  
PC Klein, helping to keep Battersea
cool
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Guardian
Weblog
Weblogs are the coolest, coolest thing on the Internet. 'Bloggers' keep
a sort of Internet diary consisting of short entries on topical themes
or subjects they are interested in, with links to relevant sites. Bloggers
tend to keep alive the voice of alternative opinion, evidence and other
sides to the stories of the day. The Guardian's weblog is not as personalised
as ordinary blogs, but it is huge, and is the most potent proof that
the Guardian's site generally is the way to go for the web. Rebecca
Blood who writes Rebecca's
Pocket, one of my personal favourites has written a book on weblogs
and how to do it, which shows just how (relatively) old the subject
must be - so if you haven't tuned into weblogs yet, catch up on your
cool factor quick. Try Metafilter
for a quick taste of how blogging might change what you read on the
web.
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The
Postmodernism Generator
The true irony and humour of this page is only revealed when you press
'Refresh' (F5) - upon which an entirely new essay will appear, full
of the sort of vacuous postmodern jargon and cryptic essay-titles that
are frighteningly common these days, randomly generated by a neat little
script behind the scenes. It's worth comparing the random essays produced
by this page to whatever postmodern criticism you happen to be reading
at the moment, and see whether any of it makes sense.
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Philosophy
Football
Simply the coolest football shirts around. This company produces a range
of well-designed, good quality shirts with oddball motifs and inscriptions.
One range includes quotes about football from great philosophers, composers,
thinkers, revolutionaries and others. Try these for size: Aston Villa
shirt with "Football is working class ballet" (Alf Garnett)
on it, or "All that I know most surely about morality and obligations,
I owe to football" (Albert Camus). Feel free to buy me any one of
them for Christmas. |
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Splat
the MP
A chance to throw eggs at Anne Widdecombe as she swings Tarzan-like
across the House of Commons (if you hit her, you get a burst of the
Hallelujah chorus), or at David Beckham as he appears from behind a
bench saying "Victoria". Watch out for Prescott, who is as
likely to punch you in the face as you are to hit him. Of all the quasi-political/satirical
flash games, this is one of the best, in my view, although the Dancing
Tony Blair is good fun for the first few minutes. Panlogic, who
made this game, also produce other masterpieces such as How
German Are You? and The
Seagull Strikes Back.
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Jesus
Dressup
Hours of fun with this online dress-up
doll. Only difference is that the doll in question is Jesus, and he
turns out to be quite a snappy dresser. If you aren't offended by such
things, you might try the Jesus
Test. Please don't complain to me that this is irreverent. I will
only reply - as someone has already said elsewhere - that if they had
had the electric chair in Jesus's time, the equivalent of crossing yourself
would look very odd indeed, and that I find the centrality of pain,
torture and ritual murder to evangelical Christianity perverse.
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The
University of Bums on Seats
This is a parody of a typical small University website, using all the
usual layered images of happy students with mortarboards and pictures
of the local area taken from angles which no-one ever seems to find
in real life. You can even award yourself degrees and print off the
certificates! A very funny site, but also quite a lesson in how not
to be taken in by form which disguises content - that's to say, once
you've seen this, you'll understand how much you 'trust' sites that
look like this, without testing the content or reliability.
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Edwina
of Oxenford
Like the University of Bums on Seats, this page is deceptive - I read
two-thirds of it before I realised it was a spoof. A cod biography of
an Elizabethan composer, Edwina of Oxenford, containing lines such as
" Her home in the High Street in Oxford was part fair-ground and
amusement arcade, with distorting mirrors, booby traps, "books"
that squirted black smoke when opened and hidden ventilators that blew
odoriferous winds up the backsides of pompous and unsuspecting visitors
". |
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The Framley
Examiner
To my mind, this is one of the funniest sites on the net. A parody
of provincial newspapers which use the rhetoric and design of broadsheets
to deal with local, parochial issues, the humour is not dissimilar to
Steve Coogan, The Day to Day, Chris Morris, with a touch of Private
eye and Viz thrown in. How the people who write it manage to keep it
so consistently funny across so many issues beats me. By contrast, I
have never found The
Onion funny - not once.
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Fling
the Cow
There's something about surfing the web that can make even the most mindless
games seem riveting. Not only do you get a chance to (guess what) fling
a cow into a target chalked into a field, but it involves the skill of
judging how long to hold the mouse down for in order to propel it with
just the right amount of force. It must make your mouse's life much more
interesting and varied, I guess. |
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Windows Annoyances
If you think you're hopeless with computers, and it's all your fault,
visit Windows Annoyances first - you might change your mind. This site
is an inventory of all the bizarre, unexplained and unexplainable and
plain stupid things that can and do go wrong with Windows, through no
fault of the user. The answer to a lot of computer problems is "it's
a problem with Windows", and this is the place to find some answers,
workarounds and moral support from fellow-sufferers.
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Am-I-Hot
Am I Hot Dot Com works like this: people send in photographs
of themselves, you rate them on a scale of 1-10. Once you've voted,
you can see how other people voted too. Don't go here when you've
got something important to do - sad and sick as it sounds, it's strangely
addictive. It's become one of the most visited sites on the web,
and of interest to psychologists because it's become a source of information
on what features make people attractive. There are many other similar
sites - most of which are entirely vile. If you're that sick, type in
'"rate my" (with the quotation marks) into Google and see how
many varieties of online poll you can take. |