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| Wednesday Aug 10, 2005 | Children given stimulant medication for their hyperactive attention-deficit disorder have lower odds of becoming drug-dependent adults. Run that past me again? to Drugs by monde |
| Thursday Apr 22, 2004 | In these days when reality and satire are becoming ever more bewilderingly alike, it seems no one really knows what to make of one Ricky Vandel, who claims he was approached by an Amazon woman who gave him the secrets of the meaning of our existence; upon these rests the foundation of the Church of Fandel - as well as his excessive fondness for Jenna Bush. to Wackos by monde |
| Sunday Feb 22, 2004 | Nasosov paints disturbed-looking portraits, in a manner that suggests a high possibility that the artist might have experienced more-than-normal amounts of trauma strapped to the dentist chair having things hung from and attached to his face; if you have a dental appointment looming ahead next week, this might make you want to postpone it. to Art by monde |
| Saturday Dec 20, 2003 | I don't know what scares me more about American Brandstand: is it that its tabulation of product references in Billboard chart-toppers shows just how much music and advertising have become indistinguishable? Or is it that the site pours on such a huge amount of fawning approval for this sort of corporate name-dropping, as if this mergence was some sort of godsend to the music world? to Music by monde |
| Tuesday Aug 5, 2003 | Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives fiercely resists categorization: you could call it droll, goofy comminglings of oddly amusing text, still art and Flash. to Web by monde |
| Thursday Jul 31, 2003 | Is the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party for real? Fascists for Mother Earth and freedom of the individual? Their goals: abolish humanism, end racial mixing, promote nationalism, decriminalize victimless crimes, and protect endangered species...? Are these people just mixing disparate ideologies together to see what happens? Possibly they're laughing out loud as their email box fills up with shocked responses. The colours of their page are, predictably enough, green and white. to Politics by monde |
| Monday Jun 30, 2003 | The Wibsite seems to be on a mission to show the world that it's possible for a person to be weird, absurdist, satirical and Christian - and all at the same time, yet. Fundies probably won't be amused, but it ought to go over well with Christian stoners. to Religion by monde |
| Monday May 26, 2003 | Just when I'd gotten to glumly thinking that all the great twisted minds were either dead or old enough to get that way too soon for my comfort, along comes British satirist Steve Aylett, whose quite quotable and off-kilterishly funny writings - which resonate with acerbic, druggishly garish absurdity - should interest anyone whose W.S. Burroughs and Phillip K. Dick paperbacks are as dog-eared as my own. Expanding from the verbal into the pictorial, Aylett is now working on an animated TV series described by one reviewer as what Tex Avery would have come up with if he'd been reading Rip Off comix. to Culture by monde |
| Monday Apr 7, 2003 | Bad fanfic is occasionally funny; really bad fanfic is a sign that perhaps the author ought to be hospitalized. to Literature by monde |
| Thursday Jan 2, 2003 | The condition of living in a protracted condition of chemobiological weapons paranoia has likely been the catalyst for yet another fetishistic turn-on: women with their heads inside of gas masks.
to Sex by monde |
| Tuesday Dec 24, 2002 | What the Free State Project wants to do is pretty simple: get at least 20,000 libertarianish sorts to move to one single state and then become civically and politically active enough in that state's government and institutions to make that state a "free state" in their lifetimes. These folks are completely serious about this... but seem to be having a hard time deciding which state will be chosen for liberation. Delaware was one of the first to be considered, but there are other possibilities being discussed.
to Politics by monde |
| Monday Nov 18, 2002 | Poet Piet loves using multicoloured text and very colourful expressions - so colourful that it all blends together in such a way as to become completely incomprehensible. Recurring theme seems to be the notion that the world needs to shuffle its rocks around...or does Piet just have rocks in his head? to Wackos by monde |
| Friday Oct 18, 2002 | If you spent your kidhood sometime in the past 50 years you know the name Wham-O - which was based on the sound made by the company's first sensation: the Wham-O Slingshot. Over the years the names of their creations have become household words: Frisbee...Hula Hoop...Superball...Hacky Sack. And unlike other toys of the past half-century which either disappeared into obscurity or collector's vaults, Wham-O's products continue to be manufactured and updated while still maintaining the charm of the originals. Wham-O's imaginative water toys are perennial favourites. Recall that yellow Slip-n-Slide you belly-flopped on as a kid on the summer lawns of the seventies...and watch today's kids romp through various 21st century versions, which have grown tunnels, waterfalls, asteroid obstacles and tidal waves. Wham-O had been assimilated by the toy monolith, Mattel, in 1994...but a few years later, in a refreshing change of pace from the usual way of such things, they de-Borged themseves to become independent again.
to Toys by monde |
| Thursday Aug 15, 2002 | Mint in Romania? Rub it in. Everybody's doing it! to Humor by monde |
| Thursday Mar 7, 2002 | When it comes to keeping children from accessing potentially inappropriate internet content, most internet users agree that individual parental use of filtration programs would be preferable to the onus of government policing. But it's nowhere near an ideal solution, due to long-standing concerns about the agendas of some censorware companies, as well as the unintentional blockage of sites usually considered "family-safe" by unintelligent filtration algorithms. What's more, at least one censorware disabler exists. Perhaps there's no answer in sight, but if you want a more intensive (and less realistic) approach, there's always Guardian 2000. to Security by monde |
| Tuesday Feb 26, 2002 | It seems there exists a niche for one whose life's calling is gleaning data by studying a lot of old crap and taking notes about it. to Science by monde |
| Enough of the "squeezably soft" and the pictures of baby chicks, baby dolls and fluffy bunnies. I want a toilet paper that gives me the sense I'm getting a product that will do exactly what I'm buying it for. to Humor by monde |
| Monday Jan 28, 2002 | To find the elusive Two that lead to One, one must take up the time-devouring game or art or senseless habit (depending on your viewpoint) of Googlewhacking. to Web by monde |
| Thursday Oct 25, 2001 | Your computer is on massive doses of chip-melting, brainbusting psychosis-inducing drugs of the type available only to machine intelligence. Might as well just hang on tight and enjoy the ride... there is no escaping the resulting chaos-&+=#@.........^^^.......^.
to Art by monde |
| Thursday Oct 4, 2001 | Ever wanted to send an email to some anonymous stranger, message-in-a-bottle style? You can...with Email Roulette.
to Internet by monde |
| Wednesday Oct 3, 2001 | Anthrax - the sheep disease...and bioweapon. The unthinkable threat that is getting more scary in these weird times. By the time you know you've inhaled it, it's usually too late. There's a vaccine - but good luck getting one: even military personnel started running out of vaccine in June 2001. to Warfare by monde |
| Wednesday Sep 5, 2001 | Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Those who would help us remember the past pretend to re-enact it. to History by monde |
| Sunday Aug 26, 2001 | Beware of the gross grocery manipulation...you are being enslaved by your neighbourhood supermarket. to Conspiracy by monde |
| Tuesday Jul 24, 2001 | Graphic novels - those epic-length comic books with lush artwork and sophisticated , dramatic storylines - are one print medium form that can translate extremely well to the Web, thanks to Flash. Of these, Broken Saints is a stunning example.
to Flash by monde |
| Sunday Jul 22, 2001 | Theory has it that a test-tube DNA meld between Barney the dinosaur, a proto-Teletubby, a random mix of Sid and Marty Krofftian genes, and a small scraping from Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo could possibly produce a being like Furnitures, the Great Brown Oaf. This seems to be a kid's TV show...and it would be the most utterly absurd kid's show I have ever come across, but I can't find any broadcast times or dates, or stations. Maybe it's happening on a cable network in another reality zone. (Co-stars bear distant resemblance to Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.)
to Television by monde |
| Tuesday Jul 3, 2001 | A look at what's wrong with copy protection reveals some of the logistical problems, legal loopholes and probable long-term technological and cultural effects of the collusion between the music, movie and computer industries, which has developed with the intent of "protecting content providers". to Commentary by monde |
| Sunday Jun 10, 2001 | The Native American-based peyote religion is a deeply revered and sacred tradition that stretches back through millennia, with its roots going back long before the drug was banned as a Schedule 1 Narcotic in 1970. While exemptions against peyote prosecution were set for the Native American Peyote Church, these are being ignored, or loopholes are being found around them, by antidrug zealots who are now firmly ensconced in high positions of power. Members of the Peyote Church are now being harrassed: the leader of the Peyote Foundation in Arizona recently had his landlord threatened, and thus he and his wife were driven from their home. Because peyote is definitely a sacrament as opposed to being a recreational party drug, this is an egregious offense against the American value of religious freedom - and many people - regardless of their feelings about drugs, feel that this oppression of individuals communing with their Creator should end. to Drugs by monde |
| Friday May 4, 2001 | Dogs in elk. Dogs in elk. Dogs in elk. to Pets by monde |
| Tuesday Jan 16, 2001 | The new Federal law requiring U.S. schools and libraries to install censor software on all internet computers will go into effect this year, barring judicial interference. It's a lot more serious than many people realize: the new law will not merely keep minors from seeing "indecent" sites; the law's stipulations could encourage situations in which adults will be required to jump through an unbelievable array of hoops to get public librarians to switch off the filterware, and it proclaims swift and heavy-handed denial of vital federal funding to noncompliant libraries. What's more, censorware doesn't just block sex and violence; most censorware companies have no qualms about their "sexless values" propaganda agendas. Peacefire pulled a "bait-and-switch" trick with the makers of CyberPatrol which had some very telling results. Another censorware, CyberSITTER 2000, now features secret installation of remote control for spying on latchkey kids - or your spouse. It also inexplicably now features a category specifically blocking job search sites. It will take more than slapping blue ribbon gifs on your pages to stop this menace; as usual, consult the foremost experts on net freedom for more information. to Internet by monde |
| Monday Dec 11, 2000 | Fat girls can be quite sexy too, regardless of what the completely banal, unreal and imperfectly-perfect world on television might have some folks believing. to Sex by monde |
| Saturday Dec 9, 2000 | Web Graffiti sites in their various forms can be a fun way to waste time, or to anonymously get something off your head that's been driving you around the bend, or to just post lots and lots of strange and silly pictures, poems, or just about anything else that comes to mind...and then successive visitors to the site can do one of three things: leave it as it is, erase it completely and put their own somethings there, or alter it in some way all their own. Metababy has been around providing a venue for perpetually alterable content for a while but is currently undergoing some sort of restructuring and the proprietor is being Very Enigmatic about the reopening date. This is the perfect opportunity to take your rampant Instant Graffitification urges to The Vortex Asynchrone, or to Sketchzilla. to Web by monde |
| Thursday Dec 7, 2000 | Are you a person who believes that rules exist only to be broken? You'd probably enjoy Nomic, a "game" which solely consists of the process of inventing, debating and implementing amendments to its "rules". If you like your ever-changing-rules games to have something solid in them like cards to "ground" you, you could try Fluxx or Eleusis. And if you want your chaos, and your cards, and also want to have the players drawing the pictures on the cards to be played while they are in the middle of playing them...there's the most creatively-inspiring of the lot: a game called 1000 Blank White Cards. to Games by monde |
| Everyone knows that the top spot for Unintentionally-Entertaining Translational Screw-ups is Babelfish. But not everyone knows that there was a sort of Babelfishically-goofy book long before there was Babelfish...before there was internet, or computers, or even television. to Linguistics by monde |
| Tuesday Oct 24, 2000 | Is it science or art...or both or neither...when a man decides to create a living glowing green bunny by using genetic splicing? to Art by monde |
| Friday Oct 6, 2000 | Meet Mary the Gentle Dominant Princess...who's looking for her Prince Charming. But if you really want to call her up, she repeatedly mentions that she requires you to read a page describing an intricate, step by step ritual of efficiency designed to screen out flakes and losers...as well as anyone who'd dare put his own needs above her slightest whims. She also states that every other page on her site must be read, and she'll quiz you on them to make sure. Mary has been looking for her special someone for years now, and she'll probably be looking for many more years to come...considering that she'd require her husband to get rid of his pets (she sees them as competing with her for his attention) and never ride a motorcycle again, as well as quitting any job involving danger or travelling - and that's just for starters. On top of that, yet another rule is that a would-be suitor must bring a gift of money to her before she'll even go ahead with the date...but that's solely to earn the privilege of being in her company: even though she's not religious, she's very adamantly against premarital sexual activity. to Wackos by monde |
| Sunday Sep 3, 2000 | Imagine what a happy guy Eddie Breen would be if he were turned loose in the Museum of Bad Art with a full palette of his bright, tempera-like paints and given carte blanche to do what he does best: make "piggyback art"...which is, essentially, taking odious thrift shop paintings and augmenting them a little. to Art by monde |
| Friday Jul 7, 2000 | If you are plagued with an ugly, frightening skin condition that your doctor seems clueless about but you would really like to identify, or maybe you're just in some sort of baffling self-gross-out mood, this compendium of clinical dermatological photos from the dermatology department of the medical school at the University of Iowa may be quite helpful. to Health by monde |
| Ever wonder how the number 420 came to be associated with marijuana? (It's not, as is commonly believed, a police code meaning "pot smoking in progress".) to Drugs by monde |
| Saturday Jun 24, 2000 | Evil comes to the Flea Market in the form of the dark spectre of Sedition, Drugs and Vintage Jewelry...as chronicled by an individual whose elevator just doesn't go all the way to the top floor. to Wackos by monde |
| Thursday May 18, 2000 | Unorg.com is the creation of Simon Buckinghham, who writes down-to-earth, thought-provoking essays about some of the things you can expect to experience in the changing economic realities of current times, and how to make these experiences work for you instead of you merely working for them. Even though he drops a buzzword or two along the way, the essays are (unlike some other writings about this sort of thing) both refreshingly stimulating and realistic. Unorganization: The Individual Handbook is a good place to start.
to Economics by monde |
| Sunday Apr 30, 2000 | The 404 Research Lab has a motto: "All errors...all the time." Here, you can see some of the more interesting 404 pages to grace the web. Plus: instructions that will help you to end 404 problems for visitors or at least create your own custom 404 for them to see when they try to hit a nonexistent page on your domain. 404 is your friend! to Web by monde |
| Sunday Apr 16, 2000 | Visiting California any time soon? Or maybe just trying to seduce some astrology chick?
Learn how to talk New Age.
to Humor by monde |
| It's mind-boggling just how graphically homogenous this world is becoming: for instance, the number of company logos that contain this shape is incredibly large. (And while I'm on that page, and on that subject, what is it with this orange thing? Now it's the year 2000 and suddenly everywhere I look on the web there's orange.) to Culture by monde |
| Thursday Apr 13, 2000 | Kaliber 10000, the "designer's lunchbox", is just so well-done it scares me. This webzine created by two young Denmark artists and their many talented friends occupied my teensy attention span for longer than an hour...current content includes a huge archive of desktop screenshots, a Flashtoon called Cellular Automata Man and a sort of übermetaphorical subway station.
to Web by monde |
| Moreover is a meta-newsroom linking hundreds of newswires from around the world into an XML-based webfeed system which users can either read, or have shunted to their own sites for free. Configure your prefs to view your pick of hundreds of different categories (unlike most portals they thought well enough to include one called Offbeat.)
to Web by monde |
| The appropriately-named domain weirdart.com is home to Timothy Patrick Butler, who does some very twisted things with his inkpen. I think he and R.S. Connett (creator of Vomitus Maximus) may have been separated at birth. (And they both live in my home city of San Francisco...further testament to the notion that there's got to be something in the air here that makes for a large proportion of twistedly talented people. ) to Art by monde |
| Tuesday Mar 28, 2000 | The true meaning of the 404 error code is biblically ordained. Of course, so is the area code. (I wonder what the alphanumeric meaning of "Uh, whatever, nutball!" is?)
to Wackos by monde |
| Wednesday Mar 22, 2000 | We've all seen born-agains of the overboard variety who display extreme obsession with demons...but this guy is a shade beyond the garden-variety hellfire-and-brimstone wacko. Warning the flock to not celebrate Halloween is commonplace...but Easter is evil, too? This guy seems to see demons everywhere...in paisley print fabric, in "extreme" sports, and in Lucky Charms marshmallow cereal, among a great many other things. There seems to be nothing that he doesn't consider demonic...even Christmas is supposed to be evil (I can't argue with that one, personally.) I started wondering if this whole thing was a joke when I ran into the anti-perspirant demon...but this kook's just gone to such great lengths to catalogue his lifetime of continuous exorcism that it can't be anything but for real. to Wackos by monde |
| Tuesday Feb 29, 2000 | You step in the stream / But the water has moved on / This page is not here
to Web by monde |
| Don't go anywhere that's hot and sticky without wearing an electronic dragonfly on your wrist. to Gadgets by monde |
| Tuesday Feb 22, 2000 | Do you enjoy picking flamefights with self-righteous fundies? Or maybe just want to prove to yourself what you've known all along--that the Bible is riddled with contradictions, absurdities, scientific and historical fallacies and more sex and violence than the lyrics of all the deathmetal albums in existence? Refer to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible: the entire King James Bible, plus an unflattering concordance. to Religion by monde |
| For the last two years, whenever I had a burning question conceivably answerable via the Web, I turned it over to the ever-servile info-butler named Jeeves. Though friendly enough, he's nevertheless still artificial, and thus can't give your question the special touch of personal attention. But now there are sites where you can get your answers from real live people via email...delivered in a timely manner, free of charge. Try NoWonder for your tech support questions: queries are answered about hardware, software and all things connecting them. Abuzz will take your computer questions as well, but also aims to provide answers to questions dealing with a variety of topics related to working, playing and living, and the world in which we do these things. to Web by monde |
| Dispersion - "Your easy one stop choice for personal lethal biological pathogens." to Warfare by monde |
| Friday Feb 18, 2000 | Etxtreme serves up "your daily info breakfast" via an odd little email list. It's essentially a new form of data mining...a sort of big-picture analysis of huge sections of web-space. The output sample is somewhat perplexing upon first glance, but this press release should help to clarify things a bit. And once I saw the list of sources that Etxtreme sifts through, it seemed interesting enough that I signed up for the mailings.
to Web by monde |
| Friday Feb 11, 2000 | The PSI-bernetics company sells "psychotronic, radionic and psionic devices" that you wear on various body parts to amplify psi frequencies. Were I to be actually in the market for such objects, however, I might find the fact that their catalog of Basic Devices doesn't even have photographs of the devices, but only poorly-done line drawings, to be a possible sign that they might not even have any actual inventory...And this warranty doesn't help inspire my confidence either; how would you measure "regular usage" of a psionic device? to Wearables by monde |
| Sunday Feb 6, 2000 | Yes, it's completely understandable to love a pet so much you would do anything to keep that pet from having to one day exit your life. The folks at Missyplicity are planning to, uh, clone their dog, Missy before she leaves this world. (It took me a long time to realize these people aren't kidding.) to Pets by monde |
| Friday Jan 28, 2000 | Surely a site called horny will have predictably pornographic content...right? Wrong! It's actually a newsmagazine for German high school students. Naturally, running it through a Babelfish translator results in some likely unintended laughs. to Web by monde |
| The Flashified sector of the site for the pop-hop band Supreme Beings of Leisure pushes the medium to its edge--and then sails right past it. If you want to see what websites will all look like in 5 years, check this out. Too bad that their music wasn't anywhere near as interesting as the web design. (But since this sort of thing is what I get off on listening to, of course I'd think that.) to Music by monde |
| Wednesday Jan 26, 2000 | Taking the instructions you read on the side of a product's packaging very literally may give you a really close shave...or perhaps just get you in some really hot water. to Humor by monde |
| Thursday Jan 20, 2000 | Suddenly there's all these sites popping up everywhere devoted solely to in-depth, encyclopedic accounts on the subject of self-abasement. I really thought there wasn't that much one could say about the practice of manual autoeroticism. But now you can not only learn more than you ever wanted to know about it...you can buy a special gift for the man who has everything in hand...and tends to make a mess of it. to Sex by monde |
| Tuesday Jan 11, 2000 | The Gallery of Psychiatric Art gives you a revealing peek at more than a half-century of completely legal marketing and advertising of psychoactive chemistry in America. to Drugs by monde |
| Monday Jan 10, 2000 | Forget about learning how to say mundane stuff like "Hello, what is your name?" or "How much does this cost?" in the language you're trying to learn. It's nice to see there's a page which shows you how to say something truly important...in just about any language you can think of. to Linguistics by monde |
| Do people think you're a loser who Spends Too Much Time Online? Do people tell you that you need to Get Out More? This guy is probably hearing a lot of that right now...and laughing all the way to the bank. (The virtual one, that is; he's not supposed to actually leave his house...not even for a minute.)
to Web by monde |
| Friday Dec 31, 1999 | I guess we've all seen enough of the apocalyptic nutballs looking forward to a Hollywood-style Second Coming, but the Highlights from Prophetic School is a doozy. Have a look at their IRC sessions where the students are asked to come up with religious visions and then describe them to the others. One female writes of a vision of Jesus saying to her, "My bride, My bride, what a sweet aroma coming from My bride...
Her desire for Me, her delight in Me..." Bible study is getting hot these days, and it's not just fire and brimstone! to Wackos by monde |
| Tuesday Dec 28, 1999 | If^H^Hwhen the Y2K bug doesn't end up screwing with your computer, you might find yourself feeling let down somehow, and find yourself craving some terribly invasive, frightening desktop nightmare. (To experience properly make sure all the switches for your Java-nators and DHTML-ifiers are pushed firmly to the "on" position.) to Art by monde |
| Saturday Dec 25, 1999 | One can be disabused of the notion that the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney had the fairytale market cornered by reading Magic Tales of Mexico. For instance, there's a great many similarities between "Blanca Flor" and another famous story just about all children have read, have had read to them, or have at least seen on video. These pages contain both the original Spanish versions and the English translations, with assorted cultural notes. to Literature by monde |
| Wednesday Dec 22, 1999 | uTOK is a nifty little freebie (with no ads, yet) that works as a browser adjunct that allows people to hold discussions about websites and vote on them using little "post-it note" boxes. It's better than the similar program Thirdvoice in that it doesn't
mangle the looks of sites with little reference dots. It lets users form groups amongst themselves, or just scrawl their notes as free agents. to Web by monde |
| It's sites like Swezlex that convince me that Memepool could use a category called "Etceterata" or "Randomonium"...or just plain "Weirdness". At first it's something like jodi.org or hell, with that eye-blinding dot-matrixism, only a little less inscrutable. One sooner (or later) finds out that this is all connected at loose ends to some sort of music project: band? label? individual(s) pretending to be one or more of these? Sort of hard to tell, but entertaining in a disjointedly psychedelic vein. You can learn a lot from cloud people. But beware the Explosion! something like a cross between a hornet and a weedwacker. to Art by monde |
| Wednesday Dec 8, 1999 | This story (and "story" is probably stretching it quite a bit) appears to have been written by a true hebephrenic: it gives "short attention span" a whole new meaninglessness. to Wackos by monde |
| Friday Dec 3, 1999 | This hippie commune seems to be an example of a group with a nice place out in the boonies, and a mellowed-out manner of doing the survivalist Y2K thing...but is that MIDI file that plays when you load the page REALLY "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? It's a little too scary for words. to Music by monde |
| Tuesday Nov 30, 1999 | This violent little tension breaker was inevitable...and has arrived not a moment too soon. to Humor by monde |
| Saturday Nov 27, 1999 | It was once an excuse to hold wine-swilling parties in the basement of a Boston home...but in the last six years, the Museum of Bad Art has attained the status of a community institution, which has been giving some undoubtedly unexpected exposure to some very dubious paintings found in trash cans and thrift stores all over America. A similar web-based venture, badart.com has a larger collection of exhibits, but the curator just doesn't seem to be having quite as much fun with it as the folks from MOBA are having. to Art by monde |
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