Welcome to the 153rd issue of the Cool Tricks and Trinkets Newsletter offering weekly insights into new, cool, useful, fun, unusual and interesting sites on the Internet. 

In this issue:

-Action by Inaction
-Summer Learning
-Eat Drink Dine
-Short Takes
-Who Wants To Be a Fobionaire
-The World in 2001
-Zoetrope: All-Story
-AskOxford.com
-A Whole Lotta Shakin'
-Subscribers' Sites

Action by Inaction

Trenchmouth Magazine was created by a group of Bay Area twenty-something intellectuals in an attempt to quietly infiltrate the global marketplace with their own ironic, stylish brand of Wei Wu Wei, or "action by inaction." The irreverent site offers a collection of columns like Ask the Reverend; articles like "Feng Shui: The Cult That Stole My Wife"; and a potpourri of horoscopes, personals ("Very intelligent Jack Russell Terrier seeks rather stupid human") and goofy recipes like saltines spread with orange juice concentrate.

A parody of grocery store check-out tabloids, the goal of Trenchmouth is to make the inane somehow curious. Visitors who join the cause by submitting their own theories, anecdotes, poetry, love questions and complaints -- or offer to author their own column -- are greeted with a cheerful "Congratulations! You've got Trenchmouth!!" 

http://www.trenchmouth.com/

Summer Learning 

A gold mine for teachers, Quia offers 600,000 learning games, and the list grows daily -- as visitors create the activities and quizzes themselves. The categories range from Accounting to Zulu and cover such diverse topics as a Hangman-style game of basic food vocabulary in French, to a matching game of homonyms. 

To invent Quia activities, visitors create a free account and then select among templates for 13 different types of games and quizzes, like jumbled words and flash cards. Once logged-in as a user, you can view and rate other activities, set up a class page and hold sessions that let you give online quizzes and track and analyze students' scores. 

http://www.quia.com/

Eat Drink Dine

Maybe you know that it's white wine with fish, but what if you're serving Jambalaya? Master sommelier Evan Goldstein has created this site to guide users through creative wine and food pairings. No hard and fast rules here, just plenty of information. Start either with food or with wine. If you've got a bottle of Muscat, for example, click to find an appetizer, cheese, dessert, salad, ethnic dish or poultry dish to go with it. Or you can start with a food item and see a list of suitable wines. Care for a nice Gamay with that hot dog? Yes, the list even includes fast food. 

Food for Thought has detailed advice on what to do with ingredients and seasonings; Wine for Thought explains everything you want to know about wine, from Tasting 101 to Vintage Charts that give a grading system based on the overall quality of the vintage year for specific regions and varietals. 

http://www.eatdrinkdine.com/

SHORT TAKES:

Vanity Plates

With only six to eight characters and a small metal plate at their disposal, people can be very creative. Discover the meaning of common abbreviations used in vanity license plates, read an Oedipal epic told entirely with vanity plates and learn whose car carries the tag 88 KEYS.

http://www-chaos.umd.edu/misc/
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The Head Shop 

Billed as the only head storage facility in the universe, The Head Shop really is all about heads: The Head Book is a collection of weird animated heads, like Swiss Cheese Head and Thumbelina (yep, a thumb head), cool heads, political heads, goo heads - all the creation of Colette, an artist obsessed with drawing heads since childhood who decided to create a place to put them all and give the rest of the world "a cool, weird place to go on the Net."

http://w3.nai.net/~cocopug/
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Comic Strip Artists

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow's comic strip "This Modern World", pillories the world we live in and somehow tolerate, from the Chandra News Network -- all Chandra all the time! --- to Conservativeland, the happiest place on Earth! 


http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2001/07/09/tomo/index.html

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Who Wants To Be a Fobionaire

"Many will try. But only a few will win…" warns Fobianaire, an online trivia game that mimics Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. Released in July, the game tests players' trivial knowledge of American-Asian pop culture. One Lifeline is the "Fried Rice Special," which amounts to a Chinese fast-food bribe to host Brock, who looks suspiciously like a Pokemon hero, and both the graphics and downloadable soundtrack are pure anime.

Players choose one of three characters to be their friend for the Phone a Friend option: AzN Speed Racer, Master Kung Fu-Pow or Flower Bridge, a knowledgeable but easily distracted Cantonese grad student. If you know that milk tea with pearl balls is the hippest drink in the world you'll get to the $300 level -- with only 12 more questions to go to reach Fobionaire fame.

http://www.geocities.com/fobionaire/

The World in 2001

What do some of the world's most astute and opinionated writers believe will happen in politics, economics, finance, science and business this year? This is the online version of The Economist's annual flagship publication predicting the twists and turns of major issues in the coming year, forecast by Economist editors, journalists with the world's top newspapers and such guest writers as Bill Gates and John Chambers. 

The site is Pundit Central, with sections including a Diary, listing month-by-month key events that will affect the world; Britain, Europe, North America and Asia Pacific; the World in Figures, with forecasts for 63 countries and 20 industries; Business and Management, Finance and Science.

http://www.theworldin.com/
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Zoetrope: All-Story

This web version of the magazine of the same name is a writer's panacea: a place where the short story is celebrated and nurtured for the quality of its writing, characters and story --- not its car chases and special effects. Inspired by the "Coppola heritage," as in Francis Ford, the site presents contemporary short stories that may or may not evolve into film.

Visitors can read current and back issues, listen to readings of original stories or sign up for Zoetrope's short story contests and writers' workshops. Free membership in a Virtual Studio has you collaborating with writers, filmmakers and other artists in an online community where you may submit your own work for feedback and possibly for publication in the magazine. The site is not for wannabe writers: the print version of Zoetrope recently won the prestigious 2001 National Magazine Award for fiction, beating out such fiction maestros as Esquire and The New Yorker.

http://www.all-story.com/

AskOxford.com

Launched in July, AskOxford appears as the revised edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary hits bookstores, both from Oxford University Press. Not just for grammar wonks, the web site is a vast resource for the English language, as the dictionary is, but it's a lot more fun. 

In addition to news about the latest words and phrases to gain dictionary status, the site has word quizzes, puzzles and crosswords; a jargon buster to help average Joes understand what's so bad about errors like dangling participles; a searchable database of FAQs on such topics as word origins, spelling and dictionaries; articles and interviews about English usage; and a chance to ask the Oxford experts anything to do with the English language.

http://www.askoxford.com/

A Whole Lotta Shakin'

The official Elvis web site gives fans of The King everything they could want, short of a second-coming: virtual tours of Graceland, Elvisology, audio and video clips of performances - even a chance to sign up for a free @elvis.com e-mail address. "Burnin' Links" delivers still more: Elvis wallpapers, e-cards, trivia and an application for an Elvis Visa card to use at the online Elvis Shop. 

Links on the site will hook fans up with a full Elvis experience: Book a flight to Memphis with Northwest Airlines, reserve a room in The Heartbreak Hotel, make wedding plans in the Graceland Chapel in the Woods - even spend your honeymoon chatting with other fans at the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club web site.

http://www.elvis.com/

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SUBSCRIBERS' SITES - Many of our subscribers have fascinating on-line projects. This weekly section will introduce you to some of these sites. Please let me know about your project so that I might mention it in this section. Write me at info@tricksandtrinkets.com

~ Purgatory House The Movie - Help make our dreams come true.

~ The String Thing - What to do with extra time? Get the String Thing and find out.

~ Stop the advertising lead-in. 

~ The busy person's guide to writing your life story.

~ Fred Astaire Dance Studios


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We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

Tao Te Ching

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Have a great weekend.
Charles Kessler