Welcome to the 155th 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:

- Octane Games 
- The Art of the LP 
- Brothers Grinn
- Short Takes
- Photographer Extraordinaire
- Smart Cookbook
- Real Workout
- Our Favorite Things
- Etiquette For Real Life
- Subscribers' Sites

Octane Games 

Go lake fishing, test your quarterback arm, shoot hoops or hit the blackjack tables at Octane Games, where you can play simulated sports, casino, arcade and puzzler games. Created by Octopi, an interactive media group, the site shows off its stuff and invites visitors to play, create their own customized versions or submit games they've developed themselves.

Serious gamers can register on the site to have their high scores automatically submitted to win tournament prizes. The site is a showcase of Octopi's multimedia portfolio and its new spin on online advertising - "advergaming," the use of interactive gaming technology to deliver embedded advertising messages.

http://www.octanegames.com/

The Art of the LP 

Music fans have rediscovered vinyl records and are crowding 'round their turntables to savor every ambient sound from the recording studio captured on the old discs. But this site celebrates another pleasure of album-dom that has gone missing since CDs took over: album cover art. 

The picks are not run-of-the-mill nostalgia but quirky, goofy recordings you've never heard of, like "Christine Jorgensen Reveals" and "How To Buy Meat." The attraction though isn't the music -- it's the covers, and the term "art" is very loosely applied. 

Henny Youngman is pictured playing his trademark violin with a baseball bat while wearing a tiger-skin, for example. And the Hamburg International Philharmonic chose as its cover model Ed Sullivan in a suit and tie staring intently at the record spinning on his high-fi.

http://www.whenlpsroamedtheearth.com/

Brothers Grinn 

Need a laugh? Get page after page of nutty humor at the Brothers Grinn, starting with the funny guys in the Hall of Spaz, featuring interviews with people like Scott Kurtz, creator of the web comic PvP, and Robert Darden of The Door Magazine, "the world's only religious satire magazine."

News parodies in Whacked-Out World promise to be almost as crazy as real life, and a "Chicken Soup for the Soul-less" book is in the works, modeled after the Hall of Insufferably Sugary Sweetness, where visitors are warned away if they have glaucoma, diabetes, passionate idealism, a taste for Corn Nuts and a host of other conditions. 

For the spiritually inclined, the Chinese Vegetarian Horoscope will reveal your character under signs of the zodiac like tobacco, ragweed and rutabaga (poor souls who are "slow to think, slow to speak, slow to comprehend anything.")

http://www.brothersgrinn.com/

SHORT TAKES:

Too Funny for Words

It had to happen - a singing dictionary. Dictionaraoke is something like crossing Nine-Inch Nails with a language instruction tape. Audio clips parody popular songs by using karaoke-style music with vocals delivered by audio pronunciation samples from actual online dictionaries. The songs are available for download in MP3 format. 

http://www.dictionaraoke.org 

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Lurid Paperback Covers 

The art work on vintage paperbacks of the 30s, 40s and 50s was uniquely American, often lurid and always a kick - and usually featured a blonde bombshell packing a piece and aiming it at some goon. The site features weekly cover art and compares "lurid" pulp fiction art to that of porn, romance, Gothic and sleaze. Whatever - they've all got blonde bombshells.

http://www.nwrain.com/~monlux/LuridPaperbackofWeek.html

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Finding Sounds Online

FindSounds.com is the leading web search engine for finding sound effects and sample sounds on the Web. It is simple and easy to use, and suitable for all ages. (audio files containing obscenities are filtered out so this site is safe for children)

  http://www.findsounds.com

Photographer Extraordinaire 

The portfolio of New York-based Rosanne Pennella features slide shows, portraits, landscapes, locations and architecture captured in the rich color-soaked images Pennella has found in some of the world's most exotic locations. 

On assignment for world tourist offices, her 'round the world photo safaris have yielded tribal and travel images that appear in museums and galleries. You can see them here by clicking on a world map and enjoying photographs of the people and environments of Bali, India, Papua New Guinea and more. Check out Details for extraordinary super close-ups of beads, grasses and Mehndi, henna-tinted tattoos. If you can't leave home yourself, stock photos of her work are available for purchase.

http://www.rosannepennella.com/

Smart Cookbook 

Dedicated to making shopping, cooking and eating good food easier, Recipezaar's goal is to build the "world's smartest cookbook." They may be on the way, with more than 6,000 searchable recipes to browse by course (main, appetizer, dessert), cuisine (French, Italian, Indian), main ingredients, preparation or special categories like holidays or "kid pleasers."

Visitors can also create their own personal cookbook of favorite recipes from the site's database, save them for future access, and search and browse their saved selections any time. Shopping is not forgotten either: My Grocery List gathers up the ingredients needed and sorts them into one shopping list. For those who want to eat right now, Fridge Search lets you list everything on that lower shelf that hasn't yet spawned its own life form and gives you a recipe to match. 

http://www.recipezaar.com/

Real Workout 

Workout.com is an online workout, with high quality graphic-assisted and video workout programs for all levels of sports and lifestyles. Designed as a one-stop site for those who wants to get in shape, the site promises to help you "feel comfortable, find support and discover new challenges" in the process. 

The Exercise Zone has more than 500 exercises, organized into nine categories from muscle development to agility. The Program Zone offers regimens for every training level, organized into seven areas of concentration from sports training to post rehab. There's also a special section for strength coaches, physical therapists, personal trainers or physicians who want to join the Workout network. 

Users must register with a valid e-mail address but services are free and include personalization, like My Locker, a non-smelly virtual holding tank where you can store your goals, workout logs and favorite programs.

http://www.workout.com/

Our Favorite Things

An experimental program, History Wired is a virtual tour of objects from the vast collection of the National Museum of American History. But it's unlike any other museum site you've visited. Here visitors can look at hundreds of artifacts, most not on exhibit in the real museum. 

The site is object-map based. That is, users click on areas representing categories like Clothing, Photography and Sports and then select items like flour-sack dress, Mathew Brady's Custer or Chris Everts' tennis racket to see a thumbnail image and explore the item more. Click on Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," for example, and see a page from the original text in Gothic style, then on a link to Making Type by Hand for more info - and then listen to an audio clip of the preface from the Smithsonian. 

http://historywired.si.edu/index.html

Etiquette For Real Life 

Ok, guys, are you required to leave the toilet seat down even when she's staying at your apartment? And ladies, under what circumstance should you tell a man his fly is open? Welcome to CourtesyFlush, etiquette for today's real world. Here you won't get tips on which fork to use at dinner, but answers on the stuff we all have to deal with daily in our own clumsy ways. 

Choose a category like Behaving in Public or Bodily Functions and then click on the questions to get the answer. If yours isn't covered, you can e-mail creator Sammy Adams and ask him yourself. He's funny, and he makes sense. True, it IS your toilet, but "It takes very little effort to put the seat down, and it gives us significant bargaining power for issues that really matter, like watching South Park.")

http://www.courtesyflush.com/

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If you're interested in advertising in Cool Tricks and Trinkets, email info@tricksandtrinkets.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

~Danny's Domain!

~Judy's Hand Painted River Rocks

~ Billie and Gordon's Hot Links

~The Coupon Connection 

~The Magic Twanger - Reinventing the conventional putting technique.

~HomeBizFree.com - Form your own HomeBiz and become the BOSS !

~The Art of Jeffrey K. Bedrick

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It's good to have an end to journey toward;
But it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Have a great weekend.
Charles Kessler