Clips
"Kinchan and Katori Shingo no Zen Nihon Kasou Taisho" is a Japanese variety show closely related to "The Gong Show" (we think). You may have seen one clip from the show as it circulated through the Net, a clip of a Matrix-like ping-pong game. That, friends, is one of the mildest clips the show has posted online. At the show's archive, you'll find an abrupt introduction to the wonderful, wacky world of Japanese variety shows. Most of these extraordinary acts combine optical illusions with pantomime. Although nearly all the site's text is Japanese, all you need to do to watch the video clips is click the movie icon. Check out a young basketball player and her shadow as they practice shooting hoops and the clip with the innocent-looking school hallway. You'll discover some imaginative, fun acts that play tricks on the eyes.http://www.ntv.co.jp/kasoh/past_movie/index.html
If you're an animation enthusiast, you'll to want to take a look at Toon Tracker, which pays homage to lost, forgotten, and rare cartoons. Explore the site by selecting a cartoon from the drop-down menu. Upon selection, you get a page featuring still shots of the animated piece, facts, a brief history, and occasionally audio/video clips of the cartoon. If you're looking for nostalgia, this will surely satisfy your thirst for the past. Get re-acquainted or introduced to these obscure cartoon characters like Cool McCool, the mighty Hercules, Commander McBragg,and many more. Although this Web site has some lengthy menus and minimal navigational tools, those who enjoy cartoons from another time will surely appreciate this online haven.
http://www.toontracker.com/
Another Collection of Comic Onomatopoeia
The Unh Project assembles an eclectic feast of comic onomatopoeia, those odd noises uttered by characters and machines in comics over the last 50 years. Selected cartoon panels, culled from attic collections of Marvel comics and other lesser known comics, demonstrate each noise. The often humorous commentaries below each panel come from the site owner and his friends, The images are all scanned in black-and-white, but this lends a certain film noir quality to the presentation which tallies with the antiquated exclamations. The onomatopoeia index can be listed alphabetically or by the cause of the noise, such as "Plane crash throws person towards cement mixer" for "Aaaaahh!", "Oooorf!" for "Kneed in the groin", or "Woop!" for "Squirted by grapefruit". By the time you've seen a bunch of monsters thumped with a resounding "Argggh!", you'll start to feel sorry for them.http://members.shaw.ca/tom.t/unh/
Sound Clips in Ready-to-Use Format
Soundboards.com is definitely a site to bookmark if you get more than your share of bothersome calls from salesmen offering financial services you neither want nor need. It's also a place to file away if you just like TV and movie sound clips. The site's handy collection features some classic one-liners from Joe Pesci, Samuel L. Jackson, Al Pacino, and many others. The files are incredibly easy to access and load instantly, but it's probably a good idea to get a bit of practice in first before you try playing these clips over the phone for a hapless salesman. Once you are familiar with the layout, you're ready to strike fear into the heart of the financial services industry: just place your phone's handset next to your computer speakers and listen as Goodfella Joe Pesci psychotically threatens and insults the telemarketer. This may sound extreme, but believe us - they will not call back.http://www.soundboards.com/
With kitsch rapidly becoming the new black, it may be time to consider tacky living. The TackyLiving site will help you with those endless conundrums like "Where can I buy red lip candy to remind me of my childhood?" or "How do I make silly looking TV-top antennae to annoy my style-conscious neighbors?" During vacation season, you may find TackyLiving's advice on how to pick the perfect plastic, stereotypical, and useless souvenir particularly handy. You can take part in their hard-hitting surveys - a recent topic was bad breath and how to get it - or learn how to annoy telemarketers by requesting that they pay you for your valuable listening time. If you've got time to spare and real passion for all things tacky, you might even follow the instructions on how to make a set of your very own furry dice. Watch your cool friends swallow their revulsion every time they ride in your car.
http://www.tackyliving.com/
Beer, for some at least, is the drink of the gods, and for others, apparently, it's the ingredient of the gods. At Beercook.com, you'll find all the classic recipes such as lager batter, beef stew with stout, and pork with an ale glaze, but if you're willing to try something more unusual then check out the suggestions on using beer in desserts, particularly with ice cream. They even argue that because beer is less acidic than wine, it's a more perfect accompaniment for a cheese board. Chefs throughout the US who use beer to improve their food are profiled. If you're planning a wedding this summer, you can perhaps suggest using one of the listed brewery venues to get the ceremony and reception into a state of boozy bliss. Just remember to keep the bride and groom sober until after the vows have been exchanged.
http://www.beercook.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
The History of Baseball Uniforms
The National Baseball Hall of Fame has a superb online exhibit that can easily show all the uniforms ever worn by a particular major league team or all the uniforms worn in say, 1919 (think Black Sox scandal). The images and info on the evolution of baseball uniforms and team names couldn't be better presented.http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/exhibits/online_exhibits/dressed_to_the_nines/index.htm
You'd think that visiting Crazy for Cows would have you graze through myriad cow images and other bovine-related things. Well, duh. Here, you'll discover a mooving tribute that includes a photo gallery, a facts page, and a list of the many breeds of kine grazing the planet.
http://www.crazyforcows.com/
CORRECTIONS
We Apologize to Your Cousin and Katherine Mieszkowski
A couple of readers criticized us for our piece last issue ("California Nixes Net for Cons") on Katherine Mieszkowski's Salon article, "Life, without possibility of e-mail". While we stand by our belief that California is completely within its rights to deny convicts Net access, we did err in presenting Mieszkowski's point of view. She certainly does not believe felons should have unrestricted access to the Net, but would like to see a monitoring system govern prisoners' e-mail and surfing. We were overly crude in our assessment of the situation, although we do still think that a ban on Net access is the most effective control, and that any monitoring system can't help but have holes in it.http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v09/nsd.09.27.html#BS3